Older blog entries for fatjim (starting at number 5)

  • Did some more coding on billybot. His web interface is just about done, just need to finish writing the templates. Also made his "brain" semi-persistant (you ask him to save, and he loads the last-saved state on startup). I really want to get the dynamic stuff going so he's useful to other people.
  • I suppose I might as well join the trust metric-commenting bandwagon. I have only two things to say.
    1. Thanks, raph. I like the site, and enjoy the trust metric experiment.
    2. Your trust rating should not be taken as a personal judgement. It's just an attempt to formalize the vague and nebulous network of recognition. The only thing your trust rating reflects is how much you care about your trust rating :)
  • Joanna is back in town today. She was only gone for about two days, but I still missed her. I am really pathetic <grin>.

"Resulted in the following results"?? I need to learn how to talk.

Got up very, very late today (4:00 pm) after playing lasertag until 4 am last night then playing on the computer for a while. Joanna got up around the same time for the same reason, so to keep ourselves from going back to bed we got together and made cookies. Yum!

Two nights ago I was at a friend's house and he introduced me to snoot.org. I like those kinds of games and diversions. I showed him BillyBot and we got to talking.. and then he mentioned that it would be neat to have billy able to generate haikus.

Well, the only way I could figure out to count syllables in a word without a huge amount of research was to query them from dict.org and request the web1913 dictionary, which has a nice, regular-formatted pronunciation guide, and grab it from that.

This resulted in the following results:

  • a python module for interfacing with dictd (rfc2229) servers (I posted to c.l.p, mail me if you want it)
  • a large number of hours waiting for my test program to grab the syllable counts, during which i realized that if this is really going into billy, it'll need a non-cheap-kludge algorithm
  • a program which is at this moment spitting out random haikus every 10 seconds, displayed on my vt220 so everyone walking into the room can see them.

Thinking about syllable counting made me do a bit of research; into chatbots and AI and NLP and speach recognition. I found a great grammar and parser to study for a good start on billy's next generator. If I stay as ambitious about this as I feel, he'll be able to respond to requests (like regular irc bots do) by NLP rather than regexps. I think that's cool.

Hmm.. Advogato's "notes" update-thing seems to totally ignore all formatting i put in, so I just put HTML tags in. I wonder what broke?

Wow, actually got stuff done!

Had a meeting with a potential client who turned out to be so enthused about the project that all that's left before we start on it is to agree on the price and sign the contract. Wow. I'm a professional programmer now. Feels weird.

I've done one other commercial system before; and the guy that wanted that left the province to avoid all the people he'd screwed over by running his business into the ground. I never got paid. Despite that, the thing was one of the best projects i'd done up till then.

In coding progress, i note the following:

  • got pissed off at how slow and lame javac is and installed jikes in the cramped disk space i have at school. It really is a lot faster.
  • made huge progress in billybot; he's threaded and filtered now. Coming soon is a web server to control/"edit" him, saving of state, user-suppliable filters (using RExec and Bastion), and lots of other goodies. Then... Grammar-Based sentence generation!
    Yowsa.. I spend a lot of effort on the useless stuff. At least it's teaching me good OO.
  • found a likely candidate for brush tracking to use in my slowly, slowly progressing artistic-brushes project.. which is suffering 'cause getting to know the gimp's internals takes more than a few evenings of browsing.

Noticed that I've been commenting on a lot of stories recently. I'm going to stop doing that; I want neither to make it a habit and become a habitual poster of slop, nor to encourage others to feel they must comment on everything. So; I'm only going to post a comment if

  • a) it is a quick and simple factual or referential addendum (like clarification or extra links) or
  • b) the subject is something I have already given a great deal of thought to.

I feel this is only fair to advogato and the community around it. After all, the amazing and refreshing openess of advogato requires strict discipline in it's users to keep it growing and healthy.

I've started keeping another diary (a private one, because I write more than just about coding in it) so I've been neglecting the advogato one. That and the fact that coding has been fairly absent from my life so there really hasn't been all that much of note.

So, to sum up coding work:

  • Am working on some extensions to Billybot. Nothing magic, just some filters and extensions to help clean up input and generate sentences with, for example, matching braces and quotes.
  • Am working on a python mock-up of a generic product quoting system for work. Not sure if my money guy is gonna come throught with clients though; he seems to have other glintings in his eye. I might have to learn to speak to suits.. ack!
  • And of course, school coding. To make this fun for myself, I've been documenting the code by inserting references to Knuth's TAOCP books; and since this is a data structures course, I've been using far more specialized structures than they have taught us yet. I'm hoping for the day when I have to talk to the markers and explain something to them. But that's unspeakably arrogant; so I'll keep it down.

That's about it, folks. Albatross!

Finished redoing my homepage. (Note: not the whole thing, just that one new page.)

Got colorific drawing cheesy bad brushes in a simple little app thing. Now comes the hard part of figuring out the GIMP's tools.

Slow informs me that Entity is working again; I feel guilty because I haven't even checked the repository for at least two weeks. :/

Windows Sucks. It crashed and ate the best picure I've ever made in Painter. This is why I want el chees-o colorific done.

Note to self: abandon the cheesy 'colorific' tag.

Oh, I got paid (finally) for a web job I did back before december. I'd just like to state for the record: It's very nice to get paid.

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