• Systems Approach to Studying Animal Sociality: Individual Position versus Group Organization in Dynamic Social Network Models
  

Feliz Natal

Finally seems that the worlds politicians are changing a bit and learning to live with Wikileaks:

“Russia has suggested that Julian Assange should be awarded the Nobel peace prize, in an unexpected show of support from Moscow for the jailed WikiLeaks founder.”In The Guardian

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva defended Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks.org website that published more than 250,000 of U.S. diplomatic cables sent to or from embassies around the world.Lula, a former union leader, said Assange did less harm than the classified documents’ authors, and offered his “solidarity” with the jailed Australian national.In Bloomberg

I imagine we wont see CIA Land Sweden in this list anytime soon…

Python is slow. There I’ve said it… I love Python but sometimes I hate it because of it’s speed. In this cases usually I code in C. But sometimes I’d just love call gcc on a python script like:

$ gcc -O3 somethingInPython.py

and get a powerful fast code…

here’s a list of things I’m considering to improve the speed of my python scripts:

• Write better code Lot’s of times it’s just a matter of correct algorithms and correct data structures…
• psyco It’s an old (3yrs, PyPy is the successor and is faster), JIT (just in time compiler) with lot’s of memory overhead, but reliable and very easy to add to your project. Two lines with: import psyco psyco.full() can do wonders to your codes’ speed. I like it  because it’s easy to install and run (I Like simple things).
• unladen-swallow This is a faster implementation of Python. The project is google sponsored and a branch of CPython. Thanks to Jorge Tavares to point me to this one in twitter.
• PyPy “Rumors have it that the secret goal of PyPy is being faster-than-C which is nonsense, isn’t it?”
• Pyrex This is a language that allows  you want to bring C data types to Python.
• Cython Based on Pyrex, it’s a language to write C extensions to get the most out of your Python Programs…
• Shed Skin Want C++ instead of C? Shed Skin allows you to compile Python Code (a restricted strong typed subset) to C++
• Learn Haskell or Erlang This is just a provocation has I’m currently enamored with Haskell (still learning, still learning) and maybe will try to look at Erlang for its concurrent capabilities (I teach Concurrent Programming after all). In Haskell, compiled code is fast, not as fast as C, but fast enough to beat many languages. The functional language just turns your head inside out with some constructions but in the end I do like it a lot. And it’s useful.

If I’m forgetting something please add it to the comments. I’ll update this with new comments as I’m finding new stuff and I’ll come back to this when I’ve opted for one solution. I’m still in the shopping phase now.

If you take a look at the graph of Google Trends for a search on the word “Portugal” you’ll see that there are peaks every couple of years.

Portugal in Google Trends

The peaks just pop in the middle of the year… what is this all about? Well Obviously it is the Soccer championships that Portugal participates in. Euro 2004, World Cup 2006, Euro 2008 and World Cup 2010 in South Africa. (more…)

Reading the NYT (It’s recurrent read here, NYT and the Guardian) I’ve came across a news about Laptopistan, the land of laptops, where people go to work and where the coffee shop if mainly filled with macintoshes. The read is nice and if your some of a computer geek you’ll read it, probably wanting for an expresso.