Journal

May 16

Quick hacks for emacs configuration

You might have to reload emacs quite often to see how your configuration works. Here is the quick reload


now use M x reload-emacs. There you go!

May 09

#CouchDB does not support chaining map/reduce

#couchdb does not support chaining of map/reduce jobs. people in mailing lists suggest creating temporary databases that will hold the output of the map function(again a json doc) and run map jobs on it. Will work like a charm. Sounds like what we do in traditional RDBMS world. Chaining map/reduce is basic to any map/reduce based db is what i thought. Will that be added to future versions of couchdb? Any thoughts? 

Discussion in the couchdb_user mailing list on this

Jan 16

Deadlocks and Legislature

When two trains approach each other at a crossing, both shall come to a full stop and neither shall start up again until the other has gone.

— Illogical statute passed by the Kansas Legislature

Wow, what an example for deadlock!

Source - Wikipedia article on Deadlock

Jan 15

“Impact of earthquake in Haiti. Gruelling sight - http://bit.ly/8La8N0” — Source

Jan 01

Piaget’s Theory . The best-known developmentally-based conception of intelligence is certainly that of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1972). Unlike most of the theorists considered here, Piaget had relatively little interest in individual differences. Intelligence develops in all children through the continually shifting balance between the assimilation of new information into existing cognitive structures and the accommodation of those structures themselves to the new information. To index the development of intelligence in this sense, Piaget devised methods that are rather different from conventional tests. To assess the understanding of “conservation.” for example, (roughly, the principle that material quantity is not affected by mere changes of shape), children who have watched water being poured from a shallow to a tall beaker may be asked if there is now more water than before. (A positive answer would suggest that the child has not yet mastered the principle of conservation.) Piaget’s tasks can be modified to serve as measures of individual differences; when this is done, they correlate fairly well with standard psychometric tests (for a review see Jensen, 1980).” — Jean Piaget