I have recently started playing with Amazon SimpleDB, part of the Amazon cloud computing offering, which is basically equivalent to Google Bigtable. Being a ruby enthusiast, I decided to use the right_aws gem from RightScale. The only problem, is that right_aws still does not support batch attribute insertion, which severely limit performances. Since I’m planning to use Amazon SDB for BayesFor, where we need performance, I implemented it. You can find the code in sdb_batchput.rb

At the end of April, I hosted a 3 hour seminar at Social Media Lab, a course held at the IULM university in Milan. I presented the basics of modern web technologies in the context of quantitive research, and then focused a bit on the topics of data mining, text mining and information extraction. You can find the slides attached to this post (they’re mostly in Italian, though).

Clean This Mess! is a minimalistic application to handle ToDo lists and daily tasks, loosely following the Getting Things Done principles. It is extremely simple, yet powerful and easy to use. Try it out at cleanthismess.appspot.com. You only need a Google account (like your gmail one) to access it, and you can create a new one if you don’t have it already. I created and released it in mid-April, and it already has more than 50 early adopters!

A new and improved version of Borg, v2.5, has been released! Borg is a minimalistic CMS I wrote to manage this site and made available as opensource to anyone interested in using it or contributing to it. As you can see from the new look’n’feel (much whiter, much cleaner), the biggest change is the introduction of customizable graphic templates. Two are provided by default: InternetSharing, by Solucija and CoolWater, by StyleShout.