Wolfram|Alpha
Posted by Bricky in Uncategorized on May 14th, 2009
Following from yesterday’s post about Google’s inference engine, someone directed me to a similar project called Wolfram|Alpha which is going live next week.
This is an incredibly interesting video (if a little drawn out):
Popularity: 4% [?]
Google’s Inference Engine: The Google IQ
Posted by Bricky in Uncategorized on May 13th, 2009
Something that’s been on my mind for a bit, brought to the fore today because Google is launching a new product based on it:
Inference Engine
One of the wonderful concepts of artificial intelligence is the inference engine. It’s a kind of computer algorithm that allows computers to reason things. Even in a very simple form, it can achieve (what we perceive as) quite complex reasoning.
If it knows:
- Barrack Obama is the US president
- The US president lives in the white house
then it can infer that
=> Barrack Obama lives in the white house.
So the system can know a third “fact” by knowing the first two. It’s kinda smart.
If you add more facts, the system gets smarter, learning just like a child. And the more facts you add, the smarter it gets, just like a child. This is the basis for most modern forms of artificial intelligence. So what stops people making a super-intelligent inference engine? Someone has to teach it the facts. And, considering the number of facts required to make a system usefully intelligent (in a general sense) - it’s not worth the effort.
Enter the Internet, and Google
Google trawls the internet every day, which contains billions and billions of facts - waiting to be reaped. Up until recently, it just stored the content of the pages, so if you searched for words, it showed you the pages that contained those words (or had links containing your words pointing to them). But, as of late, it has started using some kind of inference engine (I noticed this lately when searching for a company director, it gave me the location of his company). And today, Google announced that they do in fact use an inference engine, and will be using it to help searching in their future products.
So, here we have an incredibly large source of information, containing most of mankind’s knowledge, and an inference engine that is reading it, and gradually getting smarter - based on its knowledge. In time that inference engine will be very smart indeed. Which would be fine, if it weren’t for its source of knowledge: the internet is not fair, just, true, or moral.
This system is currently in its infancy. Do we want it to grow up having learnt everything it knows from the internet?
Popularity: 4% [?]
An Ode to Scrubs
Posted by Bricky in Uncategorized on May 11th, 2009
As the third best show on TV (the 2nd is Lost, and the number one slot goes to House) comes to a close, I feel it is time for me to express my deep sense of regret in poetic form.
Oh Scrubs,
Scrubs,
Scrubs,
Scrubs,
Scrubs,
We’ll miss you.
After eight glorious years the funniest show on TV has come to an end.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Windows 2003: Prevent user login via the console
You’d think that “Deny logon locally” would do it right? Even the documentation suggests that this is the case. But of course you can’t apply that policy to administrator account (presumably because any user called ‘administrator’ must be dumb), so it’s completely useless.
The perfectly obvious and not at all in any way obfuscated way to do it is actually to add the user in question to ‘Remote Operators’ group.
Wonderfully clear isn’t it. Windows I mean.
Popularity: 4% [?]
getmail FutureWarning with python2.3
Posted by Bricky in Programming on May 5th, 2009
Some python (I assume) update on an old Centos box made getmail bork:
/usr/lib/python2.3/optparse.py:668: FutureWarning: %u/%o/%x/%X of negative int will
return a signed string in Python 2.4 and up
return ("<%s at 0x%x: %r>"
It gets more than a little annoying when you get emailed those few lines several hundred times per day. However, according to the getmail FAQ, it’s not their fault - it’s the nasty evil lazy python developers’ fault.
Changing the top of the /usr/bin/getmail file to ignore the warning made it go away:
#!/usr/bin/python -Wignore::FutureWarning
Popularity: 3% [?]
CSS min-width for Buttons in safari/webkit
Posted by Bricky in Mac, Programming on April 16th, 2009
… has stopped working in the latest webkit versions (for quite some time actually).
CSS min-width ignored for input type=”button” on webkit
(ok, you guessed it, I’m posting this just to draw uncle G’s attention. Sorry!)
Popularity: 6% [?]
United Buddy Bears, Plaza San Martín, Buenos Aires
A rather novel idea: bear statues, each decorated independently by an artist on the theme of a country. Called the United Buddy Bears, they are touring the world and spending a few weeks in Plaza San Martín in Buenos Aires.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Floralís Genérica, Buenos Aires
This is simply a gigantic metal flower which opens and closes in response to the sunshine.
Designed by Eduardo Catalano, and built with the help of Daimler, it was gifted to the city in 2002.
Popularity: 6% [?]
All zero dates, mysql, and jdbc
Posted by Bricky in Programming on April 3rd, 2009
Cannot convert value '0000-00-00 00:00:00' from column N to TIMESTAMP
Familiar? This problem arises because ‘null’ dates in MySql are generally represented as ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00′, which, while valid in MySql, are completely forbidden in jdbc.
There is a wonderful workaround however, simply add the zeroDateTimeBehavior parameter to the end of your jdbc url as follows:
jdbc:mysql://hostname/dbname?zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull
And that’s it, zero dates will be converted to nulls and jdbc will be happy.
Popularity: 5% [?]
iPhone 3.0 Update, but no delivery reports
How could apple develop things like MMS, vCard support, and even peer-to-peer connections for the iPhone, and yet omit gaping holes like SMS delivery report support? I’m starting to think that SMS delivery reports don’t work in Cupertino.
Popularity: 7% [?]
