… consider for a moment how many levels of abstraction are involved in math itself. In arithmetic there’s the abstraction of number; and then there’s algebra, with a variable being a further-abstracted symbol for some number(s) and a function being a precise but abstract relation between domains of variables; and then of course there’s college math’s derivatives and integrals of functions, and then integral equations involving unknown functions, and differential equations’ families of functions, and complex functions (which are functions of functions), and definite integrals calculated as the difference between two integrals; and so on up through topology and tensor analysis and complex numbers and the complex plane and complex conjugates of matrices, etc. etc., the whole enterprise becoming such a towering baklava of abstractions and abstractions of abstractions that you pretty much have to pretend that everything you’re manipulating is an actual, tangible thing or else you get so abstracted that you can’t even sharpen your pencil, much less do any math.

- From “Everything and More – A Compact History of ∞” by David Foster Wallace

In 1909, after missing his train due to an ultimately disastrous trip to the lavatory at Ahmedpur station, an embarrassed, angry young man named Okhil Chandra Sen sent an unintentionally amusing letter of complaint to the Sahibganj divisional railway office in West Bengal. The letter proved to be an important one as, according to the Railway Museum in New Delhi, the subsequent investigation into the affair by the British Raj resulted in the introduction of toilets to all trains in the country; something that had been absent since the formation of Indian Railways in 1857.

via Letters of Note: My belly is too much swelling with jackfruit.

I was in a completely different world surrounded by completely different people when I heard that Steve Jobs was dead. I deeply sighed and told someone sitting near me about the news. She asked me “Who’s Steve Jobs?”. I tried to explain how valuable his contributions are to the Software/Computer industry etc. But there was a clear indifference among the people who were paying attention to what I was talking. They clearly don’t see the value and they are right.

Anyway, so far the following is the most level headed response to Jobs’s death that I’ve seen so far among the overly-empathetic media and blogs/tweets.

“I don’t want to take anything away from the guy, he was brilliant and uncompromising and wonderful, but there’s a level of adulation that goes beyond what is merited,” said Tim O’Reilly, chief executive of the tech publisher O’Reilly Media. “There will be revolutions and revolutionaries to come.”

It will be interesting to see if Jobs’s “values” will be carried forward. Of course we’ll never see an exact replica of Steve Jobs, but I’m sure there are brighter minds and leaders to come from human race.

August Bruski had a wife and a bright boy of 14 and an older daughter. The peace of the little family was almost wrecked over their willingness to cooperate and their failure to coordinate their efforts. The son won a place on the commencement program of his school. He knew his speech perfectly. The family was proud and happy until the night before the great day when the family decided the boy had no suitable clothes unless he could wear his father’s trousers, which were six inches too long. The father wasn’t willing to have the six inches cut off and the son was in tears at the thought of wearing them rolled up. However, it was decided, after long debate, that that was the best thing todo and the family retired – but not to sleep.

The mother shared the horror of her son at the thought of those rolled up trousers and at last decided to get up and cut off the extra six inches, which she did. Meanwhile, the sister tossed and fretted in sympathy with her brother and finally she, too, decide to cut off the extra six inches in an effort to cooperate. So she got up and cut another six inches off the trousers.

Cooperation without coordination will not make out pants fit.

- From an Essay by Andrew W. Robertson, The Book of Management Wisdom.

The hardware reportedly stopped the team from innovating beyond certain points because it was slow and imposed constraints, which was highlighted when webOS was loaded on to Apple’s iPad device and found to run the platform significantly faster than the device for which it was originally developed.
…

It’s worth mentioning Hewlett and Packard were Jobs’ heroes growing up. It is also worth recalling that the company saw absolutely no value in Wozniak’s original personal computer design and laughed him off. The Woz then went on to create the original Apple I, he found a company with Steve Jobs that put personal computing on the map, the same market Hewlett-Packard would spectacularly exit 34 years later.

via iPad 2 runs webOS twice as fast as the TouchPad, internal HP testing revealed | 9to5Mac | Apple Intelligence.

Google Translate looks like it is pushing the boundaries, but there are still some subtleties missing when it comes to translation of content from one language to the other. Because it is so difficult to account for the colloquialness and cultural aspects of the language which affect the usage of the words and formation of sentences. There are some really funny examples when Google Translate fails – this one is my favorite.

Google recently announced a new version of the translate tool for Android, which will convert the conversations.

Marshall Kirkpatrick (of ReadWriteWeb) thinks that it looks like a Gimmick and doesn’t really work well in the real world language translation:

Anyone who has used Google Translate in text form knows how awkward it can be. Do you know any Spanish speakers who can’t speak better English than Google Translate likely could? If so, do you really want to pull out your expensive smart phone and start waggling it in their faces? ReadWriteWeb writer Curt Hopkins, who translates poetry, says of Android Translate, “this sort of tool works best for people who’ve studied a language already and are using it as a dictionary or refresher.”

Language, context, culture, class, technology – all of these present huge challenges. Language translation is an art. Approaching it like science sounds like a recipe for poor communication.

Let us see how far the technology takes us.

The Best Thing I Ever Done HQ from MargaretEmily MacKenzie on Vimeo.

Microsoft’s Project Tuva has now hosts some of the Feynman’s lectures, unmissable if you are physics geek!

→ Richard Feynman: The messenger series
You need Silverlight to watch the video, I know it sucks but there’s no other option.

We belong to a remarkably quirky species. Despite our best efforts, some of our strangest foibles still defy explanation

But as science probes deeper into these eccentricities, it is becoming clear that behaviours and attributes that seem frivolous at first glance often go to the heart of what it means to be human.

→ Ten things we don’t understand about humans

There are many ways to make websites run faster. In this section, you can discover performance best practices that real web professionals employ in their everyday work. These practices have improved the user experience for millions of users and we hope they are useful for other web developers.

→ Let’s make web faster

Introduction

Hippo CMS is part of the Hippo’s Open Source Enterprise Content Management System. It provides a browser based user interface for managing the content in the Hippo Repository. Hippo CMS is fully customizable and developer friendly CMS that provides various ways to extend its functionality.

Hippo CMS application is built using Apache Wicket, one the best frameworks available today for building web applications using Java. Wicket is known for its simplicity, and its component-oriented programming, thus providing solid base for the Hippo CMS.

Hippo CMS has pluggable architecture which boasts of first class plug-in mechanism. Depending on your needs, you can create complex document types, extend and enhance the user interface and even create a combined add-on that can change the Core CMS and even replace. All you need to know to build the GUI add-ons is Java and Wicket.

I’ll try to explain each of these extensibility in detailed examples in this series of blog posts. So let us get started.

Yesterday we have announced a new version of Hippo CMS (version 7.1) and Hippo Site Toolkit 2(Version 2.03.09).

Getting and Building Hippo CMS
I’m assuming you are using a Unixy Operating system (Linux/Mac OS X). If you use windows replace the commands appropriately.

Before starting to checkout the source and building please make sure you have the following installed on your computer.

• Subversion
• Apache Maven 2.1.0
• JDK

Open a command line and check out the code for Hippo ECM using following command. Please note that if you are using an graphical client such as Tortose SVN, then you can checkout using the appropriate menu option.

svn co http://svn.onehippo.org/repos/hippo/hippo-ecm/tags/Tag-HREPTWO-v2_06_06 cms-7.1

Now change to the cms-7.1 directory and build the Hippo ECM using maven.

cd cms-7.1
mvn clean install [-DskipTests]

If you are getting out of heap space error, set the MAVEN_OPTS using the following command:

export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xms256m -Xmx700m -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m"

If you are building for the first time, please note that it may take some time since maven needs to download all the dependencies. Once you are done with building Hippo ECM and you can run the provided Quick-start WAR file to get a feel of the user interface and the CMS application.

Change to the quickstart/war directory and run the hippo-cms web application using embedded jetty.

cd quickstart/war
mvn jetty:run-war

After jetty has been started, goto http://localhost:8080/cms to check the version of the CMS that you’ve just built. You can login using default username/password combination of admin/admin.

Hippo CMS Login Screen

Note that you can even deploy the generated war file in Tomcat or an Application Server. Check the documentation for more information.

This concludes the first part of Hippo CMS Customization Part 1- Getting Started . In the next post of this series we will see how to create a simple backend templates (a.k.a Document Types) using Document Type Editor provided within Hippo CMS.

Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them.

Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they’ve found what they consider to be “enough” information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don’t want to wait—if you’re interested in a word, we’re interested too!

Our goal is to show you as much information as possible, just as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known.

By “information,” we don’t just mean traditional definitions (although we have plenty of those)! This information could be:

→ www.wordnik.com

The TED Open Translation Project brings TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world by offering subtitles, interactive transcripts and the ability for any talk to be translated by volunteers worldwide.

→ TED Open Translation Project

export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,address=8000"

Run Jetty using Maven Plugin

mvn jetty:run

In NetBeans, Goto Debug→ Attach Debugger menu. Select Java Debugger(JPDA) and specify the port as 8000. Now you can debug the webapplication using NetBeans.

Afghanistan’s only known pig has been quarantined because of fears over swine flu, officials from Kabul Zoo say.

Acknowledging that being Afghanistan’s only pig is a lonely existence, Mr Saqib says he hopes to find Khanzir a female companion soon. However, he says, because of swine flu, “it is a dangerous and difficult time to get a new pig for our pig”.

→ Quarantine for lonely Afghan pig