Category — WWW

I want to dedicate this post to professor Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web for having given us an excellent invention. The web has been integral to my education, to my recreation and in general in all walks of life. It has helped me reach out to individuals across the globe and learn from them.

Enough said, Happy 15th Birthday W3 !

I have this habit of getting glued to fs types this year. I found another paper on semantic filesystems here.

In my search for a semantic filesystem, I was quite pissed by the extra huge number of desktop search applications, all making logical queries to a file’s metadata. Sure, desktop search is cool, but pray how do third party apps use your search tools ?

I believe that one needs a filesystem based on tagging and not another Spotlight clone. During my long and exhaustive search for such a filesystem, I came across tagsistant. Tagsistant is a 3 day hack (!). Tagsistant uses FUSE to implement an fs with an SQLite3 database. There is even a GUI to define relations between tags and to define new tags altogether.

Apart from that snippet on all things semantic, I just signed up for an account in facebook. I have heard so much about the facebook api and how well it was tested against django. Let me see if I can come up with a cool facebook app sometime later.

I’ve got to sit (stand actually) for my practical examinations on the 4th and 5th. I did revise a few experiments in the FIITJEE lab and I hope it goes well.

BTW, I have a few euler problem solutions here that will be put up in the next post. I am close to solving problem#25 now and once I finish, an update containing solutions to problems which are worth mention will be posted here.

Till the next post, goodbye

Well, I was browsing around in /etc/init.d and I found this:

shriphani@psp-laptop:/etc/init.d$ ls -ltotal 368

\-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1386 Sep 13  2006 README

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1850 Jan 14  2006 acpid

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5884 Feb 26  2007 alsa

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8710 Jan 12  2007 alsa-utils

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4886 Jun 18 01:42 apache2

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  969 Jan  3  2006 atd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4318 Mar 17  2007 avahi-daemon

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1109 Oct 27  2005 binfmt-support

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2803 Oct 18  2006 bittorrent

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5089 Sep 20  2006 bootclean

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2146 Sep 13  2006 bootlogd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1915 Sep 20  2006 bootmisc.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2930 Sep 14  2006 checkfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9548 Sep 23  2006 checkroot.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6110 Sep  5  2006 console-screen.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1693 Oct 21 18:35 cpufrequtils

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1761 Oct 13  2006 cron

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1977 Feb  2  2007 cupsys

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2760 Dec 13  2006 dbus

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1753 Oct  8  2006 dirmngr

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5984 Oct 23  2006 discover

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1196 Sep  3  2006 festival

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1833 Dec 15  2006 gdm

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5823 Jul 31 02:09 glibc.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1360 Jan 14  2007 halt

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1287 Sep 13  2006 hostname.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3886 Feb 21  2007 hwclock.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2518 Sep 15  2006 ifupdown

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1046 Sep 15  2006 ifupdown-clean

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5119 Sep 21 21:39 kdm

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3484 Oct 16  2006 keymap.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  944 Sep 13  2006 killprocs

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1375 May 25  2006 klogd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  417 Aug  9  2006 libdevmapper1.02

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1060 Jan 29  2007 lisa

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  421 Mar  5  2007 lm-sensors

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1054 Sep  7  2006 makedev

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1793 Nov 14  2006 module-init-tools

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  617 Jan 15  2006 mountall-bootclean.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1718 Sep 13  2006 mountall.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2206 Oct  3  2006 mountdevsubfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2394 Sep 25  2006 mountkernfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  615 Jan 15  2006 mountnfs-bootclean.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2299 Nov 26  2006 mountnfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3668 Nov 26  2006 mtab.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2550 Jan  6  2007 networking

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6644 May 16  2007 nfs-common

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2324 Feb 26  2007 openbsd-inetd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6499 Oct 22  2006 pcmcia

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2350 Nov 27  2006 pcmciautils

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1525 Dec 22  2006 portmap

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  375 Mar 18  2007 pppd-dns

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  997 Sep 13  2006 procps.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8045 Nov 28  2006 rc

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  798 Sep 28  2006 rc.local

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  117 Dec  2  2005 rcS

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  655 Sep 22  2006 reboot

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  994 Sep 13  2006 rmnologin

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 Jul 31 17:09 rsync

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  695 Mar  7  2007 screen-cleanup

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1376 Nov 28  2006 sendsigs

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  585 Sep 13  2006 single

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4187 Sep 13  2006 skeleton

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  520 Sep 13  2006 stop-bootlogd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  730 Oct  2  2006 stop-bootlogd-single

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  541 Apr  7  2006 sudo

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2037 May 25  2006 sysklogd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8178 Dec 19  2006 udev

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1252 Mar 28  2006 udev-mtab

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3175 Nov 25  2006 umountfs

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2128 Nov 26  2006 umountnfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1122 Sep 30  2006 umountroot

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1815 Sep 13  2006 urandom

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1626 Oct  5  2006 wpa-ifupdown

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1805 Feb 13  2007 x11-common

shriphani@psp-laptop:/etc/init.d$

My current OS was installed on my laptop this November and here one can see that the timestamps date as back as 2005. This means that those files haven’t been tinkered with since 2005 by the developers ?

I was talking to Mr. Saifi Khan of TWINCLING some time back. He told me about a discussion he was engaged in with some geeks from Yahoo! (TM). Seemingly Web 3.0 would be released. I shook my head. Web 2.0 was such a pretentious name for trash. Mr. Saifi then told me that Web3.0 was UI + Wisdom. Then my cellphone’s (well, my mother’s) battery got dischared. I then began formulating ideas based on what I was told on the phone.

I was browsing MIT’s EECS Research Page (I am inclined towards CSE now, but who knows) and I saw something called Semantic Web by Prof. Tim Berners Lee. Semantic Web has the wisdom to operate on data. Here is what he has to say about semantic web:

using the WWW infrastructure to create a global, decentralized, weblike mesh of machine-processable knowledge. Please see my general page for information about other subjects.

The Semantic Web can be described as doing for Knowledge Representation what the Hypertext WWW did for hypertext. It part of the completion of the original dream of the Web. URIs and HTTP create a universal addressable space of information, allowing things to be given globally unique and dereferencable names. By relaxing traditional constraints of global consistency, we allow the system to grow to a global scale, maintaining local consistency.

I might mention that Prof. Tim Berners Lee’s “work” called Design Issues seems to be a good source for information on the dynamics of the World Wide Web. I actually want to work on this (if I do get the chance to that is). I am really busy nowadays. I will write again later.

So, I’ve volunteered to make NIPL’s wiki. I was itching to try out kid templates some time back last year and I decided to use tg as it supports kid templates by default. After I finished my wiki, it was “weighed” against ikiwiki ( it uses berkeleydb eww!). ikiwiki was going to be lightweight any given day over something so full of batteries like a wiki in tg. So out goes my work. It is over here. Let me warn you, the thing is not as good as a full blown CMS so do not use it over something like moinmoin.