Today I hacked more on the blog organization and layout; fighting with GitHub CNAMEs was harder than I expected it to be. Eventually I settled on creating a sub-project for the blog as hosting it in my personal dhalperi/dhalperi.github.io repository affected the URLs for other projects like the CSI Tool.

Met with Jevin West and Sandra Anderson to talk about Sandra’s work on analyzing citation networks with Myria. Sandra is a rising sophomore at Cornell, of undecided major but spectacular in both CS and Math. She started 7 weeks ago with no prior experience “thinking like a database”, and in that time she has contributed lots of interesting ideas, independently re-derived much of the existing database wisdom about how to efficiently solve problems like transitive closure, and written some of the most complicated, iterative MyriaL programs to date. There will be a follow-up post on Sandra’s work!

More eScience steering committee action. We had our third session with the short-term evaluation team, which seems to be going great. So far, Veronica has managed to coerce 20+ fiercely independent minds to work together on the steps in our five-year vision for the project and to establish key evaluations. I need to learn more about the process and goals of evaluation—-I’m having a hard time following along/understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing, but I can see amazing outputs from this process already!

Some SQLShare planning and support. Seems like we’re getting closer to needing/merging the rewrite of the Python client I started a year ago.