aidanf.net

I’ve watched quite a few Google tech talks in the last few months. There are lots available. Here are some of the ones I found interesting (If you have recommendations for good talks that I haven’t listed below please leave a comment).  read more »

Barcamp Galway finally came around on Saturday. I enjoyed the day. Thanks to all the attendees, presenters, panelists, sponsors etc for making it work.

We had somewhere between 40 and 50 attendees on the day. There were 17 talks and 3 panel discussions. We had 3 rooms, 2 with talks going all day and 1 for breakout sessions. Conn Ó Muíneacháin set up a live stream for one of the rooms. We used a jaiku channel for live updates throughout the day.  read more »

I started this article about a year ago, just after I finished my Phd. I had mapped it out then left it to gestate but never got round to finishing it (This is a first draft. Please leave comments or send feedback so the second draft is better).

I recently completed my Phd. The skills that I needed to compete my Phd were much different to those I had when I finished my undergraduate degree. The tools that helped me along the way were not the ones I learned about as an undergraduate.

This document is an attempt to describe some of the choices that I made that I think helped me get through it more quickly and efficiently. The overriding theme is that of choosing the right tools for the job. In that regard the advice here is probably specific to computer science students although some of it may extend to other disciplines. Choosing the best tool will make your life much easier, and lets face it, you’ll need all the help you can get.  read more »

This week ruby overtook python as the dominant programming language in my library.

I was at Barcamp Ireland - Southeast today and a few people mentioned difficulty in sourcing developers in Ireland.  read more »

Barcamp Ireland - SouthEast is taking place in Waterford on January 20th, 2007. I’m giving a talk entitled “Idiots guide to Ruby on Rails, Django, Turbogears and other assorted newfangled frameworks”. For more details see the wiki and the blog. If your are attending and would like me to cover anything in particular let me know.

Abstract:  read more »

ELIE is a tool for adaptive information extraction from text. It also provides a number of other text processing tools e.g. POS tagging, chunking, gazetteer, stemming.  read more »

BTE is a python module for automated extraction of body text from web pages. It can also be used to generate short teasers/summaries. download  read more »

gqserv - a centralised mechanism for querying google  read more »