Friday, March 20, 2009

SOLR : very impressive lucene based search tool

Very impressed with Solr and the development community behind it. http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

1.5 days of research, submitted bug and resulting immediate patch and I have a fully funtional search engine for a project at work.

If you've ever thought it would be nice to have your very own google type appliance, I highly recommend you check out solr and the underlying IR engine: lucene.

Passing the Turing Test

One of the books I am currently reading is "An Introduction to Neural Networks". The introductory chapter covered the Turing Test and the fact that no computer has ever come close to passing it. The context of the chapter was about the limitations of the computer to house and efficiently access a db of human knowledge in order to answer the questions as a human would.

A thought occurred to me. Are humans becoming more computer-like in the way we interact with each other? In this day and age, many of us interact with computers more than we do with humans. I'm doing it write now as I write this. We gain a great deal of our knowledge as a result of direct contact with computer systems and much of our 'human to human' interaction are proxied through computer systems (twitter, IM, email, etc) and we adapt out language on those systems accordingly.

For instance, a human could ask another human:
"Hey Sam, are you attending OSCON this year?"

The equivilent tweet might be:
"@samkeen are you attending #oscon2009"

And some line of computer code might be:
if(samkeen.attending('oscon2009')) {
#take some action;
}

From this you could conclude that the Tweet syntax is bridging the gap between programming code and human dialogue.

If it is true that the way we attain, and share knowledge is becoming more computer-like, will that not someday allow a computer system to pass the Turing Test. Or in that case would it be the human passing the Turing Test?

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Trying out bloggers mobile interface

Adding some message body to see where it ends up.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

kindle2 web browser

Very happy with my Kindle2 so far as a book reader. I enjoy reading tech books and my wife uses it for novels.
I've started playing with the experimental web browser and have found it to be very useful. As expecting it has trouble with graphics but for mobile oriented sites it has proved quite handy, especially since I have access through 3G.
Shown here is m.twitter.com
Posted by Picasa

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Winter Coders Social 2008

This year's Winter Coders Social is set to go. Come join the party this Tuesday, December 9th at Cubespace.

Details: http://calagator.org/events/1250456151

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

GD imagettftext broken on Leopard/mac ports

Spent the better part of the morning battling PHP/GD. I needed to overlay text on an image, something I can recall doing in the past without issue. Not this morning though. Everytime the code got to 'imagettftext' it would result in a WSOD. After much troubleshooting and Google'ng I found this mention in the PHP bug db which then pointed to the root of the cause: The macports 'freetype' lib. The solution for fixing that is here.

hope this helps others

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Augmenting Web Services with SMS and XMPP

This talk was centered around adding channels of communication such as SMS and XMPP to existing HTTP web services.
A project called Extapi, is a small web app that manages this coordination between multiple channels and services.
here are the slides for my presentation given on November 14th 2008 at PHP|Works