Month: July 2009

Another Firefox notetaking extension

I found that Evernote is not very suitable for me. Firstly, it has upload limit. Secondly, it cannot export to HTML through the website, unless we download and install the desktop application.

So, now I am trying Zotero. It cannot export to HTML, but it has the function to “generate” the HTML. Just like Google Notebook. And it also provide sync function to the Zotero server.

About the case: "Muslim Men Spying in Catholic Churches "

My friend sent me a URL. Then I read it. And I feel sad for what has happened.
There are several blogs related about this case

http://ksstanley.blogspot.com/2009/07/police-report-lodged.html
http://andrew4jc.blogspot.com/2009/07/sacrilege-profanation-of-eucharist-in.html
http://mucked-in-a-jam.blogspot.com/2009/07/al-islam-muslim-reporters-spying-in.html
http://mahaguru58.blogspot.com/2009/07/al-islam-undercover-operation-at.html

About this case, the followings are my personal opinions:

What is happened, is already happened. What we need to do, is to prevent this type of sacrilege happened again. Use the peaceful way. Do not perform flaming through Internet.

Besides that, is sacrilege happened every where? I am not sure. But we know, if we commit mortal sin, we should not receive Holy Communion. Do we commit mortal sins? We also need to look into ourselves.

Next, from blogger MahaGuru58,

They conclude in their article that the usage of such a word as ‘Allah’ in the Christian publications and prayer rituals can lead to some confusion amongst the Malays who might mistake such publications to be connected with Islam and cause problems for those with weak Aqeedah or just learning about the true faith of Al Islam.

We can read from Wikipedia about this. Is there any confusion?

Finally, non-Christians think that our teaching and faith is far away from theirs, even think that we are wrong. We also have this thinking about others. This is surely happened, that is why there are so many religious in this world. So, learn whatever Lord teaches us, love your enemies, pray for them. Only love our enemies, will make us different from others. And we need to know, Truth will win at the end.

Batch install hotfixes for Windows XP

Since Windows XP Service Pack 3 released, we might need to install the critical hotfixes ourselves. There are several ways to install hotfixes. We can search for “windows offline update” from internet.

But, I personally prefer go to The Software Patch, and download manually. Because I can download whatever I like. However, installing those hotfixes manually is troublesome. Then I wrote a batch file to install the hotfixes automatically. But I need to update the batch file whenever I download new hotfixes. Finally, I found a good solution.

I wrote a batch file as following:

if not exist c:\temp mkdir c:\temp
dir /o /b /s *.exe > c:\temp\temp.txt
for /f %%i in (c:\temp\temp.txt) do %%i /passive /norestart
del c:\temp\temp.txt

And put this batch file under the same directory with the hotfixes. Run it, everything okay.

I will explain the algorithm:
1) Make a directory “c:\temp”
2) Display all *.exe within the current directory. Assuming there are only hotfixes .exe, no other .exe files. And save the list of .exe to “c:\temp\temp.txt”
3) Read the “c:\temp\temp.txt”, for every line of the temp.txt is a hotfix .exe file, then run the .exe with the parameter “passive” and “norestart”, so that silent installation without restart is performed.
4) Finally, delete the “temp.txt”

Firefox 3.5 with some new addons

Just upgrade my web browser Firefox to version 3.5. Because it is 3.5, some extensions (addons) cannot be used. The Google Notebook extension cannot be used. This is a bad news for me. Because the development of Google Notebook is stopped. Thus, no more Google Notebook extension for Firefox 3.5.

Google Notebook is very nice for note-taking. Because, we do not need to bookmark everything because of part of the page we like. Sometimes when we are surfing net, we might like some quotes. Using Google Notebook, we can highlight the quotes, and save it.

Since there is no more Google Notebook for Firefox 3.5, then I need to find a replacement. Firstly, I tried UberNote. But the extension caused some of the toolbar buttons missing, especially Uppity, FlashBlock, AdBlock Plus, Download Helper, etc.

So, I tried another extension, that is Evernote. It is not bad. It replaces the tasks of Google Notebook for me currently. However, I still have not yet find out how to export the notes in Evernote.

Besides that, Sage-Too is also no more support for Firefox 3.5. So, to read the news feed, I tried Brief. So, this is also a good replacement.

Human learning and machine learning

One day, my junior asked me, how to improve programming skill. Then I told her, only practicing a lot and a lot. Then, I told her about how can we learn like machine learning.

Just like machine learning (such as Artificial Neural Network), we need a lot of training samples. More samples will produce better result. So, as we learn, we also need to have a lot of samples. Then, the learning process need to be repeated. After enough learning, a person can surely categorise the new sample. Because, even a machine can do so. For example, an expert is able to appraise the fake painting and the real painting. This is because he or she has many experiences.

This makes me aware that, there are 3 points about learning. Firstly, the talent, that is the innate perception of a person. Similarly, for the machine learning, the innate perception is the learning algorithm, for ANN, it will be the network topology. Thus, different person has different talent; different learning algorithm can solve different type of problem.

Secondly, the training samples of machine learning. For the human, it is the experiences. The more experiences will produce better learning.

Thirdly, the learning output of the machine learning. For ANN, it will be the weights (connections) output. Similarly, the learning output is the knowledge. One can get the knowledge of the other person, but cannot get the experience, because he or she doesn’t have the training samples.

Therefore, when you have a talent, and apply your talent in a correct field. The experiences you gathered will become the knowledge of your own. Though you can pass your knowledge to someone else, unless he or she has same talent as yours, he or she cannot understand the knowledge. If someone has the same talent as yours, unless he or she experiences what you experienced, he or she cannot produce the knowledge like yours.

However, human learns better than machine, because human can learn how to learn.