Komodo 3.1

The beta version of this cool IDE is available for download. The load time hasn't improved, but the performance inside the editor is much better.

Sequence prediction - part 2

I finished my sequence prediction program. It's up on my Software page.

Snow update

Well, we got about 8" here in Havre de Grace. Tonight the wind is ranging from 20-40 mph, so we expect a lot of drifting.

Big snow

If you've been watching the news channels, you probably know that we're about to get a big snow here in MD. The snow started falling about 10:00 a.m. this morning, and we have about an inch or two right now. The worst part is supposed to be between 1:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. We could end up getting about 10-14 inches. We're also supposed to get 40 mph gusts on Sunday morning.

Our pastor already sent out an email that our early church service and evening service is cancelled. We had an 60 member orchestra scheduled to come in from Illinois to play in our morning service, but they got as far as western Maryland and had to stop.

Today is a good day just to hole up and stay out of the cold (aside from the shoveling). I plan on working on my Sunday School lesson for tomorrow and just doing a little bit of coding. Doris and her mom are downstairs, keeping warm under blankets and watching a movie.

House of Sand and Fog

I've been looking at this DVD in Best Buy for some time, wondering whether I should buy it, but I never have. (It's a little expensive.) When I was in Florida, I was searching for something to read in a used book store, and I found the novel that the movie was based on.

The story centers around a young woman whose family home in California is auctioned off after a county tax dispute. The house is sold to an Iranian man, for whom the profit of the deal will be a way of restoring the fortunes of his own family. The subsequent legal battle for the home turns increasingly personal and desperate, as both people misunderstand the intentions of the other.

I was hooked, even though the story was slow in parts. It definitely kept me turning the pages, and I had it finished in about three days. There were times when I didn't quite believe the motivations of the characters, but I don't think that was necessarily anything in particular but my point of view.

Now I'm sort of interested now to see how Jennifer Connelly plays the young woman's character. My opinion is that she would be a little too beautiful for the role.

Of academic interest

MIT teaches an AI course on Commonsense Reasoning that looks fun. The information is apropos since I've thought about writing a Firefox extension that would scan through linked RSS feeds on web pages/blogs and find other blogs/articles with similar content. In other words, the extension would make Firefox into a "smart" browser that could suggest other linked articles or feeds that I would be interested in. There's way too much content out there for me than I have time to scan through.

I think the two main components to this would be a word/phrase classifier and a commonsense database. The classifier would pick up the most common occurrences of words or phrases on the web pages I frequent and be able to suggest relevant content. The commonsense database would be necessary to distinguish the context of pages, e.g. being able to tell the difference between "Java" the programming language and "java" as coffee.

Looking at MIT's page, there are apparently three main, open-source commonsense databases available on the Web: ConceptNet, ThoughtTreasure and OpenCyc. The only one I've really played with to any extent is ConceptNet because it has a slick database browser written in Python and Tk. Unfortunately, I don't have a good impression of its capability to understand most sentences, especially when there's technical content involved. It's also slow.

I'm not sure if this programming project will make it off the ground. But unlike most of my other ideas, I don't see anyone else who's working on something similar, and I have a feeling even a half-smart browser would be useful.

Liberal blogs

I'm fairly disgusted with the number of liberal blogs I read. Unfortunately, most software developer blogs seemed to be concentrated on the East or West Coast, and so I can't avoid it.

As a result, this satire made me laugh out loud.

Blogger One: As you know, Blogger Two, because I have some expertise in writing large-scale, service-aspected, distributed-transactional J2EE hoozy-widgets, I feel perfectly comfortable spouting off about how President Bush couldn't policy-make his way out of a boot if he were stuck at the bottom of the boot and he told his advisers to read the instructions for policy-making to him that were written on the heel of the boot. Ya know?

Blogger Two: true dat blogger one and wh@t's up w1th th3 w@y h3 t@lkz huh whut a idi0t

Blogger One: Ha, ha! You're such a #@!$tard, Blogger Two. Woot!

That was worth the read!

Play Classic Games

At risk of being made fun of by young kids (who are probably playing Halo 2 anyway), surf over to Midway's site and play some classic games like Spy Hunter, Joust and Defender. (Requires Macromedia Shockwave)

Favorite Firefox extension

Forecastfox - I have it displaying the local 5-day forecast up in the menubar every time I start my browser.

Knuth lectures at Stanford

Free lecture videos by the computer science guru himself, Donald Knuth, courtesy of the Stanford Center for Professional Development.

Wireless LANs at risk

This post from George Ou says that even the most current wireless encryption technology is at risk. Huh! I thought the state-of-the-art was just plain 'ol WEP until I read this.

What's happening with IronPython?

A few people are upset about how quiet Jim Huginin is and are searching for ways to make progress on their own.

Bookmarks for 1/2/05

Via Bill de hOra, an article by C++ guru Herb Sutter: The Free Lunch is Over -- A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software

Via Sean McGrath, Jython has now received grant funding from the Python Software foundation.