Netflix prize must be doing well, as there are now other companies willing to tap into web’s researchers with deep knowledge of computational techniques. The latest company is Spock, a company so new that you have to read 3rd party sites to figure out exactly what they do. Even to use it, one has to signup for the account. Basically, Spock is about the search with the strong focus on the people mentions.

Tonight (April 12th, 2007) is Yuri’s night, a celebration of first manned space flight done by Yuri Gagarin, the russian cosmonaut. It is 46th anniversary of the original 1961 event. I had missed the party last year, but - being Russian and a geek - I am certainly making it this year. There are parties all over the world (124 parties in 35 countries), including where I live currently. As an aside, I just realised that Russian drinking toast is ‘Поехали’ (Let’s go), which is exactly what Gagarin said on launch.

My VOIP phone company (Lingo) has just announced that they are now on MySpace. I have heard of car companies doing that, but it feels rather weird when a utility company wants to do the same. I can see two reasons they could be doing that: They are not doing too well and are getting desperate. They used to offer $25 as a referral fee and remind of it every 6 months or so.

UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) project has recently transitioned from IBM to the Apache incubator. This is only for the open source part, the commercial part is - and will stay - with IBM. I have last written about UIMA a very long time ago (1, 2) , so I decided to give it another look. It is still as complicated as ever and it still takes a couple of hours of browsing documentation before one can run a basic example.

I am a member-at-large of SCA - Society for Creative Anachronism. Due to various reasons I was not able to go to any events for nearly two years now. Today, I had a chance to go to a feast and it reminded me the power of SCA. I did not have any of my garb or feasting gear, but friends were more than happy to lend it to me. Once I got to the event, many of other friends and acquaintances were happy to see me, chat and dance with me.