Monkey In The Jungle

Typepad will hide your .xml files.

I don't why TypePad made such an odd decision, you can not see any .xml file you uploaded into file manager. I asked the tech support, and was told "The File Manager hides feed files so they're not deleted by mistake, which includes ones that are uploaded by you. This is why you can't see them."

Palm TX? Mac users should think twice.

Thanks Santa and my fiancee, I got a Palm TX for this christmas. However the joy of opening new package only lasted half an hour. Obviously, some of the function just does not work out of box. If you are a mac user, I strongly suggest you to think twice before you take out your credit card, because:

1. Lack of documentation for Mac. Most of manual, doc and online resource are for PC users.
2. Bluetooth does not work out of box. Of course, I don't expect zero configuration. But still not working after me playing with it for 4 hours?
3. Hotsync via Wifi does not work out of box.

If you already bought it, like me, and got frustrated. Do yourself a favor, buy Missing Sync for Palm OS, a small extra investment to save whole a lot hassle and time.

1. Since the software is particularly designed for Mac users, the documentation is much easier to follow. You won't see some instructions that don't apply to Mac at all.
2. I used to be a Missing Sync for PocketPC user. Seems to me, their support team is very responsive.
3. Bluetooth just simply works after I installed the software and followed the manual to set up.

It surprised me how much better a third party software compares to the original software that is supposed to provide the same functionality. I haven't try Hotsync via Wifi, but I expect it to work as well.

I have only one problem so far. Every time after a synchronization, even everything is fine, it always pop up a message saying there is an error. I guess nothing is perfect. Seeing an error message while everything is fine is better than seeing error messages and nothing works.

Update: The reason that the error message pops up is because I have conflicted conduits. Once I solved that, the message goes away.

If we don't agree on anything, then what's the standard for?

Have been trying to generate Google sitemap for my blog. First, got pissed to find out that I have to paid some extra bucks to use templates. Fine, lucky me, Google also support RSS. Ok, let's turn on the feed option, then add the feed URL <feed://garbage-collector.typepad.com/monkey_in_the_jungle/index.rdf> to Google. Here we go ... What the [beep]...

"URI starts with an invalid scheme"

After a couple minutes google'ing, here's the answer:

"But coders beware. The name "RSS" is an umbrella term for a format that spans several different versions of at least two different (but parallel) formats.  The original RSS, version 0.90, was designed by Netscape as a format for building portals of headlines to mainstream news sites.  It was deemed overly complex for its goals; a simpler version, 0.91, was proposed and subsequently dropped when Netscape lost interest in the portal-making business.  But 0.91 was picked up by another vendor, UserLand Software, which intended to use it as the basis of its weblogging products and other web-based writing software.

In the meantime, a third, non-commercial group split off and designed a new format based on what they perceived as the original guiding principles of RSS 0.90 (before it got simplified into 0.91). This format, which is based on RDF, is called RSS 1.0.  But UserLand was not involved in designing this new format, and, as an advocate of simplifying 0.90, it was not happy when RSS 1.0 was announced. Instead of accepting RSS 1.0, UserLand continued to evolve the 0.9x branch, through versions 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, and finally 2.0.

What a mess."

Unfornate non-Pro typepad users, Google sitemap only support RSS 2.0, not RDF (RSS 1.0).

N-gram is just a class of Stochastic Regular Grammar.

Being in speech technology industry for 5 year, I have never thought about "what exactly is N-gram", until I was asked by my co-league. About two weeks ago, she asked me: " Hey, what kind language is N-gram? Seems it is hard to fit N-gram into Chomsky hierarchy?".

When I used to work for a speech recognition company, we realized that one can always convert a N-gram into a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG). But there are always some context-free grammars that can not modeled by N-gram. Is N-gram a subset of PCFG? If yes, what kind of subset is it? After google'ing around, I start getting a bit more understanding of N-gram. It turns out N-gram has even less expressing power than I thought. It is just a subset of Stochastic Regular Grammar (SRG), or Probabilistic Finite State Automata (PFSA). Actually people have a name for this subset of PFSA, Locally testable FSA. Not surprisingly the language modeled by this type of FSA is called locally testable language.

The mathematical definite and characteristic of this language is beyond my comprehension. But here 's the rough idea:

"Local testability: A locally testable language L is a language with the property that for some nonnegative integer k, called the order or the level of local testability, whether or not a word u is in the language L depends on (1) the prefix and suffix of the word u of length k-1 and (2) the set of intermediate substrings of length k of the word u. For a given k the language is called k-testable."

Finally, I got to blog again.

Hey, don't get me wrong, not complaining, everyone makes mistake.

BTW, this is how you run a data center, "Along Interstate 5, in the heart of San Diego, you can still see the scars of that deluge; they're the remains of long trenches in the pavement dug as part of a frantic push to add more lines to the Sony facility."    "Engineering Everquest", IEEE Spectrum, July 2005.