Philip Robinson implemented the collaborative filtering algorithm Slope One in Erlang.

Peter is getting one of these new Hitachi 1 TB drives. He remarked:

At $450 each, 1 million dollars will buy you 2000 terabytes!

Together with Gilbert Paquette and Petko Valtchev, I received a $1 million grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to build a Research-oriented Data Warehouse called ERASME. The Data Warehouse will include terabytes of storage and a cluster of powerful machines for high performance computing.

Other researchers involved include Martin Brooks (NRC), Abdulmotaleb El Saddik (U. Ottawa), Étienne Gagnon (UQAM), Robert Godin (UQAM), Owen Kaser (UNB), Hakim Lounis (UQAM), François Magnan (UQAM), Olga Marino (UQAM), Hafedh Mili (UQAM), and Guy Tremblay (UQAM).

I am not entirely sure yet what the XXL library does and why it is important, but it felt important enough to blog about it. It seems to be a library allowing one to build custom database engines. Here’s the summary from their web site:

XXL is a Java library that contains a rich infrastructure for implementing advanced query processing functionality. The library offers low-level components like access to raw disks as well as high-level ones like a query optimizer. On the intermediate levels, XXL provides a demand-driven cursor algebra, a framework for indexing and a powerful package for supporting aggregation. The XXL project provides various packages. See the longer introduction to XXL for an explanation of the packages. The library is publicly available under GNU LGPL and comes with a full documentation.

Unacomputer. Computer that can run in a shack using mostly solar power or other off-the-grid power.

(A reference to the fact that the unabomber lived in a shack.)

Source: Owen.