ntoll.org

I spent last week at two events:

1. A beginners Erlang course given by Richard Carlsson on Monday to Wednesday, and
2. The Erlang eXchange conference (sic) for the rest of the week.

As the Erlang site states Erlang is a functional programming language with an emphasis on concurrency, distribution, robustness, “soft” real-time (where response times are required within milliseconds), hot code upgrades, incremental code loading and external interfaces to connect to the outside world.

Why am I, someone who writes C# code for an investment bank, interested in this? There are three reasons…

I’ve just found a rather cool website called Wordle.

It allows you to enter text and it produces “beautiful word clouds” (to quote the website) – and I happen to agree with them. I used the text of my post on computational creativity and species counterpoint to produce the following:

(click the image to get the full word cloud from the Wordle site – Java required).

You are able to change the colours, fonts and layouts to create some rather funky effects. It is also possible to import the tags from specific users on delicious. Here’s a picture of the results for my user (ntoll):

I perfomed the Vaughan-Williams Tuba Concerto this evening. It went well and the audience responded enthusiastically.

I’ll have to work out what to do with my evenings now I don’t have to practice… hmm… how about reading my backlog of books starting with Searle’s “Speech Acts”, “Programming Erlang” and various Python related materials.

Too much to do but so little time…

On June 14th 2008 I’m going to be the soloist in a performance of the Tuba Concerto by Ralph Vaughan Williams. As well as preparing the piece for performance I’ve written two sections of the programme: a description of the piece and a short musical biography of myself. Both of these are reproduced in this post.

The short answer: There isn’t going to be an AIMLBot 3.0.

However…