f8

I was at work when f8 started today in the morning. But I did get glimpses of the live presentation showing some of the new technologies that Facebook is planning on rolling out. I think they have some very interesting products in mind, such as Timeline, Ticker, and the concept of Open graph.

The proposed changes seem intriguing, but I wonder how this will affect the nature of social networks. There is the technology aspect of the products, but I am more concerned about the type of privacy features that are getting bundled with these ideas.

Code coverage plugin for eclipse

I needed a code coverage tool to check how good of a coverage my unit tests were doing. Looking around a little for a code coverage tool for eclipse, I came across ecobertura. I only played around a little with this, but from first looks, it seems quite handy. It gives you a nice highlighting of green for lines of code that got executed, and others in red. There are some other features that I did not get a chance to check out yet. One problem is that there is no way to toggle off the code coverage tool, probably something the author has in mind to add I am sure.

If you decide to use it, please let me know how it goes for you in the meantime.

Vim like editing for eclipse

I am using eclipse at work for development, and although eclipse provides many excellent functionalities, being a vi/vim person myself, I was missing the elegance of developing using a vim style editor. One of the senior engineers at work, being himself an avid vi/vim user as myself, pointed out an eclipse plugin for vim called vrapper. It is not complete vim, but has enough functionality to keep me happy. I have been using it for about a week now, and I am liking the eclipse functionality with a vim style editor.

You can install it from eclipse marketplace. If you are using one of the relatively newer eclipse IDEs, you should see a link from "help".

Computational Advertising class @ Stanford

Since I have decided to dabble into the problem of ad serving, I have been looking at this class at Stanford trying to get a sense of what is out there currently in the real world, and what are the lines of thought of researchers in the field. Here's the link if you are interested.

A brief detour

For those of you who might have stumbled upon my blog previously, you would probably remember me as a PhD student in Machine Learning in California. I have decided to take a detour from my PhD program for a stint as a Software Engineer. I am working in California, primarily focusing in applying Machine Learning in building high value scalable products for users, and with a goal in distributing them at a massive scale.

At the moment, I have decided to delve into the problem of Ad Serving. All of us engineers in this area are basically working on the problem of how to connect advertisers, publishers, and users in a manner that is profitable for all involved, and to do all that in an efficient manner.