You have to read this article about Wal-Mart. Absolutely fascinating, and extremely well-written. Via Dane Carlson.
Dmitry just got rid of the bogus referrer field. As opposed to NewsMonster which seems to be earning a reputation as an evil net citizen.
drools
The problem that the current crop of rules engines face is that the language by which we express the rules is frequently a language that Java developers have never, ever seen before. Jess, for example, uses a language that looks remarkably like Prolog, which many Java developers, having bypassed that class in college or trade school in favor of something more practical like Swing, have never seen. So now adopting the business rule engine as a core part of the business logic layer means a serious ramp-up time as the programmers are forced to cut their teeth on an entirely new way to think about programming, much less a new language. (And the rules concept does, in fact, seem to be taking off--JSR 94 defines a standardized API for rules engines, and if it turns out that triggers a flood of interest in rules-based systems, I think it's entirely likely we could see a "RDB" (Rules-Driven Bean) show up in a future EJB Spec. That said, why wait? It's not like you need to plug-n-play your rules engine, anyway.)
Enter drools. Rather than define another Lisp- or Prolog-like language, drools instead uses syntax that most Java programmers are perfectly able to grok, assuming they've done anything at all with tools like Ant:
bloof
Bloof is a tool for visualizing the evolution of source code.
The aim of the thesis is contributing to the software evolution metrics field. The aim of Bloof is helping people in comprehending a software system.
Bloof uses version control data for analysing the evolution of source code. It can easily be integrated into other applications by providing various input interfaces and a XML output format. Bloof comse GUI for browsing the analysis results.
Perl.com: Building a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl
As a Perl programmer, sooner or later you'll get an opportunity to build a search engine. Like many programming tasks - parsing a date, validating an e-mail address, writing to a temporary file - this turns out to be easy to do, but hard to get right. Most people try end up with some kind of reverse index, a data structure that associates words with lists of documents. Onto this, they graft a scheme for ranking the results by relevance.
As Perl programmers, we know that laziness is a virtue. But we also know that there is more than one way to do things. Despite the ubiquity of reverse-index search, there are many other ways to build a search engine. Most of them originate in the field of information retrieval, where researchers are having all kinds of fun. Unfortunately, finding documentation about these alternatives isn't easy. Most of the material available online is either too technical or too impractical to be of use on real-world data sets. So programmers are left with the false impression that vanilla search is all there is.
In this article, I want to show you how to build and run a search engine using a vector-space model, an alternative to reverse index lookup that does not require a database, or indeed any file storage at all. Vector-space search engines eliminate many of the disadvantages of keyword search without introducing too many disadvantages of their own. Best of all, you can get one up and running in just a few dozen lines of Perl.
The XML Revolution
This slide collection provides an introduction and overview of
XML, Namespaces, XInclude, XML Base, XLink, XPointer, XPath,
DTD, XML Schema, DSD, XSLT, XQuery, DOM, SAX, and JDOM
including selected links to more information about each topic.
Builder.com: Use this Java framework for finite state machines
Because of peculiarities such as relatively loose coupling between the user interface and application logic, Web applications present unique challenges to the programmer. Chief among these is ensuring that the application can respond intelligently to unexpected user activities, such as using the Back button in the client Web browser.
One way to work around such problems is to build Web applications as finite state machines. Let's take a look at a real, reusable Java class that will allow you to create robust Web applications modeled as finite state machines.
Some of these links via Erik
Via Raible Designs (that page is on a redirect loop at the moment, for some reason), test your Java knowledge with Sun's Java quizzes.
I've decided I (again) want a wiki for my site. I had one before but removed it a long time ago. I'm going to stick it behind my CMS so that I can have whatever URL's I want (ex: keithdevens.com/wiki/HelloWorld), so the wiki will have to allow me to change the URL format (I could always buffer the page and replace all URLs, but I don't want to have to do that).
Right now my choices are:
I'll let you know what I decide 
Integration with the existing look of my site would be nice, so that would be a bonus if any of the PHP wikis will let me do that.
Two other features I'd want are the ability to transclude pages, and the ability to have the following access rights:
- Completely private, only seen by me
- Public, but only editable by me ('locked')
- Completely public, like normal wiki
Oh, and whatever it is should be XHTML compliant, but more importantly should work with register_globals off!
Hey, one of my questions for evolutionists has been about the evolution of multi-cellular organisms from single cellular organisms. I totally forgot about prokaryote vs. eukaryote cells!
Saturday, February 22, 2003
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new⇒Calif. Supreme Court to take up gay marriage ban
I would argue the point is notdefinitional. While the wordmarriage is su...
Justin: Nov 20, 4:37pm