Jan 30, 2007
The last few days have been intense, with not one be two releases.
We have first shipped Lokad Sales Forecasting v1.0 for ASP.Net, a stand-alone reporting library to be integrated in your favorite ASP.Net eCommerce application.
Then we have shipped Lokad OpenShell v1.0, a PowerShell snap-in that features CmdLets related to time-series forecasting. Lokad OpenShell aims to facilitate RAD (Rapid Application Development) approaches while integrating the Lokad technology.
Both products have been released under a BSD license.
Jan 29, 2007
Let say that you have an ASP.Net 2.0 web application running on top of MSSQL Server 2005. Guess what happen if you database transaction log get full? Well, you will get a large amount of weird side effects, most of them seeming totally unrelated to the saturation of the transaction log.
Among the problems that I have encountered
The web services of your website start to send totally misleading error messages like authentication failed.
Jan 7, 2007
I have been using AdWords for quite a time, having setup ad campaign both for PeopleWords.com (freelance translation marketplace) and for Lokad.com (business time-series forecasting). And, being both a AdWords consumer (yes I do click on ads) and an AdWords publisher, I must say it’s quite surprising to see a company weighting hundred billions of dollars, with a business so crippled with long-lasting intrinsic issues. Please note that this post is not a complaint against Google, they are quite good at what they are doing; my point is that the AdWords business model is really weak against adversarial behaviors.
Jan 5, 2007
Lokad is about time-series forecasting, but as simple as the time-series model may seem to be (after all a time-series is nothing more than a list of time-value pairs), there are several subtleties in the way to manage time-series. In this post, we will see how the Lokad time-series model distinguishes missing time-value pairs from empty time-value pairs. Since the topic is slightly complex, I would suggest, if you’re not familiar the Lokad technology, to have a look at our User Guide (in particular, the Forecasting tasks section).
Jan 3, 2007
In my previous post, I was reporting that BindingPoint.com was badly dysfunctional. Well, the problem has been solved, BindingPoint.com is no more. On their home page, they blame the market for being too slow to adopt Web Services. Well, I do agree that surprisingly the adoption of web services has been fairly slow; yet, you can’t blame the market for obvious bugs in your web application.
Also, Lokad.com (my company, which provides time-series forecasting web services) has been listed in eSigma.
Dec 11, 2006
Most Web Services directories have one thing in common: they are totally bugged at the point of being totally unusable. Indeed I have tried to submit the Lokad Forecasting Web Services to several directories. Namely:
BindingPoint.com: registration process crashes and the ASP.Net default exception page. WSIndex.org: can’t even login, gets a fatal cgi-bin error while trying. XMethod.com: website painfully designed, registration succeeds but submission crashes. Dmoz.org: “Submit URL” gets me to a page Service Temporarily Unavailable (it has been that way for the last 2 weeks) It’s almost unbelievable that so many top-ranked web sites (try web services directory on Google) are not even able to achieve something as simple as a registration process.
Dec 4, 2006
Although we have tried to make Lokad as simple and intuitive as possible, statistical forecasting is a counter-intuitive science with many traps. In this post, I am going to describe one of the most frequent mistakes that I have encountered within many companies. In a nutshell, it is wrong to make a sum of forecasted values. Since the problem is quite hard to grasp, let’s start with an example.
Let’s say that you have 3 shops; and that those 3 shops are selling coconuts.
Nov 30, 2006
I have finally released my latest project named Lokad.com. Lokad is about time-series forecasting, I believe that our approach is quite radically different from what the market was offering until now. Since Lokad has its own blog, my two posts about the Lokad release can be found here and here.
Nov 11, 2006
Source control management (SCM) is a technical matter as well as a good practice matter. Here is a small list of tips that I have found quite useful in practice.
A good commit is like a good paper:
It starts with an evocative title. Ok, there is no title in SCM but there are comments provided while committing. If your SCM comment is not clear, then how do you expect your co-workers to keep track of what you are doing?
Nov 8, 2006
I have just started to use the PowerShell a few days ago; and I am more and more impressed by the work that have been done by the MS folks. Yet, being a developer, I have the feeling that many aspects of PowerShell still need to be polished.
Too bad that there is no Visual Studio project templates for CmdLets. Providing an hello-world CmdLet with its associated SnapIn would really make the life of the developers easier, smoothing the learning curve.
