Reformed(?) Hacker

Wiki tab sweep

Tab sweep of items I reviewed regarding how social policies support or enable the success of wikis:

General Wiki Statistics

List of the largest installations of Mediawiki	http://s23.org/wiki/List_of_largest_wikis
Information and stats about Wikimedia project	http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
General Statistics of Wikipedia	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
Raw, public server-log style page statistics on Wikipedia	http://dammit.lt/wikistats/
Example of user community mining the public statistics published by Wikipedia	http://stats.grok.se/
Public charts showing Wikimedia usage stats	http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/

 

Examples of Wikipedia policies / social roles

Welcoming Commitee	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcoming_committee
Example tool provided to select users on Wikimedia sites, along with the social policies that govern it — CheckUser	http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Checkuser
Wikipedia arbitration policy	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_policy

 

The study of wikis and why and how they work

How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko	http://dirkriehle.com/computer-science/research/2006/wikisym-2006-interview.pdf   http://dirkriehle.com/computer-science/research/2006/wikisym-2006-interview.html
International Symposium on Wikis	http://www.wikisym.org/
From Little Things, Big Things Grow	http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fromlittlethings
Wiki Patterns	http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns
measuring wiki viability	http://nitens.org/docs/wikidyn.pdf
what makes wikis work	http://snurb.info/node/742
What makes wikis work well	http://www.deltaknowledge.net/2008/08/what-makes-wiki-work-well.html
Viable wikis	http://www.patres-project.eu/images/4/47/ViableWikis.pdf
Design principles of Wiki: How can so little do so much?	http://c2.com/doc/wikisym/WikiSym2006.pdf

 

Specific Papers I found enlightening

Cooperation and Quality in Wikipedia.	http://ws2007.wikisym.org/space/WilkinsonHubermanPaper
Authorial Leadership in Wikipedia.	http://ws2007.wikisym.org/space/ReaglePaper
Quantitative Analysis of theWikipedia Community of Users	http://ws2007.wikisym.org/space/OrtegaGonzalezBarahonaPaper/Ortega_WikiSym2007_WikipediaQuantitativeAnalysis.pdf
Structuring Wiki Revision History	http://ws2007.wikisym.org/space/SabelPaper
exposing wikipedia revision activity	http://www.wikisym.org/ws2008/proceedings/research%20papers/18500102.pdf
Wiki Trust Metrics	http://www.wikisym.org/ws2008/proceedings/research%20papers/18500017.pdf
measuring author contributions to the Wikipedia	http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~luca/papers/08/wikisym08-users.pdf
a method for measuring co-authorship relationships in mediawiki	http://www.wikisym.org/ws2008/proceedings/research%20papers/18500125.pdf
Cooperation and quality in Wikipedia	http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/wikipedia/wikipedia07.pdf
Are wikis usable?	http://www.wikisym.org/ws2005/proceedings/paper-01.pdf

 

Graph processing

I’ve been wrestling for a while trying to find a good technique for large scale graph processing. Some wonderful folks here at work have come up with some cool solutions based on map-reduce.

Today, however, Google sent out a tease about their in-house solution — Pregel. It will be interesting to see what the details are when they discuss it.

Tab Sweep: Search

Current tabs

• Blog entry from Matthew Hurst exploring Google^2
• Blog entry from William Cohen, discussing the above entry and SEAL
• Google^2
• SEAL

Identifier Tab Sweep

I’m swapping into working memory the history and relationships of URLs, URNs, and URIs….

• IETF URI Working Group
• Tim Bray on identifiers
• And again
• Untangle URIs, URLs, and URNs

When two people know less than one

Credit to Car Talk:

I can’t begin to count the number of times that I’ve seen it (and, sadly, participated sometimes — I like to believe I’m wiser now)….

Posit the question: Do two people who don’t know what they are talking
about know more or less than one person who doesn’t know what he’s
talking about?

One person will only go so far out on a limb in his construction of
deeply hypothetical structures, and will often end with a shrug or a
raising of hands to indicate the dismissability of his particular take
on a subject. With two people, the intricacies, the gives and takes,
the wherefores and why-nots, can become a veritable pas-de-deux of breathtaking speculation, interwoven in such a way that apologies or gestures of doubt are rendered unnecessary.

Typical scaling progression for a large website

John Engales, the CTO of Rackspace, has written a presentation about the typical stages of scalability undergone by a website.

Scalr

By it’s own description, “Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2″. While I haven’t yet tried it, there certainly seems to be a market for management tools riding on top of EC2. Rightscale.com, a commercial alternative to Scalr, can attest to that.

I find the type of automation offered fairly compelling. We are approaching the day where deploying your application at internet scale will be push-button simple. Perhap’s Time’s person of the year this time ’round should be a cloud.

Standalone, Java implementation of Bloom Filters

I wrote an implementation of Bloom Filters which you can download from here. This implementation offers some advantages

• Pluggable hash functions
• Pluggable “bit stores” (an array of bits)
  • An option to store the bloom filter in a file on disk. This allows for bloom filters bigger than your JVM heap by using Memory Mapped Files
  • An option to store the bloom filter in ram.

Instructions for using the bloom filter are in the javadocs.

Standalone, Java implementation of Cuckoo Hashing

While spending some time with Bloom Filters, I came across an interesting hashing technique called Cuckoo Hashing. In short, Cuckoo Hashing is a technique for building a hashtable with guaranteed O(1) access time. Very useful. Unfortunately, after poking around the net a bit, I wasn’t able to find any standalone implementations in Java. So I wrote one. If you find it useful, please drop me a line.

Scrum Master

I’m now a certified Scrum Master.