Daily Bytes

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.

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 diaries.diagon.org.

Sergio 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 Omondo and I found an interesting one: a PHP Open source plugin for eclipse.

From phpeclipse.sourceforge.net.

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 blogs.osafoundation.org.

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.

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

From www.eluminx.com.

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

From www.linksys.com.

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 www.tribunaisnet.mj.pt.

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. [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 .

Jeffrey Zeldman refered to this nice article at 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 I saw people worrying with backward compatibility and not with forward compatibility.

From webstandards.org.