Archive for May, 2006

What is a Competitive Learning Network

Sunday, May 28th, 2006

A competitive learning network (CLN) is an unsupervised learning technique that is used to find similarities in examples in a dataset and therefore suggest groupings of the examples. This is known as a clustering algorithm since it “clusters” the data examples together into similar groups. It is called unsupervised because we do not tell the algorithm how to group the examples together. It is left to its own devices to figure out any similarities in the data.
A CLN is made up of two layers of nodes; an input layer and an output layer. Each node in the input layer connects to every node in the output layer. Each connection has a weight assigned to it. The values assigned to these weights are where knowledge is stored in this network. The each node in the input layer is associated with a feature in the dataset. Each node in the output layer corresponds to a potential grouping of the data.
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How to Link to Search Queries for Google, Yahoo Shopping, and a Few More

Saturday, May 27th, 2006

In updating Grocist today I needed to know how to link to key shopping sites to search for each item on my grocery list.

Apparently none of these websites has ever thought that anyone would want to link to them :-) so they didn’t offer any help anywhere.

Here are the URL syntaxes I’m using to link to these sites which I discovered by trial and error. I don’t claim they’re correct or that they won’t change but they work for right now:
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Location of the Google Desktop Index File on Your Computer

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

As of May, 2006 it’s:

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search
where USERNAME is your username on the computer.

As this useful GDS tips page tells us.

Update:

Avid reader Jody writes in:

It’s actually C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop\[hash]
where [hash] is some weird set of characters.

but you can find out for sure
by going to….regedit and finding the key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\google\googledesktop\data_dir (mine was under administrator)

Terms I searched for:

  1. where is the google desktop index file located
  2. where is my “Google desktop” index file
  3. where is my “Google desktop” index

[tags]GDS, Google Desktop, Search[/tags]

MSN Local Search – How to Submit/Add Your Website/Business

Wednesday, May 10th, 2006

Answer:
Simply fill out this submission form (as far as I can tell).

I found this info on the FAQ for MSN local search:

Why isn’t my business listed in your Local search results? (back to top)

Our business listings come from publicly available local telephone records for published telephone listings. To add your business information, go to Add a New Business Listing form.

Making FireFox Browse a Local Directory

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

By default Firefox does not allow you to follow hyperlinks to local directories.

To change this for versions of Firefox <1.5, this Mozilla Knowledge base article tells us to:

Type about:config into the Location bar and hit Enter. Find the entry for security.checkloaduri and change its value to false by double-clicking it. Then, restart your browser.

For newer versions of Firefox just follow the complex sounding instructions from that article. Alternatively this Firefox extension: Policy Manager may give you an easier go at it.
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