Older blog entries for cinamod (starting at number 155)

ZoomInfo is Hiring!

Do you stay up at night attacking interesting algorithmic and architectural problems? Do deep NLP, semantic search, and distributed systems get you all hot & sweaty?

If you've answered "yes" to any of these questions and live in the greater Boston area, you should drop me a line.

ZoomInfo is a great place to work. I've been there for 14 months, and I've had a heck of a time. The corporate culture is energetic, youthful, and above all else, smart. It's still got a start-up feel to it, even though the company's consistently been in the black for the past 8 years. And we're growing. Fast. But not recklessly so. There's a method to our madness, and it's paying great dividends.

Check out our careers page and our recruiter's blog for more info. We love hiring F/OSS people and we unofficially have about 20 open engineering positions for web, backend, and data architects. If you're unemployed, underemployed, or just looking for a career change, you should definitely give us a look.

26 Nov 2007 (updated 26 Nov 2007 at 20:31 UTC) »

Regardless of whether Murray's recent rant is accurate or polite, I'm glad that he's aired his opinion.

Most of the board's processes and meetings happen behind closed doors. From the meeting minutes (and be honest here, how many people actually read those?), who can tell if member X is being derelict in his duties or being an obstructionist? Especially since the board members have an unofficial policy of not speaking negatively of past and present members in public.

Murray has been on several GNOME Foundation boards. He's seen how the process works and has a somewhat unique insider's view of things. I'm glad that he's broken the wall of silence.

How much you choose to believe Murray is, of course, your decision to make. However, attempts to silence him by telling him to voice his opinion solely through his anonymous vote is disingenuous and does a disservice to us, the Foundation's members, who'd like to make better-informed decisions.

Attempts to silence Murray's negative comments while implicitly condoning his and others' public endorsements reeks of hypocrisy. Disagree with Murray's language if you'd like to. Disagree with his diagnosis if you'd like to. But Murray's content (and any response from Jeff) is the "chocolate" that all of us should be considering when we vote for the next board. Jeff has the capacity to respond to Murray's critique if he'd like to. Let's let them speak.

Dear Red Sox,

Please start treating Eric Gagne as a sunk cost. Just because you paid $6,000,000 for his contract this season doesn't mean that you have to play him unless, say, a meteorite hits your bullpen. Even then, consider letting Manny pitch a few innings instead. It'll be better for all of us.

Gagne's proven on enough occasions this season (including 2 consecutive nights in the playoffs!) that he's not worth it. Boston area pharmacies don't have enough antacid to go around.

Signed,

A fan with increasingly shorter fingernails

8 Aug 2007 (updated 8 Aug 2007 at 17:31 UTC) »
Alternately, "America" is a popular nickname for the only country with "America" in its name :)

After all, lots of countries have political subdivisions called "states". A bunch even advertise the fact that they're made up of states in their official name. Some even go so far as to throw the word "united" in there. So in some bizarro-universe, the abbreviation "U.S." or colloquialism "the States" could refer equally well, to say, the United Mexican States as it does to the United States of America.

But Canadians would never refer to their other southern, NAFTA-loving neighbor as "The States" or the "U.S.". Every sane person just calls it "Mexico". Of course, the continents aren't named North and South Mexico. But maybe if we all had goatees... All the other cool countries get to remove "Federated States of", "Grand Duchy of", "Republic of", etc. from their common names. Why can't the USA?

8 Jul 2007 (updated 8 Jul 2007 at 22:01 UTC) »

3 weeks I spent stripping, cleaning, and sanding through 6 layers of paint, lacquer, and stain on my poor deck. Each day, an hour before work and an hour after work. 5 hours each day on the weekends. I finally finished it yesterday, and it looked beautiful.

This morning, I looked at the forecast. 30C and partly cloudy. Perfect weather to stain the deck. GWeather has no mention of rain whatsoever for the next 3 days. And it hasn't rained for 3 days. This is my window of opportunity. My summer project would finally be complete.

No sooner than I finish the last brush stroke on the stairs, the heavens open up. One gray cloud that I'd been shooing away all afternoon decided to plant itself over my house. My deck now has 1cm of water on it. It's probably ruined. I'll need to strip, clean, and sand through this layer of stain so that I can re-apply it. What else can I do but laugh :)

SoC update for Uwog

One of my SoC students is working on a grammar-checking plugin for AbiWord. Last week, he started to use ICU's sentence breaker instead of an ad-hoc one that we'd developed inside of AbiWord. The major difference is in how abbreviations (like "Mr." and "Mrs.") are handled. The results aren't perfect, but he's making headway.

Obligatory before and after screenshots, for Uwog's viewing pleasure.

Media Wars

This week, a federal appeals panel struck a blow against the FCC's ability to censor "obscene" content on television and radio. The FCC (though they may be exaggerating their case) fears that the opinion "could gut the ability of the commission to regulate any speech on television or radio".

I've never understood the FCC's prerogative when it came to regulating content for moral reasons. Nor have I understood (or agreed with) the Court's first-amendment jurisprudence when it comes to "obscenity" and "community standards".

The airwaves belong to the public. The first amendment grants us freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Case closed, as far as I'm concerned. Community standards and obscenity are noticeably absent from the Constitution - probably invented from the ether by some of those "activist judges" that today's Republicans get so up-in-arms about.

The government has already mandated that all televisions contain a V-Chip and that broadcasters rate their content according to the amount of "language", violence, sexuality, and etc. that it contains.

I am in favor of warning labels. For example, I'm quite happy that products list their ingredients and nutritional value. Whether these labels are government-mandated or come about via the "invisible hand of the market", they help make me a more informed consumer.

I am generally in favor of personal choice. True choice can only come about when you have informed choosers.

So, with these ratings (assuming that they are roughly accurate) and V-Chip-like technology, we have the ability to self-censor anything that we wouldn't want to watch (or more often, wouldn't want our progeny to watch).

So fsck community standards, and fsck the FCC. Get out of the business of fining Howard Stern and Opie and Anothony for the garbage they say on the airwaves. If FOX wants to become a hardcore pr0n channel, fine. Let them. So long as these broadcasters are required to accurately rate their content and we, their potential audience, have the ability to filter out undesirable content, I don't see the harm. (Though I also don't see the harm of a kid accidentally seeing a breast on TV our hearing a "naughty" word. But that's just me.)

The FCC should have never been permitted to police "community standards" in the first place. Maybe it was "necessary" for a while before we had V-Chip technology. But the technology has been mandated for 7 years now, and in light of this, the FCC's policing is wholly unwarranted.

The agency still does some useful things, like certifying that electronic devices don't interfere with one another. Let them do that, and get out of our radios and television sets. The government and my community have no right to legislate what I choose to see and hear, nor do they have the right to legislate what these broadcasters might wish to say (absent, perhaps, making knowingly factually inaccurate claims in order to deceive the public).

I'm headed back to the Tel Aviv area again this weekend. If any of my Israeli friends would like to meet up sometime between June 2 and June 7, email domlachowicz AT gmail DOT com.

This comes on the heels of a thoroughly enjoyable trip to Montreal this past weekend. I spent most of last Saturday lying on sunny, green Mont Royal with Ruth. On Sunday, we went to a chocolate festival in nearby Bromont. I'll have to post pictures when I get a few spare moments to myself :)

29 May 2007 (updated 29 May 2007 at 16:03 UTC) »

Late last year, my favorite restaurant in Boston was forced to close when its liquor license wasn't renewed. At the time, I was furious. What had happened is that "neighbors" of the restaurant (read: white yuppies that live 7+ blocks away) objected to the "undesirable element and noise" that the restaurant attracted in their "up-and-coming" Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Since this was an inexpensive Ethiopian restaurant, I'm going to assume that "undesirable element" was code for "relatively poor black clientèle." I petitioned the Boston City Council, pointing out all sorts of interesting data like the fact that no one lived near the restaurant (using photos of the parks that surround it...), that the clientèle was largely blue-collar blokes trying to make ends meet (usually as taxi drivers) and weren't causing anyone any trouble. But to no avail. The burgeoning property owners had won. Fasika closed, neighborhood property values rose slightly, and I begrudgingly moved on with life. I bought a house, moved further away from JP, and assumed that was that.

Until today, that is. Pat Lam just told me the greatest news ever. Fasika has reopened. In Somerville. Five blocks from where I now live. I'm so happy that I could cry! This white yuppie property owner proudly welcomes Fasika to his up-and-coming Somerville neighborhood. And I'll happily watch my property value (and most likely, weight) go up because of it.

SoC status

Google's SoC program hasn't officially started yet, and already my two students are busy hacking.

Rob Staudinger has been busy refactoring AbiWord's build system so that parts of AbiWord might be turned into a proper library. In the process, he's managed to get AbiWord to cross-compile to Win32.

Due to its relatively light footprint, AbiWord has seen an upwelling of adoption on "embedded" platforms, like the Nokia Maemo or OLPC runtimes. These devices have wildly differing constraints, but at the core, all see a need for a rich-text widget. Rob's work is critical for us to fully exploit these emerging markets.

Meanwhile, Gabriel Bakiewicz has been hacking away at improving AbiWord's grammar checking. He's managed to hook up AbiWord to CoGroo. Initial screenshot here. Gabriel's plans for the summer are pretty ambitious. In the end, we may have an Enchant-like interface for grammar checking. I'm lucky to have help mentoring this project from one of Gabriel's professors, Carlos Menezes.

This is impressive, considering that SoC hasn't officially started yet. Great job, guys! Keep up the good work.

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