Spring; emptying the project queue

It must be spring, because it's warm enough for me to ride the Vespa again. Granted, at night I still need gloves and a biker jacket zipped all the way up, but I'll take what I can get.

Dejector is this ==><== close to done; tonight I just need to knock out a custom XML-node-equivalence function (xml.dom, oddly, does not provide one), and barring some daft bug I might not have noticed, the proof of concept will be complete.

That leaves me free to work on MVS, which expands to Meredith's Virtual Stewart. You may have heard of Justice Potter Stewart, who wrote in his concurring opinion on the Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio,

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

(Emphasis mine.) The problem of "I know it when I see it" is a tough one in data mining; it's easy to give specific criteria for a decision, and just as easy for those criteria to be barking wrong. My adviser came up with an interesting SVM-based method for inducing a user preference function on tuples from a database; another one of his students, $collaborator2, is working on a front-end which will derive an SVM function from several rounds of user rankings; and my job is to write the C which will do all the heavy lifting for the ranking function inside the database (Postgres, in this case), rather than having to extract huge amounts of data in order to determine a few top-ranked entries. And, uh, extend the SQL grammar and all that good stuff too.

Hey, it's a pun and a historical reference all in one. You're supposed to laugh now.