I was updating my server this afternoon. Since this particular server runs Gentoo , this means that I was browsing the web while idly watching thousands of lines of open source code compile and optimize itself in a background window. If you're not technically inclined, suffice it to say that this is the closest real-world...

My undergraduate work is completed. Here's the poster and final report for my TomeTracker project. I expect to work on it more during the next few months, but as far as my class is considered it's done. I need to go to bed. Needless to say, I'm glad to be done with school, and I'm really excited to be starting work at Jobs...

Jordan just introduced me to SmarterChild , a modern day ELIZA for AOL Instant Messenger users. There's something inside me that really wants to wrap ol' ELIZA in a nice chatbot wrapper set the two agents after each other. Unfortunately, a manual dry-run produces rather disheartening results: ELIZA : Hello. I am ELIZA. How...

A small update on my previous post about automated tag recommendations: after much refinement, I slapped together a rails application to demo the functionality. It worked very well, especially considering the short amount of time spent on development. People at Jobster were impressed by it, and it won the "People's Choice"...

I've posted before about an nice linguistics technique that I think has a huge number of interesting applications. It's described in Cavnar and Trenkle's 1994 paper on N-Gram based text categorization ; more than a decade later, it's still a really cool idea that warrants exploration. Since it's time for Jobster's March "I...

I recently purchased a brand-new Sony VAIO laptop. It's beautiful, which is why I went against every fiber in my body that expresses allegiance to the open source software movement. See, Sony doesn't offer any computers with Linux loaded on them. That's not a big deal to me, actually, since I rather enjoy customizing my Li...

This technique may not be news to anyone, but it was a good learning experience for me. I worked with my friend Steve Hardin to create The Thread website for our upcoming art night. Steve is an awesome designer, with a very distinctive style that lends itself to the web readily. Steve handed me an initial layout, which use...