Install BDB

Download BDB: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/index.html

Download the Ruby BDB bindings: http://moulon.inra.fr/ruby/bdb.html

Install Wordnet and Ruby-WordNet

Download and install Wordnet: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/obtain

Download and install the Ruby-WordNet gem: http://www.deveiate.org/projects/Ruby-WordNet

Go to the location of the installed gem (because I use MacPorts, mine was /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/wordnet-0.0.5) and run:

I don’t love that last chmod, but I think the Ruby gem needs to be able to add to the database files.

For wordnet documentation, run ‘gem server‘ can go to http://localhost:8808 in your browser.

Hope this helps!

It’s on GitHub. Enjoy!

Adding a tag:

• git tag tag_name
• git tag -l
  Should show your new tag.
• git push origin --tags or git push origin :tag_name
  Because git push doesn’t push tags.

Removing a tag:

• git tag -d tag_name
• git tag -l
  Should no longer show your tag.
• git push origin :refs/tags/tag_name
  Because git push --tags doesn’t push deleted tags.

Thanks 知易行难!

All this has got me thinking about geek travel in general.  When I was in Seattle a few months ago I made a similar online post and received some suggestions, but I suspect that only a few people saw these posts and fewer actually knew the areas.  What I’d really like is a comprehensive geek travel site or wiki.  Does anyone know about such a thing?  Do you think I should make one?

Edit: From the comments, NuNomad looks very cool!  Thanks Clayton!

I explored the University City area of Philadelphia today and saw a surviving part of ENIAC in the Moore Building at UPenn.

Saw an interesting post today by John Resig about JavaScript-based genetic A/B testing. Very cool prospect. I hope that Greg Dingle releases it as open source.

This reminded me of a project that I did a while ago and never really released. It’s called CSSEvolve and it uses a traditional blind watchmaker / user-driven genetic algorithm to drive CSS changes on a site of the user’s choosing. Basically, a set of mutated CSS variants are produced, the user selects changes that he or she likes, the algorithm randomly combines those changes through crossover and mutation, and the process continues. It works best on heavily CSS-based sites, and isn’t perfect, but it’s a fun example of actual “intelligent design” on the part of the user to guide an evolutionary process.

I would enjoy people’s thoughts on how this could be an actual tool instead of an experimental toy.

Firefox and Safari support an onload event for SCRIPT elements.  That is, you can dynamically add a new script to a page, set its onload event to fire a callback, and know when the script has been successfully loaded.  You would want to do this because when you include a bunch of new SCRIPT tags in a page, there are no guarantees in what order the browser will decide to evaluate them, thus making dependencies among the scripts difficult to resolve.  Using onload to chain the script additions is one solution to this, however, Internet Explorer doesn’t seem to support onload in SCRIPT tags.  Here is a workaround:

Update: Owen in the comments says: Thanks for your post, but I have since found a more efficient way to do this and thought I might share with you. As you said you can use an onload event in Firefox, but in IE you can use the onreadystatechange event. Works from at least IE6. Haven’t tested earlier.

My solution:

  function importJS(src, look_for, onload) {
    var s = document.createElement('script');
    s.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
    s.setAttribute('src', src);
    if (onload) wait_for_script_load(look_for, onload);
    var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
    if (head) {
      head.appendChild(s);
    } else {
      document.body.appendChild(s);
    }
  }

  function importCSS(href, look_for, onload) {
    var s = document.createElement('link');
    s.setAttribute('rel', 'stylesheet');
    s.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
    s.setAttribute('media', 'screen');
    s.setAttribute('href', href);
    if (onload) wait_for_script_load(look_for, onload);
    var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
    if (head) {
      head.appendChild(s);
    } else {
      document.body.appendChild(s);
    }
  }

  function wait_for_script_load(look_for, callback) {
    var interval = setInterval(function() {
      if (eval("typeof " + look_for) != 'undefined') {
        clearInterval(interval);
        callback();
      }
    }, 50);
  }

  (function(){
    importCSS('some_stylesheet.css');
    importJS('jquery-1.2.6.js', 'jQuery', function() {
      importJS('some_script_that_uses_jquery.js');
      importJS('another_one.js', 'SomeClassOrVariableSetByTheScript',
        function() {
          importJS('a_script_that_uses_that_class_or_variable.js');
        });
    });
  })();

Recently, I was advising a friend about startup interviews and came up with this list of technologies that you simply must know about when going into a technical startup interview. You don’t need to be an expert in every one of these, but I think you should be aware of their existence and their high-level overview.

So, in no particular order…

1. Most web applications are database driven, so know about database scaling and performance. Also: Memcached (distributed memory cache), caching proxies like squid, and caching techniques in general.
2. Machine learning and data mining techniques — at least an understanding of their potential. There is way too much to go into here, but play with the open source package called Weka. Also check out the excellent introductory, hands-on book Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran.
3. Lucene, an open source search engine.
4. If you’re applying (or working at) an interesting startup, you’ll probably have large quantities of data to process, so know about Hadoop, the open source answer to Google’s MapReduce paradigm. Consider in combination with Amazon’s EC2 (see below).
5. The Google File System (GFS) and Google’s BigTable. These projects represent the current cutting-edge in data storage for scalable web applications. But if you want to use them, you’ll have to join Google or use one of these projects that offer some (but not all) of their features: Amazon’s S3 and SimpleDB (see below), MogileFS, Global File System, and Hadoop’s HDFS file system with HBase acting as BigTable, but HBase may not be ready for prime-time just yet. There are, of course, other solutions of varying complexity as well.
6. Amazon web services: S3 (backups, reliable data store; data archive; file serving), EC2 (virtualized, scalable utility computing; file processing; server environments — and you should know something about machine virtualization in general as well), and to a possibly lesser (and unproven) extent SimpleDB (scalable database replacement for some types of applications — you should have experience with MySQL and the SQL language too).
7. Ruby on Rails — even if you’re not working in Ruby or deploying a Rails app, Rails is a powerful environment for rapid prototyping and experimentation, plus a very marketable skill in the current climate.
8. Almost without saying: the obvious frontend interface technologies of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Flash/Flex.

All of the above are fairly language agnostic. You should know a couple of programming languages quite well, preferably one scripting language (probably one of Ruby, Perl, Python, or PHP), and one ‘harder’ language such as Java or C++. Be prepared to write code and answer questions in your chosen languages.

When interviewing at a startup, or any place really, make sure to a) explain your thoughts when solving problems (don’t just think to yourself for 5 minutes), b) talk about what excites you (technologically and otherwise) and your awesome side-projects, c) be willing to talk about the flaws as well as the strengths of technologies, d) know something about the technological area of the startup, and e) actually know the subjects you proclaim to understand on your resume.

Everyone is hiring right now (including my employer)! So read up, do some side projects, and good luck!

What do you think about this list? Please suggest technologies and links that I missed!

Update: kvz in the comments also suggested:

More on caching & performance optimization here:
http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblog/article/survive_heavy_traffic_with_your_webserver/

The article teaches on heavy load handling.