Sean McGrath’s Push and Pull Report republished

“Push and Pull Messaging …” by Sean McGrath is a decision document between push and pull in a service delivery bus designed for the Irish government. Although the application is specific to that system, it also contains a great summary of the rationales one should use when choosing between push and pull. It fell off the web, but the Irish government very helpfully dug it out and gave me permission to re-distribute it.

I’d recommend it particularly to anyone thinking “Should I use SWORD for this system?”.

Lensfield IEEE paper

I’ve uploaded the slides (DSpace@Cambridge, Slideshare) from my presentation on Lensfield at the IEEE eScience conference today. Thanks to everyone who made it through a long week and still chose to come to listen – I hope it was worth it.

Tiny Clojure snippet

At the Cambridge Clojure meetup last night I decided to have a go at something work-related, but that I don’t usually get time for. The OSCAR3 chemistry entity extraction and text-mining tool uses N-Grams to create feature vectors to classify words. It turned out to be pretty short work for loop...recur, but then Nick Day pointed out that I’d just reimplemented partition, which turned the function into: -

(defn ngrams [word n]
  (let [pad (repeat (dec n) \#))]
    (partition  n 1 (concat pad word pad))))
(ngrams "foobar" 3)
-> ((\# \# \f) (\# \f \o) (\f \o \o) (\o \o \b) (\o \b \a) (\b \a \r) (\a \r \#) (\r \# \#))

Notes from PM-R group Code Review 6/11

In case they’re of wider interest.

1. Get used to "literal".equals(object). Get used to it. Yes, yes, blah blah blah. Just get to used to it!
2. Useful classes 101: there’s a generic BidiMap in the Commons-collections library, version 4.0. Hasn’t hit maven2 repo yet, but it’s released (javadocs).
3. Useful classes 101: org.apache.commons.io.output.NullWriter – writes to dev/null
4. Boolean unpleasantness. Don’t test myBoolean == true, just use myBoolean. Also remember that this: -
   

   if(something) {
     return true;
   }
   else {
     return false;
   }

   is a really long way of saying return something.

5. No Magic Numbers
6. Yes, Tuples are lovely. If you really don’t want to design your way around their absence in Java, use something like the generic Pair class.

Unchecked Type Conversion best practice

A couple of months ago, we started using the Murray-Rust group meetings to perform code review. It’s been interesting – sometimes we look at fairly low level idioms, sometimes at more fundamental refactoring and design issues. I’m particularly pleased that the tone has remained constructive, even when PM-R took centre stage last week.

Occasionally we stumble across an issue for which there is no established or widely accepted best practice. One of the things that came up recently was what you should do about the “Unchecked Type Conversion” warning that appear when you try to shoehorn a 1.4 library into 1.5 code that’s expecting generics. I should probably have posted it myself, but Joe has done me the service of recording the results of our discussion and research.

Cambridge Clojure Meetup 10th Nov

I’ll be going to the weekly Cambridge Clojure Meetup next Tuesday, 10th November, 2009.

The time place is the usual, 8pm at the Kingston Arms.

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Update: I’ve set up an upcoming entry for next week’s meeting.

Embedding Metadata and Other Semantics in Word Processing Documents

The paper by Sefton, Barnes, Ward and Downing that I presented at the International Digital Curation Conference last Edinburgh has been published in the International Journal of Digital Curation: http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/121.

Cambridge Clojure meetup 6th Oct

Myself and a couple of colleagues from the Unilever Centre will be at the Cambridge Clojure meetup this evening.

Time: Tuesday 6th October, 2009. 8pm
Location: The Kingston Arms. Has food, wifi and usually excellent and varied ale. 10 min walk from the train station.

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ICE-TheOREM Final Report Available

The JISC-sponsored ICE-TheOREM project’s final report is available from the IE repository. The project was a technical investigation into applying ORE to scholarly workflows; along with Peter Sefton’s team at the Australian Digital Futures Institute at the University of Southern Queensland, we developed a demonstrator that passed ORE-described ETDs between systems to recreate a thesis submission process.

Au revoir, Nico!

I’d like to publicly mark the occasion of Nico Adams leaving the Murray-Rust group. Nico has been a hugely influential member of the group, and a great colleague to work with, always ready with a rigorous position in a vigorous discussion!

I’m hoping we’ll be able to collaborate in future. Enjoy your break, Nico!