Daily Bytes

Deductive Databases

href="http://www.andrerestivo.com/files/deductivedb.pdf">Paper.
Abstract:

Logic programming has proven its merits in a variety of
application areas including diagnostic expert systems, natural
language processing and agent-based control systems. Prolog, as a
logic programming language, has lots of advantages over more
conventional procedural ones but it also has some drawbacks.
Performance is the main problem this type of languages face. On the
other hand Relational Databases are all about performance and
surprisingly have lots of similarities with logic programming
languages. Joining together this two fields resulted in a new one
that we call Deductive Databases and that is what we’ll discuss in
this article.

Middle Earth Secret Diaries

The secret diaries, or should I call them weblogs, of the most
important characters of The LOTR. From Gandalf’s Diary:

Day Twelve: Went to Saruman for advice about Ring but
he had become evil. Nobody tells me anything. Apparently there was
a memo. Radagast the Brown probably stealing paper out of my inbox
again.

From href="http://diaries.diagon.org/">diaries.diagon.org.

PHPEclipse Home Page

Sergio href="http://blog.portugalmail.pt/K/archive/000227.html#000227">just
discovered how far the Eclipse revolution is going on the IDE
world. It was a long time since I last visited the Eclipse plugin
page. Some of my favourite are still looking good like href="http://www.eclipseuml.com/">Omondo and I found an
interesting one: a PHP
Open source plugin for eclipse.

From href="http://phpeclipse.sourceforge.net/">phpeclipse.sourceforge.net.

Ducky’s Laws of E-mail

Found this interesting set of e-mail laws in a comment to a Mitch
Kapor entry on his weblog.

DUCKY’S LAWS OF EMAIL

1. People are more efficient when related messages are grouped
together and the groups are in rough priority order.

2. People want to be able to see all their “to-do” messages –
ones that they need to read, respond to, or act upon — easily.

3 (or maybe 2b). When a message has no more pending actions,
people want to remove it from their list of “to-do” messages.

4. People want to execute actions with one or fewer clicks.

5. Old messages are a valuable resource.

6. The faster and better a Search tool is, the less important it
is to file messaages.

7. Fuzzy-logic or “scoring” filters are much more accurate than
the “sudden death” filters that most email clients now have.

8. Most people won’t customize their own setup, but are usually
willing to import customizations that other people have made.

9. Messages that are to you and only you are usually more
important than messages where you’re one of many recipients.

10. Some people (e.g. customer service reps) answer the same
questions over and over, but computers are not quite smart enough
to be able to figure out which response is appropriate.

From href="http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/000095.html">blogs.osafoundation.org.

XPde :: XP-like desktop environment

These guys are trying to mimic the XP interface on Linux. I’m
really not into copying stuff from the Microsoft world specially
when I much prefer my WindowMaker interface over any MS Windows
one. But I must agree that this project can help some reluctant
Windows users to try some of the *nix flavour. Who know maybe they
will even try some real
window managers once they got the hang of it.

From www.xpde.com.

eluminx

For people who like to work in the dark, like me, and keep losing
their keyboard.

From href="http://www.eluminx.com/product.asp">www.eluminx.com.

Signal Booster

Yeah! No more having to work in the most strange positions to get
wireless net on my laptop

From href="http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=33&scid=38&prid=478">
www.linksys.com.

Courts online

Portuguese people can now watch on the internet as their legal
processes slowly move through the judicial system. It should be
really fun to check a process, everyday, for 5 long years.

From href="http://www.tribunaisnet.mj.pt/distrib/">www.tribunaisnet.mj.pt.

The Two Towers

With The Two Towers Peter Jackson has shown, once again, that he is
the right person to recreate Tolkien books on the big screen. The
film isn’t perfect, far from it, it even has some flaws that I
really can’t understand:

What I don’t condone is Peter Jackson taking perfectly
good plot lines and characters and, as far as I can see, making
them worse on purpose. Faramir, the noble and kind brother of
Boromir, has been turned into a carbon copy of his brother just to
delay the coming of Shelob, when the Frodo/Sam sequence could just
as easily have ended with Faramir pointing them in the right
direction to Cirith Ungol and sending them on their way. Gimli and
Gollum were transformed from a grim and doughty warrior and a
tortured soul, respectively, into comic relief that the movie
wouldn’t need if Tolkien’s comedic lines were kept intact. Eomer
was banished from Rohan just so it could be he, rather than
Erkenbrand and the Huorns, who shows up and saves the day, which
makes the situation less confusing for non-book readers but is
sheer horror for Tolkien purists. If I wanted to keep on listing
specific changes I could go on all day, but suffice it to say that
Peter Jackson seems to have forgotten that this is not his story to
tell. The phrase “based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien” should be
preceded by the word “loosely” or vaguely”. Hopefully Return of the
King will put the storyline back on track. href="http://www.movie-source.com/l/lordoftherings2.shtml">[link].

There are some modifications that I can understand like removing
Tom Bombadil to cut on the film length. What I don’t understand are
the changes that completely change the spirit of the story and
don’t add anything to the film.

From .

Sniffing for Features

hjref="http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1202b.shtml#kottkemustbestopped">
Jeffrey Zeldman refered to this nice article at href="http://webstandards.org/">WaSP explaining how to sniff
for browser features instead of browser signatures. This is
something that got me thinking sometime ago some time ago as href="http://www.criticalsoftware.com/">I saw people worrying
with backward compatibility and not with forward compatibility.

From href="http://webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/tips.html">webstandards.org.