I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...

I have been enjoying Nassim Taleb's book 'Antifragile' in which I have learned (or better understood) how difficult to impossible it is to predict the future, especially events with a low probability. Taleb does convince that it is possible and desirable to rate personal habits, health issues, business, governments, etc. as to how fragile robust antifragile they are. Robust is good, antifragile is even better. It is fragile, for example, to depend on the salary from one company to support your family while investing heavily in that company's stock. It is more robust having a side business to earn extra money and to broadly distribute long term investments. It is antifragile to own multiple businesses. Taleb argues, and I agree, that it is better to earn less but have safer more distributed income streams. Personally, I have three businesses: software development consulting, writing books, and I am a landlord for income properties. I am in the process of opening a fo...

When I worked as a contractor at Google in 2013 I noticed that a lot of people were using Chromebooks. On my first orientation day I received a retina MacBook Pro, that was very nice, and I didn't immediately understand the preference of some people to use a Chromebook. Later I understood that a large amount of work performed at Google could be done in a Chrome web browser. They even had a very nice browser based IDE called Cider that was very great to use because it handled all programming languages and interfaced with Perforce source code control. My curiousity about Chromebooks has persisted. I am going to start teaching free classes at my local library in about two months on Internet secutity and privacy and I used this as an excuse to buy a Tosiba Chromebook 2. I had already bought earlier this year a little HP Stream 11 Windows 8.1 laptop using the same excuse :-) I will start out this "review" with a list of the good and not so good things about the Chromebook ...

Originally published April 2, 2014 I watched the Google Cloud Platform webcast last week and a few days later I received a $500 credit that I need to use in the next three months. The side project I am working on right now is in Clojure. A few years ago I wrote a few small test web apps in Clojure for AppEngine but the loading request time (i.e., the time to serve a request for a cold instance) was several seconds - not so good. With the free credit, I am experimenting now with a Compute Engine instance to run the prototype Clojure web app, just running with "lein trampoline ..." In the past several years I have experimented a lot with AppEngine. With Java (and using Objectify as a datastore API) loading request time was very quick (about a second) and I wrote a GWT application, hosted my knowledgebooks.com site, and wrote several Google Wave robots hosted on AppEngine. I don't much use Python but I did do one Python AppEngine app for a customer several years ago and t...

Originally published February 15, 2014 I never had the chance to try Google Glasses while I consulted at Google last year but my friend Judy just got a pair and I tried them this morning. Judy took the following picture of me wearing her glasses: I was pleasantly surprised at how nice they were (after a couple of minutes getting them adjusted). I think that when Google finalizes the product and starts shipping them at a reduced price that the glasses will be popular for a variety of applications like: Workers who need to keep their hands free People with disabilities Walking tours, supplying information about what a person is looking at Hands free web search Hands free photography and videography (but, the Google Glasses need an indicator light warning people when the camera is on!) etc., etc. I already "talk to my phone" to do web searches, get directions, etc., so talking to the glasses seems natural enough. I think that for general consumers that price point will make...

Originally published October 17, 2013 Alexis Ohanian's new book Without their Permission was just released yesterday. Copies were on sale and I bought one :-) When Alexis signed the book I bought, I joked about my slight disappointment that Reddit switched away from their Common Lisp initial implementation. Thus his comment. Nice Reddit Alien drawing. Alexis talked about freedom of the Internet, and his charitable work. He also had great advice on entrepreneurship. The fellow at Google who interviewed Alexis (I didn't catch his name) did a fine job. Lots of fun! As long as I am posting pictures, here is a picture of the talk and of my lunch earlier in the day:

Originally published October 8, 2013 I haven't blogged in a while because I have been busy getting used to working as a contractor at Google. My wife Carol and I have also been busy getting settled living in Silicon Valley and exploring the area. I have somewhat reluctantly put my new book project Build Intelligent Systems with JavaScript on hold. You may wonder about my writing a book using Javascript examples when I am so enthusiastic about using Clojure, ClojureScript, and Ruby. I decided that the use of Javascript is so pervasive that it would be useful to write a good reference and source of examples using JavaScript for knowledge representation, AI, semantic web, graph databases (and other NoSQL data stores), relational databases, and general information gathering and reuse. I enjoy writing Javascript code while working in IntelliJ with JSLint turned on to warn errors and style warnings. I think that I will mostly be using Java for development at Google. The training clas...

Originally published October 8, 2013 Here is the job posting. Please read this job posting if you have a background in the Semantic Web and Linked Data. We have an interesting project and Google is a fun place to work.

Originally published September 4, 2013 I accepted a contracting gig for working at Google a while back and after a vacation with my family I started this week. I don't have too much to say except that the people are nice and Google is a very well run company.

Redit was down for over 5 hours last week because of problems with EBS volumes on AWS. Netflix was down a few hours today: another AWS user but I don't know yet what the difficulties are. So Amazon has problems and the web is full of people complaining about occasional problems with Google's AppEngine cloud hosting service. No one likes to not support users 24x7 and the users don't like interrupted service, but I think that these occasional outages are just growing pains as we move towards a new way to deploy applications that costs less money, requires fewer staff resources, and likely is more energy efficient. I think that I have only had one customer in 3 years who did not at least partially deploy on Amazon's AWS. This is the future and we need to learn how to work around problems and take advantage of resource savings when we can.

Setting it up took 45 minutes because it immediately downloaded a new version of the OS when I set up the wireless Internet connection. I use Directv and it synced up with my DVR and Sony TV with no problems. The keyboard is nice, with a trackpad and mouse button top right corner. It is much nicer using the keyboard rather than the remote for Directv guide and DVR control. I have experimented with writing Android cellphone apps with the SDK and now I want to try some HTML 5 apps for both the Android cellphones and Google TV. Fun! I had a consulting job two years ago writing some Java blu-ray example apps and the development environment for that was, frankly, painful. Both Android and Google TV seem much more developer-friendly. You personalize Google TV by logging into your Google/GMail/Apps account. I had to enter my account information multiple times for Youtube.com and Picasa photo albums. There are some wrinklles to iron out but the platform has a lot of promise. We watched p...

Anyone using Google search and who is paying attention has noticed the very different end-user experience. Showing search results while typing queries now requires that Google has to to generate at least 5 times the number of results pages, use new Javascript support for fast rendering of instant search results, and, most interesting to me, a new approach to their backend processing: It has been about 7 years since I read the original papers on Google's Big Table and map reduce, so it is not at all surprising to me that Google re-worked their web indexing and search. The new approach using Caffeine forgoes the old approach of batch map reduce processing and maintains a large database that I think is based on Big Table and now performs continuous incremental updates. I am sure that Google will release technical papers on Caffeine - I can't wait!

I spent some time experimenting with the Buzz APIs this morning - well documented and simple to use. The firehose data will be useful for tracking public social media posts. I set up Google's example app on my AppEngine account and had fun playing with it. Unfortunately, because of the amount of incoming data, it would only run each day for about 4 or 5 hours before hitting the free resource quota limits. Since this was just for fun, I didn't feel like paying for additional resources.

Interesting news this morning of Google's investment in online games 800 pound gorilla Zynga in order to have access to social graph data from people logging into Google accounts to play games. There has been a lot of buzz about Facebook's effective social graph data and games like those provided by Zynga have helped them. That said, I would still bet on Google having a better chance of making the most money off of social graphs because they get to effectively combine data from at least five sources to build accurate user profiles: statistical NLP analysis of GMail, search terms used by people who are logged in to any Google services, friends and business connections from GMail address books, social connections from Google Buzz (which often includes data from other social graphs like Twitter), and in the near future online multi-player gaming. There is another issue: infrastructure. While I am willing to roughly equate the capabilities for non-realtime analytics of very large...

Except for some consulting work, my big project is a new book on using AllegroGraph for writing Semantic Web applications. Lots of work, but also a lot of fun. I received a Google Wave Sandbox invitation today. I am going to try to spend an hour or two a day with Wave to get up to speed. Fortunately, I am 100% up to speed using the Java AppEngine (initially, Wave Robots, etc. get hosted on AppEngine, either Java or Python versions) and I have some experience with GWT - so I should already be in good shape -- but I need to write some code :-) My wife took a short video of me kayaking yesterday .

Very nice. I just installed the Eclipse plugin for the Java version of Google App Engine and created a new web app using JSPs and some static content. I have not yet tried using the JDO and JPA based Java persistence libraries (with Big Table being the underlying data store). The deployment was very easy. The application dashboard and administration web applications are well done and the people who wrote the Eclipse plugin did a very good job - really slick. With free pricing for low volume web applications and moderate pricing once you go over the free quotas, I would bet that a lot of Java developers will jump off of higher priced Java web app hosting services. For my own use, it is an open question how much I will use this service. I really enjoy configuring Linux servers, installing just what I need. I lease two Linux servers for running Rails and Java web apps for customers, my own stuff, and general experimenting and fun. App Engine may be too "abstracted" of an environ...