MySQL

After installing mysql with synaptic package manger

Goto the menu Applications/Programming/MySQL Administrator
hostname: localhost
username: root
password: your password

If you are not using mysql server all the time you may want to remove it from the services and start it manually by System/Administration/Services

Taste

Taste version 1.7.1 was used

To create database named taste -- click on Catalogs and then under Schemata right click and select create schema "taste"

Then use MySQL Query Browswer and follow the instructions to create table at http://taste.sourceforge.net/javadoc/com/planetj/taste/impl/model/jdbc/M...

Loading MovieLens Data

LOAD DATA INFILE 'ratings.dat' INTO TABLE taste_preferences FIELDS TERMINATED BY '::';

# for 1 million

LOAD DATA INFILE '/home/neil/tmp/u.data' INTO TABLE taste_preferences FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t';

# for 100K

Notes:

Some say that recommendation technology represents the new paradigm of search: interesting items find the user instead of the user explicitly searching for them. In an article published in CNN Money, entitled “The race to create a 'smart' Google”, Fortune magazine writer Jeffrey M. O'Brien, writes:

Various Issues

Issue 1

WARNING: You are not using ConnectionPoolDataSource. Make sure your DataSource pools connections to the database itself, or database performance will be severely reduced.
 

FIX: ConnectionPoolDataSource dataSource = new MysqlConnectionPoolDataSource();

I am trying to get an applet working that makes a URL Connection.  I have run into quite a few problems.  Here is some ways of solving them.

A nice guide from Sun: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/security/toolsign/index.html

Signing Applet Jar

http://yellowcat1.free.fr/keytool_iui.html

A very nice GUI tool; saved me a lot of time.

http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40310

This is a quick guide for buying a mid level laptop (based on recommendations given to one of my friends recently). 
For ultra portable perhaps asus eee pc is a clear leader (for now) http://kakaku.com/item/00200916376/

A very nice site for comparing the prices is http://kakaku.com/sku/pricemenu/winn.htm
Note: sometimes you can get quite a bit better deal by clicking on one of the advertisements on the page.

I had the followoing error while trying to install JGR (included bellow).This problem is described in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=424921Although the suggestions listed there did not work for me.Here what did work:

This is my blog entry and so on....