Another pretty cool knowledge engine: http://www.eyeplorer.com/.

vionto GmbH develops knowledge machines. Machines that know. Machines that think. Machines you can interact and communicate with. Our knowledge machines are based on advanced semantic technologies.

Our approach is inspired by current research results from cognitive science, computational linguistics and neurobiology. We aim at radically improving the way users interact with knowledge and information online. Recent studies show that human thought processes have a strong visual component and that the brain can process images significantly faster than textual information. We are convinced that it is time for innovative, interactive, visual methods of working with and discovering facts and information instead of wading through ever longer lists of documents and search results.

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This Java Virtual Machine (VM) option came with Java 6. It dumps the heap to file when a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError is thrown.

A heap dump is useful in production systems where you need to diagnose an unexpected failure.

-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError does not impact performance , it is simply a flag to indicate that a heap dump should be generated when the first thread throws a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError.

Because this option is so useful, it has been backported to Java 5u7 and Java 1.4.2_12.

More on VM options can be found here.


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Unlike traditional music discovery services like last.fm, Pandora or the Genius Mode in iTunes, Mufin analyzes the actual musical structure of a song.

Co-developed at the Fraunhofer Institute (the creators of the MP3 format), Mufin uses audio recognition technology to analyze the actual musical characteristics of a song. Mufin creates a unique "fingerprint" for each song, using 40 characteristics like tempo, instruments, rhythm structure and sound density. Then, when you search for a song in Mufin's database, an alogrithm compares the fingerprint of that song against the database and presents you with results of songs that are similar in structure.

While Mufin's approach generally works surprisingly well, the problem with this technique is that the system is simply oblivious to the cultural context of a song. Thanks to this approach, you might get to hear Christmas songs in February, for example, as the algorithms simply can't understand the cultural context of your music library.

They have just released an iTunes plugin available for Mac OS X. There is already an iTunes plugin available for Windows.


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Proceed as following:

1. Ensure that cdrtools are installed (it includes cdrecord and cdda2wav tools). With MacPorts installed on your machine this is just as easy as running sudo port install cdrtools.
2. Put the CD into the CD drive.
3. Unmount it using Disk Utility (otherwise the CD, probably mounted automatically, will not be accessible by cdda2wav).
4. Run cdda2wav -v255 -DIODVDServices -B -Owav in the directory where you want to extract the audio files.
5. Execute cdrecord -v driveropts=burnfree -immed -audio -dao dev=IODVDServices -useinfo *.wav to burn a new CD.

Remarks:

1. cdrecord needs wav files to create an audio CD. If you already have your audio files but in another format, use sox to convert them into wav.
2. I read a couple of times that it would be better to burn audio CDs at the slowest speed possible (by using the option -speed=4). Faster speeds can make them unplayable in certain players. However I did not use this option and things worked out.
3. I did not use either the option -pad which seems to be useful.
4. To create a cd with "secret" pre-gap, refer to the tool cdrdao.

Useful links:
UNIX CD BURNING
CD-Writing HOWTO


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Compared to other new features of Java 5, Pack200 hasn’t gotten as much attention. Pack200 is essentially a technology for achieving much better compression ratios of deployable Java code (like Java Web Start applications and Applets).

Java code has traditionally been packaged and deployed as jar files, which are nothing more than standard zip files with the extension .jar. Pack200 can result in radically higher compression ratios of Java bytecode when compared to traditional jar packaging.

Traditional jar files normally achieve compression ratios of 1:2 or 1:3. It’s not uncommon for Pack200 files to achieve compression ratios of 1:10 or greater.

More information could be found here:

• Pack200 and Compression
• Pack200

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