Halcyon smyrnensis in my backyard

A Halcyon smyrnensis flew into my backyard. While resting, a cat stormed on him and caught it between his gaws. After playing with it for a few minutes, the cat let go and the bird run away. The cat went to sleep, and the bird, terrified, waited (perhaps it was wounded... I don't know...). I took the chance to grab a few photos. We put a deep plate with water for the poor bird. Chased away the cat and went to bed. We hope that the bird will get over the trauma and move on before another bird takes a shot...

ICML 2007

The 24th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning is just around the corner and will be held in conjunction with the 2007 International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.

See the list of accepted papers at: http://oregonstate.edu/conferences/icml2007/paperlist.html

An interesting yet amusing view of writing job advertisements

I read an interesting and amusing post in use Perl about job advertisements

It says that you want to hire people that fit. It also says that the audience splits into the following four groups of people:
1. Those that qualify: have the necessary required skills and knowledge and that can do the job
2. Those who are unqualified and are honest about it
3. Those that think that they qualify but they don't
4. Those that do not qualify but are not honest about it and lie

This looks like a partition that should make life easy: you want to hire people from the first group and not from any other group.

Two problems are being raised:
One that those that qualify most probably already are working. This means that any advertisement targeted at them should be clear about why switching jobs is worth doing for them?
The second problem is that it is hard to filter out the people from groups 3 and 4.

The post further tries to give some advice about the proper way to advertise your "wanted ad".

I like that posting very much and enjoyed reading it.

google face search

Try adding to the query string in the resulting search URL in your google search the following: &imgtype=face

see: http://emad.fano.us/blog/?p=556

I played with this a few times now and it is kind-off disappointing... this feature has some serious maturing to do :-)

Photographing children in the kindergarten

I started a new thread about Photographing children in kindergarten.
My goad i to get tips regarding the approach, lighting, composition, technical issues and the general approach.

The discussion is in Hebrew in a Tapuz forum: http://www.tapuz.co.il/tapuzforum/main/Viewmsg.asp?forum=809&msgid=99785178

JINR -- publish your negative results on NLP and ML

JINR is an electronic journal, which brings to the fore research in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning that uncovers interesting negative results.

They idea is that while we see a lot of publications about successful attempts, it is not clear which paths are not promising directions.

Much can be learned by analysing why some ideas, while intuitive and plausible, do not work. The importance of counter-examples for disproving conjectures is already well known.

Negative results may point to interesting and important open problems. Knowing directions that lead to dead-ends in research can help others avoid replicating paths that take them nowhere. This might accelerate progress or even break through walls!

see: http://www.jinr.org/

xml namespaces decision table

Being able to correctly handle XML namespaces in an XML processor seems to me to be summarized in the following formulation. I don't know if I'm right or not, but that's why I posted a question about it in the xml-dev mailing list.

Let's consider three variables: a, b and c:

a. Name is qualified in XML Schema: yes/no
b. Name is prefixed in XML document: yes/no (default namespace is also considered as a prefix, the empty string prefix, for this discussion’s sake)
c. Prefix for name is defined in XML document: yes/no

If we consider all possible values for a, b and c we end up with 8 possibilities:

a	b	c
0	0	0
0	0	1
0	1	0
0	1	1
1	0	0
1	0	1
1	1	0
1	1	1

I don't expect to get any namespace related error
if a==b==c==0
or
if a==c==1 and b is either 1 or 0

(0 stands for no and 1 for yes...)

If I'm right than testing for namespace can be done with two comparisons


In case we don't have an XML Schema, the table has only two columns (no column for qualification):
So we get

b	c
0	0
0	1
1	0
1	1

we get that the only error is if we use a prefix that is not declared.

OWASP-IL mini conference

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/2nd_OWASP_IL_mini_conference

Unfortunately, I didn't attend, and I could only read the presentations online. Hopefully some of my friends from work who did attend will give a summarizing presentations on the new things for us to learn from the conference.

From my own reading I liked the talk about positive security, although there is nothing new presented there.

Some pictures from Nir's 1st birthday party

Here are some pictures from Nir's birthday. Nir is now one year old.

Racalling a visit to XRCE in Grenoble, France

After recalling my visit to Trento for ESSLLI2002, I also recalled another visit to Europe that was related to my academic interests. In March 2002 I visited Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France, and attended a Finite-State programming course, that was given by Ken Beesley. Dr. Beesley is currently at Inxight.

Recalling my visit to Trento in 2002

This is my last day in Paris and I'll be heading back home. I'm spending the rainy morning at the hotel surfing the web. I recalled my visit at the 14th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information , which took place in Trento, Italy in August 2002, which was also called ESSLLI2002. I took some pictures there with an old Olympus point and shoot with about 1 megapixel. Here's a link to the pictures: http://yeda.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/ESSLLI2002/index.html

Pictures from Paris

Blow are some pictures I took this afternoon in Paris. The res ones with the number 30 on them are of a depth ruler marked on a side of a river barge. The road sign is next to crossing signs at the end of a sidewalk not far from the closest metro station near Novotel Paris Tour Eiffel Hotel. The Eiffel tower is a reminder of the location. The last one is of some bolt and a writing on one of the sides of a bridge over the river Siene.

Appealing talks for me at XML Prague 2007

XML Prague 2007 will take place in June 16th and 17th.
From the published program I found special interest in:

Generative XPath
Oleg Paraschenko
Saint-Petersburg State University

The most convenient approach to navigate over XML trees is to use XPath queries. But there is no reason to limit ourselves to XML only. Indeed, it's useful to have XPath for navigating over arbitrary tree-like structures. There are a number of projects, in which developers have tried to implement XPath over project-specific hierarchical data. Unfortunately, most of these attempts resulted in something that resembled XPath, but was not XPath. The problem is that implementing XPath, even version 1.0, is a difficult task. We propose an alternative approach. Generative XPath is an XPath 1.0 processor that can be adapted to different hierarchical memory structures and different programming languages. Customizing Generative XPath to a specific environment is several magnitudes of order easier than implementing XPath from scratch.

The Generative XPath framework consists of three components:

• XPath compiler,
• XML virtual machine,
• native (customization) layer.

The XPath compiler transforms XPath expressions to an executable code for the virtual machine. During execution, the code interacts with the native layer to access the tree nodes and its properties.

This paper explains what the virtual machine is, what is expected from the customization layer, and how they work together. Also, background information about the design and implementation of Generative XPath is given.

XML Processing by Streaming
Mohamed Zergaoui
Innovimax

The first part will be to present the state of the art of XML Streaming processing by reviewing the products in place (joost, cocoon, saxon, etc.), the API available (SAX, Stax, XOM), languages (CDuce, XDuce, XJ), and the spec in progress or stalled (STX, XML Processing, XQuery update). Speaking of what is currently in preparation (i.e. an XML Streaming XG at W3C). And taking the time to present what has already been done in SGML time (Balise and Omnimark, cursor idea that can be find in Arbortext OID in ACL, etc.)

Then the goal is to present all the area where some work has still to be done and give some hints on an elaborated vision of XML Processing trough different kind of process : around constraints, normalizing, streamable path, multilayer transformation, and last but not least constraints aware streamable path. Some light will be spot on static analysis of XSLT and XQuery to detect streamable instances. What are the needed evolutions of the cursor model? What are XDuce-like languages added values?