Mine some knowledge from your data with Eureqa

Monday, December 14, 2009, 9:04 PM
Thoughts by John (Article #254)

Eureqa is the type of clever tool that would not have been possible, on a mass scale, a decade ago. Built by the good people at Cornell's Computation Synthesis Laboratory, Eureqa is a functional desktop solution for mining data set to discover equations.

What does that have to do with web design?

Well, if you're in the CSS crowd, nothing. The CSS crowd can stop reading at his point and resuming wasting their time reading articles about CSS on Digg.

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If you're in the MySQL crowd, Eureqa can be a serious turn-on. The truth is, we as a society are outputting more data every day than all of humanity did a few decades ago. It's a lot of data, and in many cases, not a lot of answers.

It will be a while before processing power approaches the point where Eureqa can be integrated into a typical web server. It's not an FFMPEG-type game changer just yet.

But, it is a huge first step toward taking some of that data and putting it to use.

The next next big revolution (two nexts, because it's a little ways away) is on demand crunching of data. We're seeing services like Amazon cloud computing bring enterprise-class numbers crunching down to reasonable costs for good projects that demand it. It's not hard to picture in five to ten years a point where we can expect to dump a numbers crunching task worthy of Eureqa into a web server and see results within a few second.

In the near term, I am hoping to take a few of my favorite numbers sets I've always wanted to crunch and build them into a website. Look for more soon.

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Welcome!

Wonder where to start with your web design business?

This blog follows along with my efforts to build and grow a website design business, Pro Content and Design.

The goal of this blog is to fill in blanks that may be empty as you get your business rolling.

This blog, particularly the source code section, is not intended for beginners. If you are not comfortable with databases, Ajax, DOM objects and other advanced methods, I strongly suggest you go take a look over at W3 Schools before even reading -- let alone tinkering with -- any of the code here.

I hope this blog has some value to web designers as they attempt to get their businesses going.

Good luck, and happy reading.

Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design