Peer to Peer Web Search with Minerva
Google engEDU
1 hr 1 min – Aug 3, 2006

Google TechTalks
August 3, 2006

Gerhard Weikum

ABSTRACT
The peer-to-peer (P2P) computing paradigm is an intriguing alternative to Google-style search engines for querying and ranking Web content. In a network with many thousands or millions of peers the storage and access load requirements per peer are much lighter than for a centralized server farm.

On the other hand, P2P Web search also poses major challenges, one of them being the computation, dissemination, and efficient management of statistical measures that are crucial for good search strategies and ranking algorithms. Statistics (e.g., local and global document frequencies, overlap among peers’ contents, PageRank-style authority) need to be acquired and maintained in a decentralized manner for scalability, they need to be compact for efficient communication, and they need to provide sufficiently accurate estimators of various measures of interest. This talk will give an overview on our ongoing research on P2P Web search, with emphasis on statistics-driven query routing, decentralized PageRank computation, and exploitation of user behavior.

The developed methods have been implemented in the Minerva prototype system, an experimental testbed for P2P research. Read the rest of this entry »

Hashing Searching Sketching.
Google engEDU
1 hr 2 min – Nov 20, 2006

Google Tech Talks
November 20, 2006

ABSTRACT
We will see improved results on search using hashing and sketching. Hashing is often analyzed as balls being thrown into bins where you think of the hash items as balls and buckets as bins. By studying variants of the balls and bins processes we obtain a hashing algorithm with 85% hash table space utilization. We will also study locality sensitive hashing, a hashing method used for nearest neighbor search, as opposed to exact search. A locality sensitive hash function is likely to map nearby elements to the same bucket. We will see a variant of locality sensitive hashing that finds an approximate nearest neighbor in high dimensions using linear space. We will also see some lower bounds and applications to kd trees. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Install a Testing Server on Your PC
VitaminCM
10 min – 23-Nov-07

If you have a website or do any type of web development you have probably needed a server at some point. Not everybody has a full blown commercial web server at their disposal for development, experimenting, and testing their site. You may think that it is both expensive and complicated to have your own local web server.
View the entire article on http://www.vitamincm.com/2007/11/22/how-to-set-up-a-testing-server-on-your-pc/#more-99 Read the rest of this entry »

Edubuntu Setting Env Vars in BashRC: Where’s Apache in Debian?
Dennis Daniels and Demostudio and VNC
10 min – 19-Jan-06

In this screencast you’ll see how to set environment variables in the bashrc file. And you’ll see me thrashing around looking for the apache folder.

The Edubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Edubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.–http://www.edubuntu.org/

I made this video by VNCing from my XP machine over to my Edubuntu machine on my network. I recorded the VNC session using Demostudio. If there was an equally easy to use and powerful screencasting tool for Linux that offered mpeg recording then I’d use that instead. Please post your own screencasts on how to use Linux! There are so many curious people about Linux but many have never seen it in action! Make a screen cast and post your own successes, and failures, under Linux.

keywords: software, training, tutorial, evangelism, screencast, OSS, network, education, Linux, Debian, ubuntu, Gnome, desktop, productivity, LTSP, thin client, server Read the rest of this entry »

How to Configure Your XAMPP Server
VitaminCM
5 min – 23-Nov-07

If you have a website or do any type of web development you have probably needed a server at some point. Not everybody has a full blown commercial web server at their disposal for development, experimenting, and testing their site. You may think that it is both expensive and complicated to have your own local web server.
View the entire article on http://www.vitamincm.com/2007/11/22/how-to-set-up-a-testing-server-on-your-pc/#more-99 Read the rest of this entry »