Technology
How to Integrate Skype and MythTV
One of the things I am really confident will happen in the near future is an integration between our TV and phones. In the past years Skype and VoIP improved significantly but yet we have to see an example of seamless integration between those technologies. In my living room I have a big flat screen [...]
NASDAQ or S&P500 Components List: How to Download it from Yahoo! Finance
In many are trying to apply Machine Learning Algorithms to the stock market to learn and predict the fluctuation of stocks. Yahoo! Finance is of great help because allows you to download in simple CSV files price and volume of all the stocks going back a few years. The API is easy to use and [...]
Google Maps Traffic data is crowd-sourced through cell-phones’ Google Apps
Google Maps have been able to display traffic conditions, even on small road, for quite a while. How does Google know that? The technology behind it is very interesting. They use GPS/time data sent back from people using Google Maps Apps on their phones (iPhones, Blackberry, Android, …). At regular intervals the phone sends to [...]
Google Collected Wifi Data for Geo-location Purposes
In the past days there have been a lot of discussions about the public admission of collecting Wifi data from Google. This has been labeled as “mistake” but do not you wonder why Google was collecting those Wifi data in the first place? They were collecting MAC addresses and network SSIDs for geo-location purposes. Since [...]
Web Pages Language Classification: Bayes, Characters and n-grams
Most search engines start focusing on only one language (e.g., English) because it is simpler, requires almost no characters encoding, and has a wide audience. Wherever you want to index only pages written in English or support all the language of the world, a fast page language classification is one of the first tasks that [...]
How to Update Flash Player on Apple TV
The folks at Boxee recently updated their player to version 0.9.20.10710. The new interface is pretty slick and installers are now available for Ubuntu, Apple TV, OS X and Windows. Unfortunately, after having installed it on Apple TV v3.0.2, it is not possible to play any TV Show due to an outdated Flash Player. No [...]
Reiser4 Performances on Ubuntu 9.10
Since its debut in 2004, there is a lots of controversy on Reiser4, the game-changing file-system developed by Namesys. It has been available for Linux for quite a while and there are great reviews on the Internet, but most distribution do not include it as an option by default, including Ubuntu Karmic 9.10. Since the [...]
Why Twitter Clients still lack Classification, Clustering and Ranking?
On Facebook the average user has about 130 friends and I believe that the average user of Twitter follows a similar number of people. Considering one or two Tweets per day from each, plus 10 or more from accounts like CNN or ABC, it’s reasonable to think that you would have to look at 250 [...]
Facebook’s Email could really Take Down Gmail Supremacy
According to some statistics from Google, people spend 4x more times surfing the Internet than driving their car. However, when asked what a browser is, they had no clue. The first Internet users were hackers which spent most of their time on terminals, chatting through IRC, using Pine for their emails and a few newsgroup. [...]
Use shared_clone() to Share Variables among Perl Threads
Sharing variables across threads is generally very annoying in Perl. You have to declare the variable as shared before using it, and pay attention to the values you put in it. Things get especially messy with multi-level hashes, since you are obligated to pre-declare each level as shared. Luckily, there is a way to make [...]
