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.

In the last week I spent some time preparing a presentation about Web 2.0, data mining, text analysis and related topics. Among these, I discussed a bit of graph theory and clustering. To show a good demo, I fired up Processing to demonstrate how clustering and graph theory work together to create a nice visualization of tag clouds.

Woah, today I decided to spend the Sunday with some coding fun, and I ended up using the whole day, breakfast to dinner, and even after. It turns out that none of the alternatives available on Firefox to create thumbnail previews, or speed dials, is satisfying enough for my tastes. On the contrary, the new TopSites feature in Safari 4 is quite appealing. So I decided to recreate it.

I’ve found a small accessibility bug in the website of a popular (most popular?) italian credit card provider (Cartasi.it). How long does it take them to recognize the problem? Will they answer at all? Will they just ignore bugs submitted by common users? Or will they react quickly and address the issue? UPDATE: They answer (sort of).

After ages of leaving it dormant, I decided to restore my Twitter account :-). As you may have noticed, I don’t update this blog very often. If you want to keep track of what I’m doing, you may prefer following me on Twitter. Here is my twitter page. You can start following me from there. I’m pretty sure I’ll forgot to update my Twitter status in two weeks from now… but you never know, I may actually keep it up to date.

The Android G1 is not officially supported by Meteor , here in Ireland. So you can’t download configuration settings to access the Internet (mail, maps, youtube, the whole lot…) from the Meteor website. Just in case you are looking for the settings to punch in to get everything working, here they are:

APN: wap.mymeteor.ie

user: my

password: meteor

proxy: 10.85.85.85

port: 8799

I have published a new article on the programming portal DevX.com , whose title reads Google Visualization API: Deliver Graphical Data Analysis in Your Web Apps. The Google Visualization API offers a unified way for developers to deliver visual analysis and provides a rich set of graphic and charting components to handle the majority of visualization scenarios. The Google Visualization API is a data interchange specification and a set of libraries that developers can use to represent structured data as graphic visualizations and interactive charts inside their web applications.