Kiva is Social Networking at its best!

Not enough good things can be said about Kiva.

Having first caught details of their work on this FRONTLINE episode, it was obvious this was the best of giving back to the whole world the fruits of our technological advances without leaving any economic minority behind.

Their site implementation is also clean, easy to use and informative. You really owe it to yourself to connect to a truely international social networking site like Kiva.

I visit my lender page every day.

Expand Mathematica 6 Documentation Searching

Mathematica 6 from Wolfram Research has revamped the way previous versions indexed and exposed documentation. Previously blogged in more detail here.

However, if you are a fan or user of the GUIKit package, you may be surpised on how limited the search results are when using the built-in Documentation Center window.
It turns out that although the locally installed GUIKit package contains the updated documentation and indexing files. Mathematica 6 fails to include the Packages/ directory that GUIKit lives in.

You can add these packages, and updated searching results by adding the following in your local Kernel/init.m:


Needs["ResourceLocator`"];

ApplicationDirectoryAdd[
ToFileName[{$InstallationDirectory, "AddOns"}, "Packages"]];


You could update the ResourceLocator package code with this additional application directory but this style of using an init.m keeps your modifications outside the Mathematica distribution in case of updates.

Mathematica 6 + Lucene = Exposed Searching

With the release of Mathematica 6 from Wolfram Research comes an update to their documentation and searching that uses the open-source Java Apache Lucene project.

The great thing about this choice is that it exposes the vast amount of data about the documentation to the end user, allowing customized searching tools using either Mathematica code or Java code.

For example, try pointing this great little Java app Luke at your new Mathematica 6 Index/ directories (recommend opening them read-only). With it, you can browse through all the Lucene documents and see what fields and available, along with doing custom searching from within Luke. It can definitely give you some ideas on alternative ways of tapping into this information than through the existing Documentation Center interface.

Welcome

Welcome to the beginning of my rant blog on technology and computing.
I hope to post on things I find interesting out on the net as well as ideas and code snippets of my own.

I'll probably focus on my interests such as Java, Apple and applications like Mathematica