James Tauber

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James Tauber's Blog 2010

Conference Time

I have four conferences coming up in the next eight weeks.

From 12th-14th February, I'll be attending Kiwi Foo Camp in New Zealand—one of those trips where the travel time is longer than the length of the conference :-)

The day after I get back, I'm off to Atlanta for PyCon. I'm involved in the Pinax tutorial at the start and will be staying all the way through the sprints where we hope to get lots of Pinax done!

Then March 10th-12th I'm in Montréal for ConFoo, the first conference I've been to in a while that's all expenses paid for speakers. I'll be giving a talk on, you guessed it, Pinax. Will be fun to introduce Pinax at a general Web conference.

I'll finish off the month in San Jose for BibleTech March 26th and 27th. I'll be giving two talks there, one on my graded reader project and one on using Pinax for collaborative corpus linguistics (partly talking about Pinax in general and partly talking about some early stage work I'm do specifically on corpus annotation tools in Pinax).

Hope to see many of you at at least one of them!

by James Tauber : Created on Feb. 5, 2010 : Last modified Feb. 5, 2010 : Categories python linguistics morphgnt travel conferences speaking language_learning pycon greek new_testament_greek read_john pinax graded_reader : (permalink)

Zeno Processing

Say you have a stream of incoming data. Perhaps it's a database table that's monotonically increasing.

You want to do some processing on it that will take a long time because of the size of the data. Say it's one million records.

You take a snap shot and processes the million records. Say that takes 4 hours. In the meantime, ten thousand new records have come in. So you take a snapshot and process those. Say that takes two minutes. In the meantime, a hundred new records have come in. So you take a snapshot of those...and so on.

The analogy with the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea is obvious and so Nicholas Tollervey and I have decided "Zeno processing" might be a useful term for this approach.

At some point the processing is quick enough that either no new data comes in or you can take the stream down for enough time to finish off the processing.

I'm sure there's an existing name for this technique, but I like "Zeno processing".

by James Tauber : Created on Feb. 1, 2010 : Last modified Feb. 1, 2010 : (permalink)

Good Week for Launches

Last week was a pretty amazing week for the Eldarion team. Amidst a ton of client work, we managed to:

Readers of this blog who remember Potter Predictions will immediately recognize aspects of the second and third sites.

On Friday I managed to squeeze in time to attend a workshop at Harvard on Morphological Complexity where I saw a lot of familiar faces from when I was more active in my PhD.

Over the weekend, I worked on a new website for the Pinax project but didn't get that done so unfortunately missed out on launching a fourth site. I guess I also need to get back to redoing this site at some point too :-)

by James Tauber : Created on Jan. 25, 2010 : Last modified Jan. 25, 2010 : (permalink)

Fake JKM

I thought I'd kick off my blogging in 2010 with this video of my short opening talk at DjangoCon 2009 in Portland.

The talk was inspired, in part, by Rives on 4 AM.

by James Tauber : Created on Jan. 2, 2010 : Last modified Jan. 2, 2010 : Categories django conferences speaking : 175 comments (permalink)