Facebook buys start-up Parakey

From the FT, Facebook buys start-up Parakey.
what is Parakey?
Parakey is a startup launched by Blake Ross. Blake Ross helped launch Firefox at the age of 15. A nice interview to Ross was in IEEE spectrum, The Firefox Kid.
The aim of Parakey is to make browsing the web and your file system seamless, a kind of Web OS. It will be interesting to see how Parakey will evolve with Facebook.

Software Performance Assessments

Performance is an important quality of a software. In my recent paper, just accepted for publication in the Journal of Systems and Software  Elsevier, I discuss the use of software performance assessments in the context of software product family architectures and real-time embedded systems.

The paper is: Software performance tuning of software product family architectures: two case studies in the real-time embedded systems domain
Abstract: Software performance is an important non-functional quality attribute and software performance evaluation is an essential activity in the software development process.
Especially in embedded real-time systems, software design and evaluation are driven by the needs to optimize the limited resources, to respect time deadlines and, at the same time, to produce the best experience for end-users.
Software product family architectures add additional requirements to the evaluation process.
In this case, the evaluation includes the analysis of the optimizations and tradeoffs for the whole products in the family.
Performance evaluation of software product family architectures requires knowledge and a clear understanding of different domains: software architecture assessments, software performance and software product family architecture.
We have used a scenario-driven approach to evaluate performance and dynamic memory management efficiency in one Nokia software product family architecture. In this paper we present two case studies. Furthermore, we discuss the implications and tradeoffs of software performance against evolvability and maintenability in software product family architectures.

Automatically tagging documents using search engine keywords

People write keywords or sentences in a search engine and retrieve a set of documents related to that query. The search engine finds the best match between the keywords and the document.

Using the inverse look-up, we can discover that a certain document has been found using the specific search terms. I use this technique to automatically tag my research papers. The tags are the keywords people have used to download that specific paper. You can check the example in the research section of my home page.

And I have recently found a paper on the subject:
Learn from Web Search Logs to Organize Search Results that will be presented by Xuanhui Wang and ChengXiang Zhai at the upcoming SIGIR 2007 conference.
Thanks to Greg Linden Blog