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I’ve been hearing more about the Blazegraph triplestore (well, “graph database with RDF support”), especially its support for running on GPUs, and because they also advertise some degree of RDFS and OWL support, I wanted to see how quickly I could try that after downloading the community edition. It was pretty quick.

I’ve been hearing about proximity beacons lately and thought it would be fun to try one of these inexpensive devices that broadcast a URL for a range of just a few meters via Bluetooth Low Energy (a.k.a. BLE, which I assume is pronounced “bleh”). Advocates often cite the use case of how a beacon device located near a work of art in a museum might broadcast a URL pointing to a web page about it—for example, one near Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed in New York’s Museum of…

I’ve been using Google Docs more because at work it’s great for collaboration, and also, for shopping lists and notes to myself, I can easily edit the same documents from my phone, tablet, and laptop. I found out that it’s pretty easy to add menus that perform custom functions, so I created a few menu choices… and then found out that they weren’t available on my phone or tablet. Still, it’s good to know how easy it is to automate a few things.

As I tweeted last July, I always learn so much about both the past and future of database computing from recent Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. I recently learned that the latest edition of Readings in Database Systems, also known as the “Red Book,” is available for free online under a Creative Commons license—or at least the introductions to the readings are. With most of these being by Stonebraker, and quite up-to-date, I consider these 43 pages required reading for anyone…

I’ve been thinking lately about the visionary optimism of the days when people dreamed of the promise of large-scale hypertext systems. I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean linkless content down the middle of a screen with columns of ads to the left and right of it, which is much of what we read off of screens these days. I certainly don’t want to start one of those rants of “the World Wide Web is deficient because it’s missing features X and Y, which by golly we…

I’ve done some copyediting as part of my job, especially with marketing material. Certain basic mistakes come up so often that I made a list that I’ve been tempted to give to whoever gave me the original content and say “please make sure that it doesn’t have any of these problems first!” I didn’t, but for those who are interested, following these simple rules will make your writing look more professional. The nice thing about these is that, unlike with truly good writing, no skill and very…

In my data science glossary, the entry for data wrangling gives this example: “If you have 900,000 birthYear values of the format yyyy-mm-dd and 100,000 of the format mm/dd/yyyy and you write a Perl script to convert the latter to look like the former so that you can use them all together, you’re doing data wrangling.” Data wrangling isn’t always cleanup of messy data, but can also be more creative, downright fun work that qualifies as what machine learning people call…