Heat your homes using waste from data centers

This is the neatest proposition I’ve seen/ read about in quite some time. IBM’s Zürich Research Lab demonstrated at Supercomputing 2008 how, within 5 years, they’re going to have data centers that use water pumped through microchannels within computers for cooling rather than traditional air conditioning or fans. Here alone we are talking about saving annual energy costs by billions of dollars! Then, additionally, this water that would absorb the heat from the huge data centers will be used to heat nearby homes, which would save more energy dollars. If this comes true, we are talking about a very efficient and effective step towards a greener earth, in my opinion. Even as I am holding my breath, you can read this interesting article here.

Shazam!!

Shazam is a new iPhone/ Android phone application that is capable of capturing from the surroundings any music playing and identifying which song exactly it heard. It has a database of 6 million tracks and it’s actually pretty neat. Talking from a first-hand experience.

Now if only someone will develop this for my RAZR… or my notebook…

Installing Infomap on Ubuntu

Infomap is an NLP software from Stanford which simulates a variant of a Latent Semantic Analysis, with term-term matrices (instead of term-document matrices) and singular value decomposition. In a nutshell it is a C program which is readymade for you to build semantic vector spaces and compute similarities between words or concepts.

To install it on Ubuntu, make sure you follow these steps:

1. Install g++ (sudo apt-get install g++)
2. Install gdmb (with dbm-compatible modules – refer to the README/ INSTALL file)
3. Install Infomap

Hope that works!