October 26, 2006 1:51 pm by Markus.

Google recently started their new Co-Op service (see here) which allows users to create their own personalized search-engines to whichever topic they desire. More importantly, it allows for inclusion of the search into the website of the whoever created the search-engine. Especially the later is nice as before it was only possible to either drive the user away to the Googles’ homepage, open it in an iframe or a new window - all stuff that webmasters wouldn’t want for one reason or the other. I just created a search-engine for machine-learning related materials. I’m still adding sites, but I’m getting better results for my personal searches already. I also wrote a module for the PHPNuke content management system to include whichever personal CoOp search-engine you created into the system. You can download the Search-The-Web-module for PHP-Nuke on my website. It even comes with English, German and French language-files (although the French translation might be a bit funny).

Posted in Coding / Programming, Machine Learning | Print | 1 Comment »

October 25, 2006 1:55 pm by Markus.

We had a small incident last night. Around 10 or so the firealarm in #208 went
of, at first only one, then two of these annoying beepers. A minute later
somebody knocks on the door and keeps knocking. So I go downstairs, open the
door and this huge cloud of smoke is outside. The neighbor girl is like: “Hi,
um, do you have a fireextinguisher we could borrow?”. I can see flames in
their kitchen-window and it smells awful like burning grease. Nobody got hurt, but their kitchen is now a mess. That reminds me to check the batteries in my smoke-detectors… you never know.

Posted in Random | Print | No Comments »

October 15, 2006 3:22 pm by Markus.

A friend of mine just pointed me to the book of A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. It’s a book full of random numbers from back in the days when random number generation was hard. However, check out the reviews at Amazon of the book. They are hilarious.

Posted in Statistics, Ramblings, Random | Print | No Comments »