Google Indexes TTL

I really would like to know what is the time to live (TTL) of Google indexes. This blog of me changed design and back end in July (OK, end of July). We are in the beginning of February. Being a nice boy, this counts as six months.

And, after six months, I still have lots of lots of missed hits to posts that were published in the old engine and that are, yet, live in Google servers. What I need to do to make Google update their indexes and remove all this crap from there?

American Pie Presents: The Book Of Love

Sunday afternoon, needing to relax, without will to work, without the will to do anything, without the patience for a real movie, probably the time to some teenage sex-related comedy. No need for big brain work, no need to take too much attention to the story. Just relax, smile, laugh, watch some girls, and have fun.

This was what I thought when choosing the movie and I must say it fulfilled the mission. The story isn’t great nor new. But there are some nice laughs.

I just have a complain: it seems that the Book of Love doesn’t work with me

Fast and Furious – 2009

Finally I watched the latest Fast and Furious. First, lets resume the movie: cars, speed, violence, and nice girls. Talking of which, let me complain already. How is it possible that Michelle Rodriguez character dies in the first minutes? (sorry for the spoilers, but this is of significance for the story). Fortunately enough Jordana doesn’t.

About the movie, I think the first minutes are the best. The same minutes that went to the trailer. They are the best. The remaining movie has action, has speed, has girls, but not comparable to the first minutes of action.

I am not sure if the fifth will ever show up. But hope a follow up of the latest Transporter, or then, any other new movie with speed gets in the cinema. Torque followup would be good enough, as well.

Zuma – iPod Game

Zuma is the second game I buy for my iPod Classic 5th Generation. The first one was a car simulator. Let me say it is crap. Great it was just 5 Euros.

In that occasion I saw the Zuma screenshot on iTunes Store and noticed it might be a nice game, as the type of game is very adequate to the iPod touch wheel.

After about one year I decided to buy it. The game is pretty nice and playable. I just have two complains. First, the music. It is always the same. I think it repeats every five seconds or so. Yeah, I know I can make my iPod musics to play during the game, but the music could be better anyway.

My second complain is regarding efficiency. The developers of the game know exactly the hardware where the game will run, but the game still have problems running there. Sometimes you notice glitches in the music, and more rarely, on the game itself.

DBLP Bibliography Database and Scientific Publications in Portugal

In Portugal, Universities are rating researchers accordingly with their publications being or not cited on Internet articles databases like DBLP or ISI Web of Knowledge. Basically, if your article is not cited anywhere, then your article is class C. If it is cited in DBLP, it is class B. Finally, if it is present in ISI Web of Knowledge, it is classified as class A.

That is, if you can persuade DBLP author to publish the information about a conference or a journal, you can get your article to be rated B. Then, if a commercial company includes your article (that is, ISI Web of Knowledge), then you can get a class A article.

I wonder how a single guy (Michael Ley is doing a great job, that is not the problem) can find out if a journal is good or not for all areas. I do not know what Michael researches about, but I do not agree he can discern what conferences or journals are good for Parallel Computation, Natural Language Processing, Bio-Informatics, Artificial Intelligence, etc, etc.

Also, I wonder why there is a journal with a single issued published in DBLP, and without all articles listed. Yes, there is a journal that has more than thirty issues. Only one is in DBLP. And that one is not complete. Just half the articles are listed.

Yes, I tried a couple of times (in fact, more than four times) to send the full information about that journal and offered myself to add the BibTeX entry for all journal issues. Never ever got an answer.

The same happened when I sent (twice) the index for a journal on Natural Language Processing for the Iberian Languages. No answer at all. Is it because it is  bad journal? Probably. But I do not think my mails where read at all.

I can do similar comments about ISI Web of Knowledge. Why is a company maintaining this index? Why is this index paid? If a journal or conference pay for its inclusion, do you think the company will reply that it does not have enough quality to be listed?

More questions can be made. Check the number of conferences or journals on computer architecture. Then, check the number of conferences or journals in Natural Language Processing. Then, check the number of indexed conferences or journals in these areas. Yes, it is easier to be a GOOD researcher in computer architecture than in Natural Language Processing. Go figure why…

Pascal: parameters by reference

I posted some time ago about Pascal, and the nice (and worst) things that Pascal has in its language. I discovered yet another cool thing. Unlike C, where you can pass parameters to functions by value, or using a pointer (and therefore, as reference), in Pascal you can use a value, you can use a pointer, or declare a parameter as a variable. This is similar to passing by pointer, but with a cleaner syntax.

Note the difference between

and

The first procedure does not change anything in the outside world, while the second changes the value of the variable passed as argument.

As expected, the compiler raises an error if you call this second procedure with a constant integer.

Windows Versions

Last night was thinking on Windows, and its version numbering. I remember Windows 3.1. It was the last windows to have a number version before the recent Windows 7. That means we had 3 versions of windows that had being named other things. As we had more than 3 windows versions in this time, that means that some of them were not considered by Microsoft as major versions but as revisions (or crap).

Let us look at the list (I am omitting NT versions deliberately):

• Windows 95
• Windows 98
• Windows 2000
• Windows ME
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista

I think there is no doubt that Windows 95 was a new version, major release. Let’s call it Windows 4. In turn, Windows 98, while more stable than Windows 95, did not bring much novelty. At the moment the biggest change I recall is USB support. But there are other enhancements, I am sure. But we can not call it Windows 5 or we waste all versions too fast.

Windows 2000 was the first try to merge NT with Windows desktop.  I recall to use it a lot of time, and it was stable (well, stable for a Windows). News? At least NTFS support and the supposed stability of NT. I think we should call it Windows 5.

About Windows ME, I think I do not have to make any comment. It is not a major version nor a minor version. I think it is not an operating system at all. I think that, from the list, it is the worst piece of software to date. Including Vista.

Follows Windows XP. This one is running for some time, and did not disappear with Vista. Unfortunately (for Microsoft), it made the Windows XP usage higher. Nobody really used or use Vista for work. If they say they do, they do not work. Therefore, Windows XP is Windows 6. No doubts, there.

Vista, accordingly with Microsoft, should be the successor, a major release. Unfortunately (for them) this piece of software is crap. I can not call it a minor version of Windows XP, nor a major version of Windows. I think Microsoft understood that, and that is why they are calling 7 to the new Windows version.

Testing Linux II: Mandriva

The next linux to test was Mandriva. I recall to use Mandrake some years ago. First point regarding Mandriva, is that I downloaded the DVD version. That means I was installing with more than 4GB of software on my DVD drive. Why that is relevant? Keep reading.

The installation was easy. The interface is quite good, although not as detailed as OpenSuse installation, but better than Fedora interface. Regarding this installation, my main complain is to have Portugal listed in the secondary countries list, while some strange countries appear in the main countries list. Also, that wouldn’t be bad if it was more intuitive to select.

Regarding the installation, I miss the detailed information about what is going on. Mandriva keeps showing screenshots of their linux desktops. Also, that is a stupid thing to do, as in a small screenshot you can not detect any difference on the image for the different Mandriva distributions. Probably a list of features would be better. Lack of reflection for the Mandriva product managers.

It all went correctly until the wireless configuration. The laptop has a Intel 3945 802.11g Wireless card. It is not that recent, and there are open source drivers available. In fact, it seems that most recent kernels include this driver. But Mandriva does not include it in the 4GB of software. Oh, and I was using the 2010.0 distribution.

Probably to include more drivers and less crap would help users. I do not care if I need to use the internet connection to download gnome or kde widgets. But I really care if I need to use the internet connection to download the wireless driver, that does not let me to connect to the internet to download… yeah… kind of remembers me of BOFH story of sending by email the password to read the email.

Now I am wondering. If I need to install drivers by hand, probably the best is to go back to my predilection linux distributions, like Slackware or Arch Linux. At least these assume they are not for common desktop users. Well, the other option is to test ubuntu or debian.

Testing Linux I: OpenSuse and Fedora

I got a PC laptop for work with… Windows. Decided to install a Linux on it, and decided to give a look at current distributions. At the moment I was looking for a non-newbie system but with some basic configuration issues automated. For example, I desesperate when I need to configure a wireless manually. I think that is a task that should be easy to perform and not consume much time.

My first option was OpenSuse. I knew Suse for a long time and never tried it for being commercial. Now this was the chance to look and check what they have been doing. First, the installation wizard is really good. Not just good aspect, but also functional. It detects everything and reports the detections to the user. That is great. Also, when installing a boot loader, if it fails, it tries to help the user to correct the configuration and try to install it again.

Also, it lets you to choose between installing a KDE or Gnome based desktop. Also, a XFCE option is there. That is great. I love XFCE. Probably this choice was the reason I did not like OpenSuse, but who knows. So, when booting, the X Login Manager is based on TWM, that sucks. But that is not relevant. Login worked correctly, but when configuring the wireless device, it couldn’t connect to the wireless network. I could not find why. It did not complain with the password. It did not complain about lack of signal (no idea about its power, btw). It just said it configured the network device, and exited the configuration tool. Tried a few minutes to find out what was going on with iwconfig and ifconfig, but decided to try a new distribution.

Next try was Fedora. I know lot of people using Fedora. It is not an old distribution, but given that they use a big base from RedHat, it should be somewhat stable. Booted the live-cd and used the installer available on it. That is good because it lets you use a linux system while you are installing other linux system. That is cool. The installer, itself, is equal to the first fedora installer (at least I did not find big differences). The windows are not well designed (widgets not correctly placed…), but it is enough for the installation task.

But that isn’t my complain. My complain is that, after half hour installing the system, anaconda crashed when installing the Grub bootloader. Instead of an error message I got a Python backtrace. And that sucks. First, because I hate Python. Second, because it crashed the installation, forcing me to restart the installation.

No, I will not retry fedora now, I think. I will download another linux version.

Hope I can find any interesting distro that is not Ubuntu (I have different complains about it… for a future post).

Happy Feet (2006)

Last night we had Happy Feet in the public Portuguese television, dubbed in Portuguese. This fact is relevant. Probably I would say different things if I watched the original version, as the dubbing process was not good. Why? The voices were cute, but hard to understand, and most of the musics were not dubbed or subtitled. While that is not relevant for the Queen’s music, some others were relevant (for instance, the one in the beginning).

The story is trivial. You join the ugly duckling story with some ecological message and the result is… Happy Feet.

The graphics are not astonishing. Nothing really new here. I think the only relevant portion is the reflection of real humans over the computer graphics. I am not sure they were real humans, but some of them were quite… real.

Conclusion, a good movie for children, mostly irrelevant for grown ups.