Ajit K

Freebase is live and a lot of people are talking about it! The people and the concept behind this are (supposed to be) really cool. Rich Skrenta talks about the people behind it:

Danny Hillis is a computing legend, having founded a company to produce the Connection Machine, one of the first massively parallel computers and a very slick piece of work. John Giannandrea (”jg”) was a Netscape founder, and recently CTO of Tellme, which built a massive voice-recognizing telco application. He runs a tier-1 colocation business as a side hobby to his day jobs. Not just vision here but deep technical implementation experience.

Orielly has been talking about it too, though his response is more cautious.

Seems to be another step towards the realization of Web 3.0? After UGC (user generated content), time to get real meaning out of the web by interlinking information.

Its so cool. I was thinking of the same feature as a must have! To build a WYSIWYG for math equations would be a great and boost for Maths on Web… and Wordpress seems to have done it! Wow! Read more at Wordpress.com

http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/02/17/math-for-the-masses/

http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/02/18/can-i-put-math-or-equations-in-my-posts/

I have been facing this problem and googled for a solution. The error that I was getting is:

Building native extensions. This could take a while…
ERROR: While executing gem … (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError)
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

ruby extconf.rb install sqlite3-ruby
extconf.rb:1:in `require’: no such file to load — mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:1

After some fight I came a blog post suggesting to install the dev package for ruby.

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

And that I did and viola… everything worked fine. The problem was because mkmf isn’t installed by default! So, installing the dev package solves the problem

A few references that may help in Ruby on Rails setup:

http://daniel.lorch.cc/docs/rails_install_debian/
http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?thread_id=4161&forum_id=4050

A nice step-by-step tutorial about setting up PostgreSQL on Ubuntu.

If the Postgre hasn’t already been installed, install it using the command line or the basic add/remove utility in Ubuntu.

Using command-line:
Installing Postgre and pgAdmin:

• sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.2
• sudo apt-get install pgadmin3 pgadmin3-data

Changing the default password (postgres):

• sudo su postgres -c psql template1
  template1=# ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD ‘<enter your password>’;
  template1=# \q

To access the pgAdmin from the program menu, add a link for the menus:

• sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/pgadmin3.desktop

[Desktop Entry] Comment= PostgreSQL Administrator III
Name=pgAdmin III
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=pgadmin3
Terminal=false
Comment[en_GB]=PostgreSQL Administrator III
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/pgadmin3.xpm
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;Application;Database;System;
Name[en_GB]=pgAdmin III

If the entry exists (if installed using add/remove utility), don’t need to anything.

For more options, e.g. enable access from a local network, read more at hocuspokus.us.

Usually, online learning is supposed to follow a cookbook approach. But, the way we learn things are still being guided by old methods that we have used to follow. For example, copying the books we have created ebooks. But how effective are ebooks as a tool for learning, other than the ease of sharing (*downloading*) has it changed anything significantly. I don’t think so. It hasn’t changed the way we learn things. Rather, it is grossly undermining the computing power that we have.

This definitely has opened up great many options for us to improve. Current development in the suite of online word-processing applications is a step forward and will aid in its growth (even though the current aim is to cater to office applications). The potential of a collective book (wiki books?) can’t be underestimated. There can be various approach that can be followed for the development purpose. Such a creation will have to consider various factor such as:

• Flexibility of content
• Contribution and moderation
• Ability to merge or branch multiple versions ~ Editions
• Portability: The content may be downloaded.
• Preserving the original and trusted content.
• Innovation and accommodation of user needs

There could be many features that one may need to incorporate. Though, one must be prepared to be flexible and tend to user needs. And we need to think and start implementing.

Hmm… need to think clearly. This seems to be a nice idea and am sure many people must have started working on this technology. Lets see.

Food for thought:

Why is PDF format so popular? Is it because it is portable or is it because it preserves the original content or something else?