Often my work tasks are relatively easy: read requirements, use my previous experience and perhaps some new research to identify the best tools/frameworks to use, do a quick design, and get the job done. In order for this to be a quick and efficient process, it is important to be able to install software tools and keep them up to date - while taking a minimum amount of my own time. I am currently running Ubuntu on all of my servers and customer servers, and it makes it faster to just remember how to do things for one distro. Using apt-get is fine for stable software installs, but when evaluating new tools it is usually best to get the most recent stable releases. I am evaluating both Tokyo Cabinet and Cassandra for a task right now, and needed to install Cassandra. Evan Weaver, who works for Twitter, has written a Ruby gem that downloads the Java code for Cassandra the first time you try to start Cassandra: gem install cassandra --no-ri --no-rdoc cassandra_helper cassandra Love it - a

A while ago, I wrote Java wrappers for easily using PowerLoom from Java (see my Java AI book (free PDF download)). I am evaluating the use of PowerLoom on a customer project and spent a while this morning experimenting with PowerLoom (version powerloom-3.2.50) using SBCL Common Lisp. Since it took me a while to find how to do the things in Lisp that I am used to doing in Java, I thought that I would make some notes on what I did: Download and unpack the PowerLoom distribution. We will be using the example knowledge base file kbs/business.plm so you might want that open in a text editor to read through it. Start by running SBCL (lots of output removed for brevity): $ cd powerloom-3.2.50 $ sbcl This is SBCL 1.0.29, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp. * (load "load-powerloom.lisp") * (STELLA::LOAD "kbs/business.plm") NIL * (PLI:S-ASSERT-PROPOSITION "(and (company c1) (company-name c1 \"Moms Grocery\"))" "BUSINESS" nil) |i|/PLI/@PL-IT

Since my last book was published early this summer, I have had a full consulting work load - something that I very much appreciate, given the economic situation in the USA. I am helping two people with their start ups, building a modeling language in Common Lisp, and will soon start helping another company with semantic indexing tasks. I like to work between 25 and 30 hours a week, and I am in that sweet spot . On the educational front, I have just bought two books on subjects that I already know a lot about (Hadoop and Natural Language Processing (NLP)) but that I want to learn even more. Hadoop rocks, and I have been interested and working with NLP since 1984. I am enjoying working through both books. Carol and I have been enjoying our summer in Sedona: hiking, kayaking, gardening, and cooking.

This is good news! The lack of this plugin has been holding me back from upgrading from Eclipse 3.4 to 3.5. For me, working with the AppEngine platform has really put the fun back into doing Java development.

I was working on a customer's Rails application this morning, and I was totally enjoying myself (Ruby + Rails + TextMate + Solr), and I was perfectly happy with my work and tools. This afternoon, I was coding in Emacs + Slime + Gambit-C Scheme, finishing up the examples for a DevX article - once again perfectly happy with the tools that I was using. A long time ago, my Dad (a great guy, great scientist, and member of the national academy of science) gave me some very good advice: enjoy whatever you are working on. It was a very long time ago, but I remember the context clearly: I was in high school, complaining about too much calculus homework, and my Dad gave me "the advice." By the way, I am taking a trip to see my parents next week :-)

This is good news . Existing support for Google universal login for AppEngine web applications is great, and new support for OpenID is better. I do have real security and privacy concerns when one account will log you into many services. I keep an encrypted text file on my laptop with all my web and server logins and use different random passwords for different services. Having many different logins does make online work more secure but this has to be balanced against saved time and greater convenience. At the end of the day, I feel more comfortable keeping logins for online banking, health record access, etc. separate, while enjoying single login experiences with services that are less sensitive.