Category: Data

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Determining if an element is in the last row of a table

Once upon a time I stumbled upon a problem, where I needed to calculate if an element is in the last row of a table. Here's the scenario: you have a number of items, which are put in a table from left to right. When the row is full, the items continue in the next row. Imagine an airplane or a theater where people start sitting front-left and continue to the right until they run out of space, then going to the next row and so on. Now we want to know which people are sitting in the last of the populated rows.

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written 12:57 CET on chronolog
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Is Delicious aiming to become the next Twitter?

The bookmarking service Delicious has had an interesting life. It was one of the first social services available, later bought by Yahoo and almost canceled, then being sold to Avos about a month ago. Avos was founded by the same people who've created YouTube (Chad Hurley and Steve Chen), and these guys obviously know what they're doing. A few days after acquiring Delicious, Avos also bought a social media analytics startup Tap11, and here's what they had to say about it:

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written 18:03 CET on chronolog
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A few thoughts on content categorization. No surprises there, less is more.

Since I've started collecting bookmarks using Delicious, I've put a lot of effort into their categorization, organizing them in such a way their browsing would be as simple as possible. The service supports two level categorization (tag – bundle) which helps to control massive amounts of links people have gathered. But it's the experimentation with different structures that gives real insight into content categorization, and because this topic was already mentioned and discussed a few times on this blog, it deserves a special mention. Let's begin.

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written 13:26 CET on chronolog
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Can you believe Watson got the question about Slovenia wrong on Jeopardy?

Slovenia made it to the spotlight again, for the first time after the soccer world cup (when Slovenia was trending topic on Twitter and top search on Google). This time, it happened because IBM's supercomputer Watson competed against human champions in the famous TV show Jeopardy. IBM's computers are known to destroy people in various challenges, Deep Blue beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in a chess tournament in 1997. But chess is simple for computers to play, because it is pure logic and mathematics – the capability of a player is determined by the number of operations and actions it can calculate in advance. But a quiz is a totally different story, where the biggest challenge is semantics – understanding the meaning of words.

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written 8:33 CET on chronolog
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I've developed a magazine based on my Delicious bookmarks. And a Twitter bot.

Last week was marked a great social achievement of mine – I managed to bookmark my 10.000th bookmark on Delicious. A lot of people have 10.000 tweets, but not many own 10.000 bookmarks, fully tagged and classified. I've been collecting these since December 2006 (probably one od my first 2.0 addictions), and they are becoming one of my greatest possessions – knowledge is the ultimate collection. Hopefully Delicious won't get shut down or left behind, so I will be able to continue with this obsession.

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written 8:34 CET on chronolog
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Why an actual Facebook phone could kick ass (with mockups)

The question if Facebook will start producing it's own mobile OS on top of Android made a huge buzz a few months ago. Technology authorities such as TechCrunch and Mashable gave us diametrical coverage about it, the first claiming the rumor is true, and the second denying it. Needless to say the mobile market is one of the fastest evolving. Since 2007, when Apple supposedly revolutionized the mobile telephone by introducing the first popular tablet smartphone without a keyboard with an app market, things didn't change much, but in 2011, Facebook has a great chance to reinvent the phone again.

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written 20:28 CET on chronolog
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Are we on the verge of a full-scale cyber war?

The whole world is talking about WikiLeaks, and the drama has reached its peak with the arrest of Julian Assange. The leaked diplomatic documents are obviously a major thing, something that could change the world as we know it. The main battleground of this conflict is cyberspace, where troops of different armies are already fully ready for combat. WikiLeaks.org is currently offline, being a constant target of attacks of all sorts. But the civil initiative is striking back, putting hundreds of mirrors online (even Slovenia has one!), and hacking the bank that closed Julian's account. Even the good boy Twitter is behaving weirdly, denying accusations of censoring #wikileaks as trending topic.

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written 9:15 CET on chronolog
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