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):

James Ashley has emailed me to let me know that he has used my AIMLBot library in his Sophia project featured on the Code Project website.

What sets this project apart is James’s use of the new speech recognition and synthesis libraries that come with Windows Vista. His excellent article demonstrates a framework for interacting with AIMLBot chatter-bots and classic Z-machine text based adventures. This literally means that you can talk to the bot and the bot will talk back to you (or you can talk and listen your way through classic interactive fiction like Zork – a truly noble achievement!).

As James explains:

“The Sophia project is simply an attempt to bring speech recognition and synthesis to the text-gaming experience. With Microsoft’s speech recognition technology and the API provided through the .NET 3.0 Framework’s System.Speech namespace (formerly SpeechFX), not only is the performance fairly good, but implementing it has become relatively easy.”

Unfortunately for me, I’m holding off buying Vista until Apple releases their Leopard operating system. I’ll then purchase a new laptop (probably a MacBook Pro) and install both operating systems (and Linux too) to give me as comprehensive a development platform as possible (especially useful for testing web-based applications and various Mono projects).

Until then I’ll have to wait with twitching fingers anxious to get my hands dirty playing with the code demonstrated in James’s project.

This month’s issue of Linux Format magazine features some work of mine: The Guide for the Perplexed – a small e-book for those wishing to get started with Linux.

They describe it as:

”... an excellent introduction to Linux [...] a great guide. It’s 70 pages of easy-to-read text, along with some excellent screenshots.”

Fame and fortune at last…

Since releasing the open-source version of Program# I have been planning and developing the commercial version, writing a web-based expert system and working on the TalentTool project.

This post is a summary of my vision of how TalentTool works, how various emerging technologies are incorporated into the application to support this vision and the progress made so far.