On Search Engines

it all started as a lame chat with one of my friends about hard disk caches, i first read about that months ago and i just told him that these caches are flash non-volatile memories, then i wanted to make sure what i said was right, so i had to search the web, Google led me here, and i copied him the couple of paragraphs that showed my evidence and everyone was happy,

then, i asked myself what would happen if i asked Google to fined those paragraphs for me again, this led me to another question: how much can i put into the Google search box, using my firebug i inspected the box element and i found a maxlength of 2048 which was more than pleasing to me, i proceeded with my test and was happy with the single match result that only contained the source page, no one can ask for more...

then i wanted to know what would happen if i repeated my little experiment with other search engines too, so, i did the same with Yahoo (no maxlength declared) , and the source page came on top of a list of seven matches, not bad at all, then i turned to msn (maxlength of 250) and it just didn't like my search key and returned: "We did not find any results for: ..."

i don't know why this happened and i was curious to know how each search engine worked as i already knew about Page Rank and the Google stuff, so back to Google, i typed "how yah.." and the suggest came with "how yahoo works" which was exactly what i wanted, i ended with that interesting article, by Danny Sullivan, i hope i have the time to read it soon,

Mathematical Beauty

i believe mathematics is really beautiful, you only need to be shown that beauty if you can't see it for yourself. few gifted ones have the talent and inspiration to expose this beauty for all to see.

Douglas Arnold and Jonathan created a fascinating 3D animation that "depicts the beauty of Möbius transformations and shows how moving to a higher dimension reveals their essential unity. It was one of the winners in the 2007 Science and Visualization Challenge and was featured along with the other winning entries in the September 28, 2007 issue of journal Science. The video, which was first released on YouTube in June 2007, has been watched there by more than a million viewers and classified as a "Top Favorite of All Time" in the Film & Animation category." copied from the project home page.

you can watch the movie here on YouTube.

classical music for free

i was so happy to learn about free music websites where you can listen to and download very fine pieces of music. i have always been a fan of classical music as i used to listen to the "Musical Program" on the FM few years ago. among the different flavors of classical music i'd like to mention baroque guitar, very deep and expressive.

i want to thank the people who worked for bringing us these fine pieces of art for free.

musicbakery and musopen are the websites i visited so far.

two different trends i think, musicbakery offer samples and you pay for the whole piece while musopen is all about free music that's available to everybody everywhere. musopen also provides good info about the pieces and the composers, this adds some glamor to the musical experience.

i recommend "Festive Classical" and "Baroque Guitar" on musicbakery, currently i'm exploring musopen, i found some piano concerts for Rachmaninoff and Beethoven which i think will be just great.

Lateral Thinking

it's what they call "thinking outside the box", like that provoking questions u'd hear during interviews, sometimes it's a question or maybe a little story with few details and ur asked to give some answer or explanation, it can be very tricky or very obvious u'd be tempted to think further and slip, however it can be really smart sometimes,

it's considered a measure of creativity and innovation, that can be important for designers and marketing people, many real world situations show how people find strange solutions for their really difficult problems,

i found that site that lists a heck of those questions with answers, give it a try urself...

Ext: A New JavaScript Experience

i had the chance to explore Ext during the first week of my work in EasyDialog, i was really fascinated by the widgets that looked just great, and i liked the API docs too, it's so much like the Java Docs we are used to, very tidy and accessible.

i think it's a great job, my previous experiences with JavaScript never came near this level of organization and speed, yes, things just get done quickly and the results are pleasing too, it's a new experience for the developer, and for the user too, people just love the desktop-like components that act just as they're used to,

i like that it's a new toolkit, with Ext v1.1 released on August and v2.0 just at the end of October, it's a new vision too and it's attracting many enthusiastic people, you have to see it for urself, click here.

how to control your desktop !!!

yes, desktops need to be controlled or they'll grow beyond the screen frames, all of us face this problem from time to time and it can be really frustrating, maybe it's a bad habit or maybe it's because we are usually too busy to worry about placing each file in the proper place and you find a friend on the messenger sending you some pic or audio file so somehow after a while you find the columns increasing exponentially to cover your pretty wallpaper, you'll feel something is wrong, maybe you'll try to clean up some files, but being greedy and possessive you'll decide to keep some files 'for now' so the desktop won't restore it's beauty and the wallpaper will still be covered and you'll still be frustrated,

the quick solution is to create a nice folder called "Desktop" and throw all your desktop inside of it, well you'll feel better for sometime but you'll miss your old files and the new ones will come quickly and you'll start to worry about prioritizing your files as who gets in the "Desktop" folder and who's kept on the desktop itself !!! then maybe you'll create another "Desktop" and rename the first one to "Old Desktop" maybe you'll have many such folders and you'll forget where you put that important file while you thought you solved all your problems,

well, i've gone through this and i came to that conclusion, it's up to you to decide, either you withstand the little bearable overhead of placing the files at the properly from the start or you make a regular clean up,

the solution i'm using for now is a mixture of both, i made the "Desktop" folder but inside that folder it's not the junk you'd expect to find, i made subfolders for the common extensions i use and of course an 'Other' folder where the junk would be hidden, since having shourtcuts is important it can be placed in the quick launch, the desktop or inside the "Desktop" folder, or maybe another subfolder can be made to hold some of them. later i placed that folder in another drive and just left a nice shortcut a nice icon on the desktop, with that i can save a couple of hundred mega bytes from the C drive, and maybe i'll be able to retrieve my recent files if i had to format for any reason,

now, i can enjoy my wallpapers and the internal organization of the "Desktop" folder can help me place the files quickly and help me clean up if things get messy, i hope it works for you too,

a 1.45 GB Temp file !!!

while installing Unreal Tournament 3 Demo i had to free some space on my C drive, of course i couldn't find that much to delete but i noticed that about 2 GB are missing somewhere, and i found them in my Temp directory.

the thing that caught my attention: the Adobe Acrobat Temp folder alone "\Temp\Adobe\Acrobat\8.0" was about 1.45 GB (about 7 small files and one 1.45 GB file)

actually i moved the 1.45 GB file to another drive to continue with the installation, i was tempted to delete it but i decided to leave it for a while in case something wrong goes on.

of course nothing wrong happened and i'm able to use my Acrobat normally, surely i'm going to delete the 1.45 GB file.

the question is: why create such a huge file??

AMP, the easy way to PHP

I tried to mess around with some PHP code months ago, of course you know that you'll need to install a server to run your scripts and Apache seemed to be the right choice by then, but as an average windows user, I had little luck with the server configuration and that was the end of my PHP adventures.

Last week some of my friends suggested PHP for the web site we are working on, it sounded like a good choice as we had different programming backgrounds and each of us had little time for this project. we needed a simple tool that can be learned quickly without all that fuzz about frameworks.

Again, I started searching for some Apache release with my old experience dangling through my mind when I came across WAMPServer.

WAMPServer is a solution stack for PHP web development under windows. You get a single WAMP package that contains Apache, MySQL Server and PHP. When you run the setup you'll get a running Apache Server ready with the PHP module. WAMPServer provides a nice interface to control and configure all these services. I chose to start the service manually so I don't wait unnecessarily at startup when I'm not intending to work with the server.

All you'll have to do then is to create a new directory under WAMP/www, this new directory is then your wwwroot and it's where you put your PHP files, if you fire up your browser and point it to the default http://localhost:80/ WAMPServer will respond by listing your current sites under the www directory, you can then start using your site, from this point you can move freely modifying and testing your code.

check Wikipedia for a comparison of WAMPs

for more AMP packages for Linux and Windows check BitRock

The Lost Beauty

Why is beauty lost? because life became so complicated and most people are not able to feel the beauty in the things around them.

What's the point of this blog? we will try to uncover the beauty in the different aspects of life. Although I suspect most of my posts would be technical in nature, these technicalities all rely on basic beauty concepts that can be appreciated by those with similar interests...

Enjoy your visit!