The Rule is Life is not fair

Being nice is the way to the success!

1. Life is not fair, get used to it.
2. The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
3. You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car, until you earn both.
4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
6. If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
7. Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to your talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try “delousing” the closet in your own room.
8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
10. Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Google' s Desktop Search--Beyond Search

Google has introduced a full version of its desktop-search software, with a developer's kit and support for the Firefox and Netscape browsers.

The Mountain View, Calif., company on Monday released a PC application for searching Microsoft Office documents, images, e-mail and Internet Explorer Web pages. Google Desktop, which had been in public beta for nearly five months, now includes search capabilities for video and music files, full PDFs and Web surfing history in three Web browsers, including the fast-growing Firefox.

It also includes a software developers kit, or SDK, so that outsiders can build new search plug-ins. Already, Google has built a plug-in to search conversations in the Trillian chat software.

Security plays a bigger part in the full version. Because the tool had been able to index privacy-sensitive documents--against users' wishes--the final product avoids indexing those Word and Excel files that are password-protected. It also allows people to block indexing of secure Web sites. Google previously had to update the software because of the potential for malicious hackers to capture some personal data.

More information

[Source:C|Net]

AI expert calls for e-defence for the UK

The need for the UK military to develop e-defence so that it can compete with the rest of the world will be highlighted by Professor Nigel Shadbolt next week.

His call will be made when he delivers the British Computer Society (BCS)/Royal Signals Institution (RSI) annual lecture 2005 on Web Intelligence at the National Army Museum, London on Wednesday 9 March. Professor Shadbolt, who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, will focus on how Artificial Intelligence is being woven into the World Wide Web and he will review how these developments are likely to shape future military capabilities.

He will claim that the UK military is lagging behind what many of the rest of us routinely experience in terms of software and IT capabilities. Lengthy procurement processes means that from an IT perspective the equipment and software being used is often out-of-date. This is particularly acute in the area of web services.

He commented: ‘The military will have few options but to take advantage of the huge investment that the commercial and research sectors have made in web service solutions and architectures.’

Professor Shadbolt will demonstrate how the developing Semantic Web could provide web services for the military which might change how it operates.

For example, through developing information sets about locations, military units could access instant information about the geology, geography, customs and cultural and religious structures of a location before entering. Much of this content exists in various web accessible sources. Deployed military personnel often face problems when dealing with foreign languages. Web services are under development to support high quality speech and text translation. Increasingly services for diagnosis, image recognition, planning and scheduling can be delivered on the web.

Professor Shadbolt commented: ‘The UK military is starting to use this technology and indeed the concept of network enabled capability is accepted, but it lags well behind the US. The adage that information is power has always applied in military as well as business contexts. At the moment, it is hard for the military to change fast, but it needs to if it is to attain a position of information superiority.’

20 Year Usenet Timeline

Google has fully integrated the past 20 years of Usenet archives into Google Groups, which now offers access to more than 800 million messages dating back to 1981. This is by far the most complete collection of Usenet articles ever assembled and a fascinating first-hand historical account.

Among the list, First mention of Microsoft, First review of the IBM-PC, First mention of Michael Jordan, First mention of the term 'search engine', First mention of Google and many interesting topics are mentioned. It is a good collection and stories house to retrieve the history!

Google Scholar

Google announced his free beta service, Google Scholar, which allows users to search for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports, the Mountain View, California, company said. Google, this information industry's giant, made great strides on its technologies and applicaton once more. Will he stand on the scholar giants' shoulders?

As far as I knew, the related work has been performed by Citeseer for many years. And the works is very successful. It seems that the technologies which they applied are very similar (or maybe exactly same, not sure). Do they have any connections each other? But what attracted me most is how Google started to do things like Google Scholar, and what technologies they applied, finally what the ultimate goals they are ready to achieve based on the current technologies.

Here, I am not ready to enkindle the arguments war on two organizations. Whatever Google Scholar or Citeseer, if they really can 'stand' on the scholar giants' shoulders to provide services to the running researchers and scientists, it is the real to achieve those giants' beautiful dreams.

Presidents and Ontologies

Of Presidents and Ontologies, this paper attracted me by the ontologies in its title. At the first glance, I could not find any relation between Presidents and Ontologies and thought for a while.....:) Then, after reading the first section of the article, I knew that the Presidents are surrounded by the ontologies through the expression of RDF and some relevant technologies:) Very interesting combination!

No Topic

Success without passion is just luck! Professional research needs passion, not luck!

This is a word from Sir David Brown, Chairman of Motorola Ltd. UK, who made a speech, Engineering in the Information Age In the University of Southampton on 20 October, 2004.

GMail Drive -- A New Network Drive on Your Machine

GMail is not just email box for us from now. Can you imagine that GMail can be used as a network storage medium accessed through your local machine if only you have GMail account and network. That is just easy!

It is GMail Drive that achieve this great job! It adds a drive in your Windows Explorer or My Computer. You can use it just like using the C, D...local drive on your machine. 1000MB is a relative huge storage for normal user. Probably sometimes you think that how many letters I need to fill up this huge 'tank'. Now you've got an idea?

GMail Drive is a shell namespace extension which creates a virtual filesystem on the top of your GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail, even to create folders on this virtual drive, but folders will not appear in your GMail box. In your GMail box the files are still organized as emails. Folders are just a kind of virtual organization structure on your machine.

Detailed information can be gotten in the GMail Drive's website.

Google's technologies always shock people, which injects a shot of special and creative energy to the development of Internet technology. Also, it also attracts more and more developers who are willing to dive into the Google's technology. This is Google's Environment!

Computational Biology ----- Biology is flying with IT

Biology underlies all the life sciences, but historically it has been more of a descriptive than quantitative science. Today, however, computational approaches dramatically increase the potential to learn and understand the complex relationships within and between the subsets of biology (biological response, biodiversity, genetics, medicine, etc.).

Computational Biology represents the marriage of Information Technology (IT) and biology, and spans many disciplines, such as bioinformatics (both genomics and post-genomics), molecular modeling, bioengineering, biosimulation, clinical informatics, medical imaging, and many others. While genomics research brought a face to Computational Biology, it also brought with it a set of new and more difficult challenges such as:

• A collision of paradigms giving rise to data overload,


• Data interoperability problems, and


• The need for widely distributed data and computing resources to solve certain problems.

Continue to read 'Computational Biology: the Marriage of IT and Biology' , which bring a new face for the computational biology in relation to the Sun technologies. I think that it will give you a practical review about computational biology.

Sun also has Communities of Interest for Computational Biology, which provide a open platform for researchers, scientists, and partners. The most valuable part in this platform, I think, is Partnerships Program which is composed of three parts: Centres of Excellence, External Research Office and Asia Pacific Science and Technology Centre. It gives out large loads of information, developments, trends, and resources of computational biology with high-advanced Sun technologies.

Got GMail Account!

Recently Google announced the arrival of 1G GMail email system. Because it is still under the stage of beta testing, the registration of accounts are not available to everyone. The persons who want to get the account must get the invitation from the GMail user. Many people include me tried to look for the invitation sources and expected to get one account. My purpose is to attend the testing phrase of Google, providing useful and practical feedbacks to Google about their new email system as I was attracted deeply by the technologies of Google. Eventually I got two accounts thanks to friends Brennan Stehling and Taylor Simpson.

Next, there is a problem put on the table directly and clearly after getting the GMail account. That is, how to import the other email accounts, such as Thunderbird, Mozilla, Hotmail, Outlook and so on, into the GMail email box. Google's GMail did not provide such tools to implement this function. I 'google' GMail on the Web and found this solution for this problem, which solved most of my required problems! Based on the instructions published on that site, Microsoft Outlook PST file is still under development. I believe it will be available later time!

Currently I have 6 invitations for the GMail account. If interested, you can email me and of course I hope you can give me satisfactory reasons!