Tokens — Page 19

I wonder what Opera Software will be launching on June 16th. There are some clues in the web page source code and it seems to be updated periodically. The first clue in the code is inside the description meta tag:

<meta name="description" content="The Web is your browser. Discover how fast and fun the Web can be." />

And in the comments:

<!--
We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer.
Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was to connect them together. To share things.
But as these little networks grew, some computers gained more power than the rest and called themselves servers ...
-->

The description tag makes me think of a new Opera widget/extension/customization framework with a supporting cloud service (notice the cloud image on the page) that enables an easier and more comfortable web browsing. I certainly don’t know what the features could be, so this idea is just a shot at a wide possibility in this area.

The embedded HTML comments makes me think of P2P browsing of some sort. Can Opera be preparing to roll out a new technology that would be blurring the line between web browsers (ie. the clients) and the web servers? P2P is not the exact wording I’m looking for, I’m looking for something which doesn’t have a name yet, much like the Google Wave technology unveiled at the I/O conference.

Whatever it is, we’ll have to wait until the 16th for sure. I hope it lives up to its promise :)

Global Voices Online sitesinde Balkanlar ve Katibim şarkısı ile ilgili bir yazıyla karşılaştım. Bulgar yönetmen Adela Peeva İstanbul’da arkadaşlarıyla (bir Makedon, Sırp, Yunan ve Türk) yemek yerken arkadaşlarından her biri çalan şarkının kendi ülkesine ait olduğunu iddia etmiş. Bu olay üzerine belgesel çekme düşüncesi yerleşiyor ve kamerasıyla Yunanistan, Arnavutluk, Bosna Hersek, Makedonya, Sırbistan ve Bulgaristan’a giderek şarkıyı takip ediyor.

“Katibim” şarkısı benim de çok sevdiğim şarkılardan birisi ve bu şarkının tüm bu Balkan ülkelerinde söylendiğini bilmiyordum. Belgeselden anlaşıldığına göre bunu o ülkelerde yaşayan pek çok insan da bilmiyormuş. Her ülkede melodi aynı kalsa da şarkının sözlerini değiştirmişler. Şarkıyı hangi milletin hangisinden aldığını bilmiyorum ve açıkçası bunun çok da önemi yok. Çok güzel bir şarkı ve kültürlerin nasıl birbirlerinden etkilendiklerini çok güzel bir şekilde ortaya koyuyor. Zamanınız varsa ve özellikle bu şarkıyı seviyorsanız belgeseli izlemenizi öneririm, şarkı farklı ülkelerde farklı sözlerle her çalındığında yüzümde bir gülümseme oluştu.

</embed>

I had listened to this song before many times but I didn’t think it was any special. This morning, while running it came up again in my mp3 player and it has kept with me ever since. I just can’t stop muttering the melody and lyrics :)

Here is the song and the lyrics to captivate you as well. Enjoy!



cannonball

there’s still a little bit of your taste in my mouth
there’s still a little bit of you laced with my doubt
it’s still a little hard to say what’s going on
there’s still a little bit of your ghost your witness
there’s still a little piece of your face i haven’t kissed
you step a little closer to me
still i can’t see what’s going on
stones taught me to fly
love taught me to lie
life taught me to die
so it’s not hard to fall
when you float like a cannonball
there’s still a little bit of your song in my ear
there’s still a little bit of your words i long to hear
you step a little closer each day
so close that i can’t see what’s going on
stones taught me to fly
love taught me to lie
life taught me to die
so it’s not hard to fall
when you float like a cannon
stones taught me to fly
love taught me to cry
so come on courage
teach me to be shy
‘cause it’s not hard to fall
and i don’t want to scare her
it’s not hard to fall
and i don’t wanna lose
it’s not hard to grow
when you know that you just don’t know

Today I was trying to install a PHP module but I kept getting “no space left” errors. This was interesting because my disks were not full in terms of both space and the number of inodes as evidenced by “df -k” and “df -i” commands. Then I found out that file system errors might be a cause for this. I didn’t want to check mounted disks using fsck program so I used this page as a reference to easily check the file system on the next boot simply by creating a forcefsck file inside the root directory. After the file system check, I can confirm that the error went away.

I suppose file system checking should be one of the first things one should check in such a irregularity.

What do all these newly unveiled search engines Powerset, Yahoo! Correlator and Wolfram Alpha have in common? Well aside from touting themselves as google-killer semantic search engines, they all rely on Wikipedia for most (if not all) of their information. Semantic Web is a hard thing, mostly because it hasn’t caught up with everyone and most of the data out on the wild are not annotated, that is they are not structured and in an easy to use format. To save the day, screen scraping and Natural Language Processing comes to rescue. Wikipedia on the other hand is a huge resource, and with “infoboxes” and other templates in articles (like native of cities, geodata, categories etc.) it seems to be a relatively easy target to mine (put its openness as an advantage also). This is the reason for the proliferation of web sites that try to make use of wikipedia in a more machine learning oriented way.

Apart from all the buzz around commercial applications like Powerset et al., there is an open source project called DBpedia which has been really successful in providing the infrastructure needed for such applications. If you want to learn more about DBpedia and its promises, I suggest you watch their excellent presentation made just a month ago, provided by videolectures. I am really excited about all the stuff that can be done with this kind of leverage. I am already thinking about using DBpedia in my current project. It seems that semantic web and screen scraping & NLP are moving to a convergence. I wonder how things will go in the next few years.