Saturday, May 26, 2007

Enjoy Beryl

I still couldn't get the Vista release ... The emphasis on the visualization from its earlier versions pushed me for the alternatives. Beryl as a desktop manager (with support of different window managers) was a good candidate. I installed it (although it was a little bit problematic because of my vga card) and I enjoy the wonderful OpenGL effects.

Don't wait, use it ...

http://www.beryl-project.org/

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Tendencies

What I learned nowadays (in a really abstract/general manner) :

Software agents paradigm is regarded as the future computing paradigm for software development. The frontrunners of this paradigm mainly argue to OOP and emphasize its lackness of expressibility on contemporary requirements. That is the current discussion. There is the notion of artifact in agent oriented computing which has its computational capabilities (internal and external behaviours). This notion opens so many ways of research/idea directions to be researched. So we (will) hear both "artifact" and the "context" more often in this field.

Information Retrieval
An important observation is the absence of foundation (founding theories, models etc.) in IR.
Nutch (as crawler, "the software bundle of Nutch already includes Lucene internally", and search engine interface) and Lucene (indexer). Nutch works with Tomcat. You crawl the (intranet) web sites with Nutch and index them for retrieval.
On the other hand, you can create your own customized search engine with Google (Google Customized Search Engine).


Next --> Trust Management

Stay tuned...

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Feelings and Being Busy

Do we have feelings when we are busy? Are they the pushing force to do something or we don't feel when we are really busy?

I force myself for the blog: I must write, I must write :). But I am so busy that my agenda changes so often. So I forget to text up my feelings at that time and because of agenda change, my feelings are out of date when I have time to write.
Hopefully, I had time to write these :).

This is what I feel now...

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Chronological/Geographical View to Important Aspects/Events

You can have a chronological and yet geographical view to Religion, Middle East and some other important events/aspects from:
http://www.mapsofwar.com/maps.html

This site is a well-prepared, informative site with good visualizations.

Back to work ...

Thursday, March 8, 2007

University Rankings

I believe that the below information is really useful for prospective students searching master or phd studies/schools

1) First Anglosaxon country universities rankings as they are doing education as a business (earn money) and work more profesionally:
-US universities are ranked on the USNews
US News conducts periodical research on rankings and publishes the results annually on http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/t1natudoc_brief.php
-UK University Rankings on
http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings/
You can also find special subject rankings on this web site (such as computer science ranking etc.)

2) German university Rankings can be found on:
http://www.daad.de/deutschland/hochschulen/hochschulranking/06543.en.html
You can also use this web site to customize the search criteria

3) International university ranking from China:
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm
This ranking is making a good progress on the acceptance and respect.

4) Rankings according to the university web sites (and some other criteria):
http://www.webometrics.info/


That is all for now.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Better ...

Ideas imposed to us...

After a chat with one of my friends, I dived into the meaning of "better". Better, better, better something is better, that is better etc. The word itself is really /comparative/\relative/ to something. Simply the relation (I call it a relation) better is :
Better(A,B) = {A and B are the elements of the same domain say SomeExistence, A is preferred to B}

or

Better(A,B) = {A and B are the elements of the same domain say SomeExistence, B is worse than A}

or
...

You can increase the alternative definitions. A simple look to the above definitions reveal some other relations "preferred" and "worse". These relations can be defined by some other relations which breed new relations to be defined. At the end, there should be a base relation that is, in my humble opinion, an assumption. So do we know is this assumption is truely selected? What if our assumption is wrong? Then all things we say better are actually were worse?

At this point, human dimension of "better" comes up to my mind. A good point... If I say something is better for me, is this true for all people? No, some can say yes, some others say no, and there are abstainers (asking us why we called them :)). So the generalization of this dimension (human) constitutes the relativity property of the "better". Briefly, one better is worse for someone, or it's not preferred.

So, please tell me what is better...?

To be continued...

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Bios of Von Neumann, Einstein and Kurt Godel

After watching the movie John Nash, I found myself searching the biographies of Von Neumann, Kurt Godel and Einstein from wikipedia. I learned some important facts that I didn't know. I had some info about Einstein but not that much about Von Neumann.

First of all Von Neumann's origin is mathematics and physics (I didn't know) while Einstein's is physics (I knew :)). Although Von Neumann is well-known with his "computer architecture" in the computer literacy, he has done really important contributions in physics (especially nuclear physics --> hydrogen bomb), economics and mathematics (Game theory).

They are three of the four people invited to Princeton. Einstein was born earlier than Von Neumann who is around the same age with Godel. Von Neumann and Einstein were born to Jewish families, Kurt Godel lived in the circles of Jewish people. I think that's why they all moved to the US because of German pressure. They all grew up in German-origin countries (Germany, Hungary-Austria).

Then I could conclude that, World War II worked for the US :)... But I would say the president of US at that time (transferring these guys to the US) is a really brilliant guy predicting the future.

Name                      Contributed to
Von Neumann --> Physics, Computer Science, Mathematics,
                                Economics (ohh man this guy is great)
Einstein            --> Mathematics, Physics
Kurt Godel       --> Logic, Mathematics


There are lots of things to learn from these biographies : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del

Stay tuned...