from ifgogo

ifgogo is site set up by aw. The site is meant to be written in English but by Chinese. It seemed that I was too late to find this site, and I also found realdodo there. After reading several pages, I have to admit that my written English is still not good enough. So here I am doing some practices.
These days I am busy with my Graduation Design. My boss wants me to make a good-looking website to be the interface for their literature searching system. Bue I am trying to do more. I've finished part of the html and also have almost finished the acm portal grabber. Time is a big problem, so I need to save the time. Ok, stop blogging and start coding again.

Some ideas on searching and semantics

By using keywords as the way to do searching, the search engine can't exactly know what the user wants, what the search engine knows for sure is that what the user expects is something that contains the keywords literally. It can do some work to guess what will be the most possible answer, but there is no way to ensure that, and it's left for the user to change its keywords.

So in both perspective, from user and search engine, we will do some guess work, we guess these keywords will give us something we want and search engine guess its algorithm can present the user the most possible answer.

In this way, the keyword becomes an ambiguous id of the content, if we have never read its content and it's not ranked very high by search engine, we probably will not find it.

Can we do search in another way? For example, we can describe something, and let the search engine find them for us. We can give the user a more strict query language other than natural language to help the search engine understands the meaning. After that there is still another obstacle which hiders us: we don't understand the content on the web since most of them are described in natural language. Can we expect the information maker to give us another version of content? Not that easy, because we currently don’t have a way to describe everything that could be understood by humans.

The maybe the left critical work relies on natural language processing.

Here is a quote from Microsoft Page:

"The challenges we face stem from the highly ambiguous nature of natural language. As an English speaker you effortlessly understand a sentence like "Flying planes can be dangerous". Yet this sentence presents difficulties to a software program that lacks both your knowledge of the world and your experience with linguistic structures. Is the more plausible interpretation that the pilot is at risk, or that the danger is to people on the ground? Should "can" be analyzed as a verb or as a noun? Which of the many possible meanings of "plane" is relevant? Depending on context, "plane" could refer to, among other things, an airplane, a geometric object, or a woodworking tool. How much and what sort of context needs to be brought to bear on these questions in order to adequately disambiguate the sentence?"

I have just installed wordpress on my computer. Actually, the whole job involes apache setting, mysql installation, and php setting.
Some of the problems I've solved might be helpful for you too, so I write them down.

1.How to set a directory to match specific URL in apache?
The apache has a default DocumentRoot directory, which resides inside your installation directory, while you probably has your wordpress in another place and you don't want to copy it into your apache directory. In this case, you will want to set your wordpress dir to match some specific URL, such as http://localhost/wordpress. To do this, you need alias, which maps web paths into filesystem paths, used to access content that does not live under the DocumentRoot.
A simple example looks like this:
Alias /wordpress D:/programmer_stuff/open-src/wordpress/wordpress
<Directory D:/programmer_stuff/open-src/wordpress/wordpress>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
DirectoryIndex index.php
</Directory>

2.MySQL problem
I've installed mysql before without any problems. But this time it shows some trouble.
I can't install the service using the mysql's configure wizard. It took me some time to figure out that mysql need to have a main service to use a global administrator. So even though I can add new service instance, I still can't get it work properly. My solution is to manually install a service using sc command. and run the config wizard again, this time it works. It seems that the mysql will show some werid behavior when user didn't follow the assumed steps.

3. php setting
Even after I've all above works down, I still can't use my wordpress. The wordpress constantly tells me that mysql module was not installed. I check the php code, and find the message comes from here:
if ( !extension_loaded('mysql') && !file_exists(ABSPATH . 'wp-content/db.php') )
die( 'Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.' );

This problem will ocur if I've not uncomment the sql extension in php.ini. What's worse, I didn't even install mysql extension, and I can't see a ext folder in my php directory. It's simple to solve it after you know everything, but may be really hard when you are a newer.
So the solution on my machine is to reinstall my php and add extension=php_mysql.dll, note you have to add php_ as prefix, which is the real name.


The final step is to make my modification work, I need to have the php.ini reloaded. But how to do that? Since I am using apache2.2, so just write a bat: httpd -k restart, remember to install your apache as a service, otherwise the command won't work.
After all of the above are correctly done, Wordpress get to work, so enjoy it now.

A new beginning

I've finally decided to write blog again after a long time break. The blog I used before is too slow due to network problem, so I abandoned it. I've thought about buying a domain and a space, but never get into practice. With so many ideas fliting in my mind, I have a strong desire to write them down and to share with others. Fortunately I've access to a faster networks this time.
This blog is intended to be written in English only.