About the case: "Muslim Men Spying in Catholic Churches "

My friend sent me a URL. Then I read it. And I feel sad for what has happened.
There are several blogs related about this case

http://ksstanley.blogspot.com/2009/07/police-report-lodged.html
http://andrew4jc.blogspot.com/2009/07/sacrilege-profanation-of-eucharist-in.html
http://mucked-in-a-jam.blogspot.com/2009/07/al-islam-muslim-reporters-spying-in.html
http://mahaguru58.blogspot.com/2009/07/al-islam-undercover-operation-at.html

About this case, the followings are my personal opinions:

What is happened, is already happened. What we need to do, is to prevent this type of sacrilege happened again. Use the peaceful way. Do not perform flaming through Internet.

Besides that, is sacrilege happened every where? I am not sure. But we know, if we commit mortal sin, we should not receive Holy Communion. Do we commit mortal sins? We also need to look into ourselves.

Next, from blogger MahaGuru58,

They conclude in their article that the usage of such a word as 'Allah' in the Christian publications and prayer rituals can lead to some confusion amongst the Malays who might mistake such publications to be connected with Islam and cause problems for those with weak Aqeedah or just learning about the true faith of Al Islam.

We can read from Wikipedia about this. Is there any confusion?

Finally, non-Christians think that our teaching and faith is far away from theirs, even think that we are wrong. We also have this thinking about others. This is surely happened, that is why there are so many religious in this world. So, learn whatever Lord teaches us, love your enemies, pray for them. Only love our enemies, will make us different from others. And we need to know, Truth will win at the end.

Batch install hotfixes for Windows XP

Since Windows XP Service Pack 3 released, we might need to install the critical hotfixes ourselves. There are several ways to install hotfixes. We can search for "windows offline update" from internet.

But, I personally prefer go to The Software Patch, and download manually. Because I can download whatever I like. However, installing those hotfixes manually is troublesome. Then I wrote a batch file to install the hotfixes automatically. But I need to update the batch file whenever I download new hotfixes. Finally, I found a good solution.

I wrote a batch file as following:

if not exist c:\temp mkdir c:\temp
dir /o /b /s *.exe > c:\temp\temp.txt
for /f %%i in (c:\temp\temp.txt) do %%i /passive /norestart
del c:\temp\temp.txt 

And put this batch file under the same directory with the hotfixes. Run it, everything okay.

I will explain the algorithm:
1) Make a directory "c:\temp"
2) Display all *.exe within the current directory. Assuming there are only hotfixes .exe, no other .exe files. And save the list of .exe to "c:\temp\temp.txt"
3) Read the "c:\temp\temp.txt", for every line of the temp.txt is a hotfix .exe file, then run the .exe with the parameter "passive" and "norestart", so that silent installation without restart is performed.
4) Finally, delete the "temp.txt"

Firefox 3.5 with some new addons

Just upgrade my web browser Firefox to version 3.5. Because it is 3.5, some extensions (addons) cannot be used. The Google Notebook extension cannot be used. This is a bad news for me. Because the development of Google Notebook is stopped. Thus, no more Google Notebook extension for Firefox 3.5.

Google Notebook is very nice for note-taking. Because, we do not need to bookmark everything because of part of the page we like. Sometimes when we are surfing net, we might like some quotes. Using Google Notebook, we can highlight the quotes, and save it.

Since there is no more Google Notebook for Firefox 3.5, then I need to find a replacement. Firstly, I tried UberNote. But the extension caused some of the toolbar buttons missing, especially Uppity, FlashBlock, AdBlock Plus, Download Helper, etc.

So, I tried another extension, that is Evernote. It is not bad. It replaces the tasks of Google Notebook for me currently. However, I still have not yet find out how to export the notes in Evernote.

Besides that, Sage-Too is also no more support for Firefox 3.5. So, to read the news feed, I tried Brief. So, this is also a good replacement.

Human learning and machine learning

One day, my junior asked me, how to improve programming skill. Then I told her, only practicing a lot and a lot. Then, I told her about how can we learn like machine learning.

Just like machine learning (such as Artificial Neural Network), we need a lot of training samples. More samples will produce better result. So, as we learn, we also need to have a lot of samples. Then, the learning process need to be repeated. After enough learning, a person can surely categorise the new sample. Because, even a machine can do so. For example, an expert is able to appraise the fake painting and the real painting. This is because he or she has many experiences.

This makes me aware that, there are 3 points about learning. Firstly, the talent, that is the innate perception of a person. Similarly, for the machine learning, the innate perception is the learning algorithm, for ANN, it will be the network topology. Thus, different person has different talent; different learning algorithm can solve different type of problem.

Secondly, the training samples of machine learning. For the human, it is the experiences. The more experiences will produce better learning.

Thirdly, the learning output of the machine learning. For ANN, it will be the weights (connections) output. Similarly, the learning output is the knowledge. One can get the knowledge of the other person, but cannot get the experience, because he or she doesn't have the training samples.

Therefore, when you have a talent, and apply your talent in a correct field. The experiences you gathered will become the knowledge of your own. Though you can pass your knowledge to someone else, unless he or she has same talent as yours, he or she cannot understand the knowledge. If someone has the same talent as yours, unless he or she experiences what you experienced, he or she cannot produce the knowledge like yours.

However, human learns better than machine, because human can learn how to learn.

Free will and decision making

The TV series, "Lost", is very interesting (for me). In the season 5, the main characters were time travelling to the past. And the story said, whatever they did, they will not change the history. Right, it is same to my personal concept about time travelling. Because I personally do not believe the existence of parallel universe.

But, in the episode "The Variable", the story changes my concept. A main character said to another, we are variables, we have free wills, we have reasoning, we can make decision. That is why, in the episode, they want to change the history. If time travelling to the past really happened in our world, can we change the history?

Right, the free will is something so special. It is our free wills that let us make our decisions. We can have logical thinking and reasoning, but our free wills let us make our decisions which might against our logical reasoning. This make me recall a story in the bible.

The prophet Jeremiah warned the king Zedekiah to obey what God had commanded, otherwise the town will be burnt. At the same time, the prophet Jeremiah had already visioned the town will be burnt. However, king Zedekiah was still given the choice to obey in order to avoid the town to be burnt. In my opinion, we have the free wills to make the decision. This indicated that, the king could make the decision to obey so that the town will not be burnt. However, the vision which the prophet seen came true at the end, because the king chose the other one.

Besides that, Catholics venerate Blessed Virgin Mary, this is because of her free will during Annunciation. Because, she has the free will, she can make decision, she could say "Yes" or "No" when St Gabriel talked to her. If she said "No", what would happened today? And Jesus, true God and true Man. Since He is Man, He must have the free will. That is why His suffering is so meaningful for Christian. Because He has his own will, but He chose to fulfil the Will of the Father.

[The above is only my personal opinion.]

My Google Site

I just open the Google site. Hopefully I can pay effort to maintain the site.

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Forgot to give the link. Here.

Creativity and computer

I am not a creative person. But doing programming lets me think how to become a creative person.

We can create a computer with integrating AI (Artificial Intelligence). A low level AI computer will produce a simple pattern, which can be easily learnt by human. A higher level AI will have a more complex pattern. Whatever it is, there is a pattern in an AI. This is because the pattern is programmed by the programmer.

For a simple pattern, it is a simple formula. When the pattern is complex, there is a complex formula or consisting of a lot of formulas. Whatever it is, there are formulas which the computer follows.

Thus, for a computer to become creative, the computer must not follow the formula, or pattern. The formula is based on logic, thus the computer must not follow the logic. But this doesn’t mean that, the computer needs to negate everything, because negation is still a logic.

Thus, to make the computer out of logic, that means the computer should not base on the internal rules (the formulas). That is why, randomness is important. To create a random number, we often use the time seed. This is because only the time is always running, the time is always different. And only using the random, the computer can produce something which is unpredictable, outside the rules. The random is the outer factor which affects the logical processing of the computer.

However, time seed will only produce a random number. The random number is only a number for the computer. Within the computer, it also needs to interpret the random number as an input. Then, translating the random number to something significant as the output. Thus, there must be another rule to interpret the random input for the computer.

Another rule is used, this is because a computer cannot create anything base on a random input. For example, a computer will print “a” each second. Because of the random input, the computer can print other characters instead of “a”. However, the computer can only print the characters that are already programmed within the computer. The computer cannot create new character by itself. (Machine learning might help the computer generate new character, but machine learning itself is another rule.) Thus, rule is always needed. But the factor (or input) can be either internal or external.

Similarly, a human to become creative, he or she must not follow the rules. He or she needs a random input. A random input can be anything around us. A random input can be a whim go through our mind. However, sometimes there are a lot of random input, we still cannot become creative. This is because we do not have the rule to interpret the random input.

Maybe, a creative person, they have their creative rule, which we still not yet understand. That is why we cannot create a creative program.