Ganesh Swami

Writing unit tests is generally considered good software engineering. You can even take it to an extreme: “write test, write code, refactor” with Test Driven Development. It’s not enough to just write tests — we must also check the effectiveness and quality of the tests themselves. How many relevant paths are we taking in the module being tested. This is where tools like gcov come handy.

But this just makes me drool…

(via Juho Snellman)

Computing in Science & Engineering highlights the top 5 articles in honor of their 75th anniversary:

• The Fast Fourier Transform for Experimentalists – Part I
• Physlets for Quantum Mechanics
• The Physical Basis of Computability
• Ten Good Practices in Scientific Programming
• The Metropolis Algorithm

Not many people seem to know about the WWW07 conference, so I’m sending them some love. Defined by the organizers as “the global event that brings together the key innovators, decision-makers, technologists, businesses, and standards bodies shaping the Web,” the conference has some interesting refereed papers and posters.

The Web space as of now is pretty crowed and it’s difficult to differentiate the wheat from the chaff. The next social network, or the next youtube clone isn’t very interesting. Skimming through these papers brings to light some of the harder problems in the field:

• spammers posting portions of existing comments with a few links changed.
• a website that has the authority in one area might start writing about other things. How do you assign a pagerank to this site?
• RSS aggregators clustering. No fun reading about five different takes on the same breaking news. Much like Google News.
• Google news itself. “collaborative filtering using MinHash clustering, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PLSI), and covisitation counts.”
• mining and clustering other kinds of information (like chemical formulae)
• advertisements and click fraud
• personalization
• and a whole bunch of stuff on scalability, privacy, security and the semantic web

Also speaking at the event is Prabhakar Raghavan. I have previously heard him talk about the convergence of the social sciences and the web. Awesome speaker.