I tend to view work from a consultant's point of view, but this also probably applies to you if you work for a company: while staying on top of a few technologies is obviously important (I find that the combination of Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Java, and Common Lisp covers most of what I need to get just about any job done using tools that are at least reasonably appropriate), success in any information processing career requires more than just technical savvy: What is much more difficult, but in some ways more fun and rewarding, is the effort to learn as much as possible about the business and sales processes relevant to each project. Ultimately, most software is written and maintained to meet business and sales goals, so it pays to understand non-IT related issues as well as technical IT issues. One reason that I like to use Ruby is that the language is so concise and terse, that I can spend more time thinking about the larger issues of problems that I am trying to solve - the technica...

I wrote a Ruby API for accessing OpenCalais this morning. OpenCalais processes text and extracts semantic information. On a slightly related subject: I have enjoyed experimenting with the Python Metaweb APIs in the last year, and I just wrote about in my AI blog about Christopher Eppstein's new ActiveRecord like API for accessing structured data in Freebase.

I experimented with Mjt last year: Mjt is a client side template system: Javascript is used to merge data from JSON web service calls with templates to generate HTML - all in the browser (except for data fetched from a server). Mjt looks solid and has been fairy widely used; an alternative client side framework is Sun's experimental (not for production use!) Lively Kernel project. If you have not played with Lively Kernal, give it at least a one minute try - it uses the Morphic GUI framework, so if you have used Squeak, it will seem familiar. The big problem, as I see it, of client side Javascript frameworks is issues of maintainability. I have worked with Javascript heavy web applications that other people originally wrote and they are definitely much more difficult to jump into, understand, and modify compared for example to AJAX heavy Rails applications or GWT web applications. That said, there is something tidy about the idea of writing web applications in two intertwined bu...

I have been following the attempted Yahoo buyout with great interest because I buy into the idea of universal access to online information using many types of devices: PCs, Macs, iPhones, Nokia N800s, secret decoder rings, etc. In the future that I predict and look forward to, following and exploiting standards will be absolutely required for success. As part of my own research (and fun), I just about continuously try and evaluate every type of online information service (Amazon's web services, Google gdata, freebase.com, dabbledb.com, etc.) Microsoft's live.com seems to be getting better as far as supporting Mac, Linux, Firefox, etc. The question to me is: how open is Microsoft willing to become? If I were to sit down and enjoy a beer with Bill Gates and Steve Balmer (unlikely unless they are vacationing in Sedona, Arizona) I would have some good advice for them: do a sea change and embrace open standards, stop selling new versions of Windows and instead sell yearly subscripti...

My most recent DevX article has just been published. This was fun material to write about because after some experimentation I feel like I have my Ruby on Rails development environment and server deployment strategy just right, at least for my needs. I should mention that although I have been professionally writing Ruby on Rails applications for a few years, I have not yet written an application that will not run nicely on a single server using nginx, memcache, and a few mongrels. I set my development.rb environment for my MacBook and my production.rb environment for the Linux server I am deploying to, and svn is the glue that holds everything together. If you are interested in deploying very large scale applications, my article will not be very useful to you.

IBM has an interesting idea with Project Zero , which borrows a lot from ideas behind frameworks like Ruby on Rails: use of a dynamic scripting language (Groovy or PHP), use of a "script aware" HTML template language, and built in support for REST and AJAX. I worked through the tutorial that uses Groovy (instead of the other supported scripting language PHP), and my first impression is that the Eclipse plugin support is well done (although color and syntax support for editing templates would be good) and the framework meets its goals: support building interactive web applications with little required knowledge of the underlying technologies. I would be more enthusiastic about Project Zero if I were a Groovy enthusiast. For Groovy loving developers, Project Zero looks to be very useful.

I just tried the daily dev build (NetBeans 6.1 Dev 200802080008) for OS X. It is almost there for my daily work - my current Java development project (a commercial version of my old NLBean open source project with a new AI NLP module), Scala coding experiments, and new Rails projects all work great. The one problem: I get errors when using existing Rails NetBeans projects (actually, I get the same errors when trying to modify project properties in new Rails projects but new projects can be created with the desired properties). Close, but not quite there. BTW, the Scala NetBeans plugins, which are very new, are looking very good.

I built the latest version from source, with one problem: I was only able to install readline from source using "--disable-shared" so I ended up also building PostgreSQL statically linked - oh well so much for being in hurry, I have 2 gigs of RAM on my MacBook, so what is a little memory between friends :-) I have been waiting for version 8.3 because of the full text indexing/search features. Here is the Text Search documentation - enjoy! Here is a little sample of the SQL extensions to support indexing and search: test=# create table test (id integer, name varchar(30), email varchar(30)); CREATE TABLE test=# create index test_name_idx on test using gin(to_tsvector('english', name)); CREATE INDEX test=# insert into test values (1, 'Mark Watson', 'mark@mark.com'); INSERT 0 1 test=# insert into test values (2, 'Carol Watson', 'carol@mark.com'); INSERT 0 1 test=# select * from test where to_tsvector(name) @@ to_tsquery('mark'); ...

My wife and I took a drive this morning after it stopped snowing. Some nice pictures taken near our home in Sedona:

I had experimenting with XMPP on my long term list of things to do. I took a 90 minute break from work this afternoon to set up a playground: OpenFire XMPP server and the Ruby XMPP4r client library. Setting up the OpenFire service on one of my leased servers was easy - a very good administration web application and in general an easy install. I had more problems with XMPP4r but setting Jabber::debug = true helped. I installed the easier to use wrapper library xmpp4r-simple but decided that its API was probably too limited (long term), so I might as well get used to XMPP4r. I also grabbed the Common Lisp XMPP client cl-xmpp but experimenting with Ruby clients is probably easier. The OpenFire developers also supply a Java client library (Smack) that is on my list of things to try. I think that XMPP may be a good "push" technology for distributed knowledge sharing systems (an interest of mine). XMPP has a lot going for it: a good security model, straight forward bi-directio...

While I like to automate repetitive tasks (server deployments, builds, tests, etc.), I also enjoy "tuning up" my personal work habits, tweaking them to get things just right. Hopefully, you will find something useful here (and please add comments on how you "tune up" your own work flow): I keep three lists of things to do : tasks for today (I include errands to run in the same list as work tasks), things to get done in the next week, and long term things that I would like to do, but might not ever get to. I work on a MacBook and use the "Stickies" Dashboard widget to keep these lists. I schedule a break every 20 minutes using the "3-2-1" Dashboard widget. These breaks last a few minutes and give me an opportunity to walk around, get a glass of water or a coffee, step outside, etc. Control interruptions: my wife does not work and is at home with me for most of my work day. Whenever my "3-2-1" 20 minute alarm goes off for a short break, ...