EventBurn at minnedemo

We presented our product EventBurn at minnedemo. Short story: minnedemo was fun, you can try EventBurn for $10.

See more here.

App Engine Development Environment: Mac OSX + Virtualenv

I recently switched from Ubuntu to OSX. It was easy to get going with app engine development, but it was hard to downgrade my development environment to python 2.5 (used by app engine). Here's how I got things set up:

Social Media Research: learning to learn

It is a special feeling to stand up in front of a crowded room with nothing prepared and 20 minutes to be interesting. I got that special feeling moderating a session on Social Media Research at the Unsummit unconference.

I got good feedback about the session. People were interested, and they liked unconference-style participation. My notes are below, with examples marked. Others also have notes. Thanks to all who participated!

Synchronizing Requests in App Engine

Sometimes, it's useful to have synchronized sections of code, where only one thread of execution can run at a time.

MinneBar "Data Mining: what is it good for?" notes

Dan led a session at MinneBar called "Data Mining: what is it good for?". It was "un": there was no planned agenda. We talked about whatever the crowd was interested in.

It was surprisingly popular, so I typed up notes from what remained on the board at the end. I expanded and linkified. This is useful as a reference if you were there.

We talked about terms, tools and techniques, and further resources (reading, interest groups, public datasets).

Our two main areas of discussion were finding patterns, and visualization of those patterns. I have not separated those out below.

Computers detecting sarcasm? Please!

A colleague sent me a link to a paper on detecting sarcasm in Amazon product reviews. (See also popsci or slashdot.)

The magic of online software: it gets better

Google App Engine 1.3.1 just released. From release notes, this little nugget:

"Reduced error rate with Automatic Datastore Retries - We've heard a lot of feedback that you don't want to deal with the Datastore's sporadic errors. In response, App Engine now automatically retries all datastore calls (with the exception of transaction commits) when your applications encounters a datastore error caused by being unable to reach Bigtable. Datastore retries automatically builds in what many of you have been doing in your code already, and our tests have shown it drastically reduces the number of errors your application experiences (by up to 3-4x error reduction for puts, 10-30x for gets)."

I like a service where you wait and things magically get better with no code changes on our part.

Now how about full-text search, https support, and map-reduce across your data? :)