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It has been about a week since I began doing a deeper study of infor­ma­tion retrieval. Actu­ally, every­thing just began with a new course at my uni­ver­sity about that and I just fallen in love almost imme­di­ately. The fact is that this thing really got me inter­ested, and I began doing some exper­i­ments (one involves django as well, keep read­ing to know more).

In this week I learned a lot of things about infor­ma­tion retrieval, text cat­e­go­riza­tion, nat­ural lan­guage pro­cess­ing and machine learn­ing. But the most rel­e­vant thing is: the prin­ci­ples are easy, their imple­men­ta­tion is not. The fact is that most of the tech­niques are rel­a­tively simple but you usu­ally have to deal with very large datasets and this could be chal­leng­ing, since one of the main require­ments about infor­ma­tion retrieval is time. It’s really much more impor­tant that you give less results in one second rather than giving better results in one hour. No one will ever care to use your system if it takes an hour to get some result. And if you’re con­sid­er­ing to store your data in a data­base forget about nor­mal­iza­tion, it wouldn’t really take you anywhere.

(Con­tinue reading…)

Running django with fastcgi is not a dif­fi­cult task, also because of the excel­lent doc­u­men­ta­tion pro­vided. Anyway the doc pro­vides a very basic script to autom­a­tize the start/stop fcgi process, so today I had to write my own so I don’t have to man­u­ally fix things if some­thing goes wrong since I let my script handle the var­i­ous situations.

(Con­tinue reading…)

Today I just ended one of my side projects: pyta­gram. Basi­cally it gen­er­ates an SVG file (that can suc­ces­sively be saved as eps/pdf/whatever and even­tu­ally man­u­ally manip­u­lated) start­ing from a tree-​like plain text file. This can be useful for gen­er­at­ing cheat sheets or quick ref­er­ences to classes or func­tions that belongs to some project.

I did this for gen­er­at­ing a django quick ref­er­ence (here it is) since it has a lot of func­tions and I know what’s their pur­pose, but I can never remem­ber the names (and now two A4 papers are right in front of me).

If you’re inter­ested in this, check out the google code project page and grab your copy from the SVN repository.

There are tons of things that can be changed/optimized (i.e.: add some optional short expla­na­tion of the func­tion, add more exam­ples, easier way to change colors, …) but now the code is work­ing quite well so that can be already useful to the people out there.

Due to my devo­tion to the Django web frame­work, I finally got my copy of Prac­ti­cal Django Projects, by James Bennet. Not really expect­ing to have that soon, but a beau­ti­ful suprise anyway (to say the truth, I didn’t bought this: this has been sent to me as replace­ment prize for djan­go­dash because I was not eleg­i­ble to get the G33K beers since I live out­side US. Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of Daniel Lindsley).

(Con­tinue reading…)