Mise à jour de la base de données, veuillez patienter...

Firefox 4 was released and it definitely looks better and is faster than the older versions. I tried it out by downloading the version from the site and wanted to replace my old firefox on my Ubuntu. Here is how you can get the latest firefox on your Ubuntu box installed through apt-get.

Goto your terminal and type the following:

1. sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install firefox

That’s it. After the big download, you will have firefox 4 installed on your ubuntu machine.

Here is an explanation of what happens.

1. You are adding the mozillateam’s stable personal package archive repository to your Software Sources.
2. You are updating your local packages for the new sources.
3. And you are installing “firefox”. Doing an apt-get install of an already installed package just upgrades it.

Bonus: Look at the cool graphics to show the live download stats on the glow.mozilla.com site.

It has been a very long time since I blogged and the only thing I was doing with the blogs was paying the hosting bills. So, I decided to do something useful and decided to upgrade to WordPress 3.0 finally. The manual upgrade process was smooth and was over in less than 5 mins.
Running the new version of the software might close the numerous bugs and holes which might have been exposed on this blog for long. I recommend other wordpress self hosted users to upgrade to 3.0 – it is neat.

MontyLingua is a popular Natural Language processing tool which can understand english language and also correct it based on common sense – used by many people around the world for research. It did have a small problem – licensing. The author released it under two licenses which states that:

If it is your intent to use this software for non-commercial,
non-prioprietary purposes, such as for academic research purposes,
this software is free and is covered under the GNU GPL License,
given here: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt> and in the
APPENDIX of this document.

If you are interested in this software for commercial purposes,
commercial licensing information is available.  Please email
(hugo@media.mit.edu) for more information.

In my company, we have been trying to get to the author for the commercial license but he hasn’t replied to any emails. So we decided to make use of another NLP tool and move on. But a few days back there was a discussion at Reddit where it was noted that someone can get the software for non-commercial use under GPL – which gives him the full right offered by GPL. So he can copy, modify and share the software to anyone and the person who gets the software from him (not Hugo) can get it under GPL. This essentially avoids the commercial license path of MontyLingua Version 2.0 license.

I thought since I was already working on improving the code, why don’t I fork it, do the bug fixes and release it under GPL. This will allow anyone else to come up and fix the code and improve the project. Since the author isn’t actively working on this project, I think using this fork will benefit everyone to get a better version.

I have created a public repository in bitbucket called MontyLingua3 (the old one is in version 2.1). Right now I am going to clean up the code and since I am not a NLP expert there won’t be any new additional features. If someone can contribute with new features/functions then I would be very happy to include their patches.

To get the source code, install mercurial and clone the repository as

$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/cnu/montylingua3/

So, please contribute to the project.

Anish (at oz.blogial) is writing a 3 part series of comparisons of Linux distros in the eyes of corporate organisations. In that he is comparing Ubuntu, Gentoo and Fedora. Head over there to know which distro is suitable for your organisation.

1. Ubuntu
2. Gentoo
3. Fedora

For almost one week I have been setting up Blogial Networks and have played around with WordPress mu. I decided to use WPMU after trying out MovableType. I created a MT blog for FSLog and imported all the contents into it. With just about 350 posts, it created so many files for various views – single post, monthly archive, yearly archive, category view, etc. In total it took about 25 MB for all these files for just one blog.

Here are some of the basic reasons for not choosing MT and using WPMU:

• MT is huge. The zip file costs about 5MB and extracting it gets a 21MB monster out. Whereas WPMU is only 1.5MB – 6MB when extracted.
• Ease of use – during installation and for creating post.
• MovableType needs rebuilding so many files for every update to a single post. Missed out a word there, save it and republish the entire blog. This is unacceptable for a blog network which wants even technologically challenged people to blog. Not many would understand the republishing process (unless they are the old blogger type). I agree that plain html files are blazingly faster than executing more than 30 SQL queries for every request, but wp-cache does a great job in caching the rendered HTML pages in wordpress.
• Lot of plugins written in PHP. I can get my hands dirty with the plugins if I want to as I have seen and understood the WordPress architecture more than MT’s.

Regarding the last point, I would be running a series of posts about the various plugins that we use here are Blogial and the problems and incompatibilities we faced while installing it in WPMU.