I am working on a book on building intelligent systems in JavaScript (1) and I just wrote part of the introduction to the section on semantic web technologies: In order to understand and process data we must understand the context in which it was created and used. We looked at document oriented data storage in the last chapter. To a large degree documents are an easier source of knowledge to use because they contain some of their own context, especially if they use a specific data schema. In general data items are smaller than documents and some external context is required to make sense of different data sources. The semantic web and linked data technologies provide a way to specify a context for understanding what is in data sources and the associations between data in different sources. The thing that I like best about semantic web technologies is the support for exploiting data that was originally developed by small teams for specific projects. I view the process as a bottom up...

"Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer’s Secret Weapon" The github repo for the code is here . Enjoy!

Actually, I figured out the following directions for my Clojure + Compojure web apps, but as long as you are using nginx, this would work for Node.js, Rails, Sinatra, etc. The first thing you need to do is to make two copies of whatever web app you want to perform A/B Testing on, and get two Google Analytics user account tokens _uacct (i.e., the string beginning with “UA-”) tokens, one for each version. I usually use Hiccup, but for adding the Google Analytics Javascript code, I just add it as a string to the common layout file header like (reformatted to fit this page width by adding line breaks): (html5 [:head [:title "..."] " " (include-css "/css/bootstrap.css") (include-css "/css/mark.css") (include-css "/css/bootstrap-responsive.css") " " " " ] The next step is to configure nginx to split requests (hopefully equally!) between both instances of you web app. In the follow...

Buy a copy at Leanpub! The recommended price is $6 and the minimum price is $3. This includes PDF, Kindle, and iPad/iPhone formats and free updates as I fix any errors and update the book with new material. You may want to look at the github repository for the book example code before purchasing this book to make sure that the material covered in my book will be of interest to you. I will probably update the book in a few weeks after getting feedback from early readers. I am also still working on Clojure and JRuby wrapper for the Java code examples and as I update the code I will frequently push changes to the github repository for the example code.

The Ember.js Get Excited Video has source code for the example in the video but the test data is local on the client side. I forked this project and added a Ruby Sinatra REST service. My version is here . This uses Ember.js version 1.0 RC4. It took me some time get the example code working with a REST service so I hope my forked example will save you some time and effort.

The DART language looks like a promising way to write rich clients in a high level language. I have been looking at DART and the Ruby to JavaScript compiler Opal as possible (but not likely) substitutes for Clojurescript with Clojure back ends. It took me a little while to get a simple REST service and client working in development mode inside the DART IDE. The following code snippets might save you some time. Here is a simple service that returns some JSON data: import 'dart:io'; import 'dart:json' as JSON; main() { var port = 8080; HttpServer.bind('localhost', port).then((HttpServer server) { print('Server started on port: ${port}'); server.listen((HttpRequest request) { var resp = JSON.stringify({ 'name': 'Mark', 'hobby': 'hiking'} ); request.response..headers.set(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE, 'application/json'); request.resp...

I have been playing with Ember.js, and generally trying to get a little at better programming in Javascript, a language I have used for years, but for which I am still a novice. I wrote the other day about Small example app using Ember.js and Clojure + Compojure + Noir and I thought I would try replacing the simple Clojure REST backend with an equally simple Node.js backend. The results of this simple exercise are in the github repo emberjs-nodejs . I leave it to you to take a look if you are interested. I will say that development with Javascript, Ember.js, and Node.js seems very light weight and agile, even though I use IntelliJ for editing and project management. Starting an app takes maybe a second. Compared to, for example, Java + GWT, or even Clojure + Compojure, I find Javascript, Ember.js, and Node.js to be really a light and fun combination. It would be even more fun if I were a better Javascript programmer :-)

I have been very happy running multiple Clojure web apps using the embedded Jetty server using lein trampoline on a large VPS. I start each app on a different port and use nginx to map to each app to its own domain name. Easy and this lets me also adjust the JVM memory individually for each application. This works so well for me that I almost feel guilty trying alternatives :-) I don't know if I will permanently change my deployment strategy but I am experimenting using Immutant which is a Clojure deployment platform built on top of JBoss AS 7. After installing the lein Immutant plugin and the latest version of Immutant, then you can run the JBoss AS/Immutant using lein, and separately deploy and un-deploy web applications using lein. Pretty slick, but I am still trying to get a grip on interactive development by connecting nREPL (documentation: Interactive development ). My usual style of interactive development is pretty nice (I use IntelliJ to edit, keep the web app running ...

I use Clojure with Compojure and Noir for (almost) all of my web apps and lately I have also been experimenting with Ember.js. After buying and reading Marc Bodmer's book Instant Ember.js Application Development How-to yesterday I decided to make a very small template application using Ember.js for the UI and a trivial back end REST service written in Clojure. I used Marc's Ember.js setup and it worked well for me. The github repo for my small template project is emberjs-clj Please note that this example is a trivial Ember.js application (about 50 lines of code) and is intended just to show how to make a REST call from an Ember.js front end app, how to implement the REST service in Clojure, and not much else. I wanted a copy and paste type template project to use for starting "real projects." You can grab the repo from github, or if you just want to see the interface between the UI and back end service, here is the code run by the Javascript UI: RecipeTracker.G...

wiki-links was created using Google's web crawl and looking for back links to Wikipedia articles. The complete data set less than 2 gigabytes in size, so this playing with the data is "laptop friendly." The data looks like: MENTION vacuum tubes 10838 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube MENTION electron gun 598 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_gun MENTION oscilloscope 1307 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilloscope MENTION radar 1657 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar One possible use for this data might be to compare two (possibly multiple word) terms by looking up their Wikipedia pages, remove the stop (noise words) from both pages, and calculate a similarity based on "bag of words", etc. Looks like a great resource! Another great data set from Google for people interested in NLP (natural language processing) is the Google ngram data set that has ngram sets for "n" in the range [1,5]. This data set is huge and not "laptop fr...

Creating a custom datastore may seem like a bad idea when such great tools like Postgres, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc. are available in their open source goodness as well as good commercial products such as Datomic, AllegroGraph, Stardog, etc. Still, frustration of not having just what I needed for a project (more on requirements later) convinced me to spend some time building my own datastore based on some available open source libraries. Much of the motivation for my work developing kbsportal.com is to make possible the development of a larger turnkey information appliance. I have been using MongoDB for this, but even with an application specific wrapper MongoDB has been a little awkward for my requirements, which are: I want a reasonably efficient document store that supports the usual CRUD operations on arbitrary Clojure maps (which can be nested to any depth). Clojure maps are basically what I use to contain and use data so I wanted a datastore that supports this, simply. I want all ...

I wrote last July about my small bit of code on github that wrapped the Microsoft Bing Search APIs. I recently extended this to also wrap the Translation APIs using the open source project microsoft-translator-java-api project on Google Code . I just provide a little wrapper for the microsoft-translator-java-api project and if you are working in Java you should just use their library directly. Hopefully this will save you some time if you need to use the translation services. The free tier for the translation services is currently 2 million characters translated per month.

I spent 10+ years using large frameworks, mainly J2EE and Ruby on Rails. A large framework is a community and set of tools that really frames our working lives. I have received lots of value and success from J2EE and Rails but in the last few years I have grown to prefer micro frameworks line Sinatra (Ruby) and Compojure + Noir + Hiccup (Clojure). Practitioners who have mastered one of the larger frameworks like Rails, J2EE, Spring, etc. can sometimes impressively and quickly prototype and then build large functioning systems. I had an odd thought this morning, and the more I mull it over, the more it makes sense to me: large frameworks seem to be optimized for consultants and consulting companies for the quick kill : get in, build the most impressive system possible with the minimum resources, and leave after finishing a successful project. This is an oversimplification, but seems to be true in many cases. The flip side to the initial productivity of large frameworks is a very rea...

I have been working on a web app using Compojure, Noir, and Hiccup. I usually run both lein repl and lein run concurrently and use either IntelliJ or Aquamacs (Mac Emacs) as a code editor. If I am working on a small bit of new code and experimenting a lot, then Aquamacs + nrepl works well for me. If I have my MacBook Air plugged into a huge monitor sometimes I run lein run and a LeClojure repl inside IntelliJ and detach a few edit panes as separate windows - so many nice choices for development! I don't really like debuggers because getting into the habit of using them can end up wasting a lot of time that could be spent writing unit tests, etc. That said, I was looking at some Ruby code I wrote for a customer but have not deployed and it occurred to me to try the RubyMine debugger which worked very well and generally didn't get in my way or waste too much time manually stepping through some code. So, I decided to spend a little time trying IntelliJ LeClojure's debug...

I am not actually using functional programming in the kitchen :-) I am re-writing my old cookingspace.com web app in Clojure with a new twist: the new web app will be an AI agent for planning recipes based on the food you have on-hand and based on a user's history, preferences, and the general mood they are in (food-wise). I have written some tools to convert my old relational database code for (more or less) static data (USDA nutrition information, recipes) to Clojure literal data. Based on the type of food a user feels like cooking and what food they have on-hand, I need to transform recipes in an intelligent way to (hopefully!) also taste great after ingredients have substituted or morphed because a user would prefer a different type of sauce over a base recipe, etc., etc. Anyway, working in Lisp and experimenting in a repl is making the entire process easier. My wife and I are both very good cooks and we can make up super-tasty recipes on the fly with whatever ingredie...

Faceted search is search where the domain being search is filtered by categories or some taxonomy. Individuals become first class objects in Facebook's new Graph Search and (apparently) search is relative to a node in their social graph that represents the Facebook user, other users they are connected with, and data for connected users. I don't yet have access to Facebook's new Graph Search but I have no reason to doubt that as it evolves both Facebook users and Facebook's customers (i.e., advertisers and other organizations that make money from user data) should be happy with the service. Google's Knowledge Graph and their search in general are also personalized per user. Once again this is made possible by collecting data on users and monetizing by providing this information to their customers (i.e., once more, advertisers, etc.) Pardon a plug for the Evernote service (I am a happy paying customer): Evernote serves as private search. Throw everything relavan...

Since I (mostly) shut down my consulting business (which I have enjoyed for 15 years) in favor of developing my own business ideas I find that I am working more hours a week now. When consulting the breakdown of my time spent per week was roughly 15 hours consulting, 8 hours writing, 5 hours reading technical material (blogs, books, and papers), 5 hours programming on side projects, and many hours of "me time" (hiking, cooking, reading fiction, meditation, and hanging out with my wife and our friends). Wondering what "The Three Things" are? Hang on, I will get to that. I now find myself spending 40+ hours a week on business development. Funny thing is, I still am spending a lot of time on the same activities like hiking, hanging out, reading, and side projects. I feel like a magician who has created extra time. Now for The Three Things: I have always known this but things have become more clear to me: Spend time on what energizes you. If work drags you down an...

Here is a good 11 minute interview with Ray Kurzweil. In the past Google has been fairly open with publishing details of how their infrastructure works (e.g., map reduce, google file system, etc.) so I am hopeful that the work of Ray Kurzweil, Peter Norvig, and their colleagues will be published, sooner rather than later. Kurzweil talks in the video about how the neocortex builds hierarchical models of the world through experience and he pioneered the use of Hierarchical hidden Markov Models. It is beyond my own ability to judge if HHMMs are better than the type of hierarchical models formed in deep neural networks, as discussed a lot by Geoffrey Hinton in his class "Neural Networks for Machine Learning." In this video and in Kurzweil's recent Authors at Google talk he also discusses IBM's Watson project and how it is capable of capturing semantic information from articles it reads; humans do a better job at getting information from a single article, but as Kurzw...