Posted by Rachel on October 3rd, 2005 — Posted in Meta-blog, Miscellaneous
I gave up on getting any of the wordpress plugins I found to work. I figure that it’s probably easier to just stick with what I know… and that’s spacking rss feeds into webpages. 
heh. Most of my personal site is entirely generated using rss – I found that I was terrible at updating websites, especially ones about me, but using feeds from various online journals/blogs I keep and bookmark sites, it made it a lot easier to have current content online.
The sidebar on this blog not only now has links to relevant sites I’ve looked at recently, but I managed to sort out a feed of the music that I’m listening to as well. I do like rss. It is tempting to change my project entirely into something that keeps track of people but the rss trails they leave… but I suspect it may already have been done and it’s a bit late to change tack now. heh.
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Posted by Rachel on October 3rd, 2005 — Posted in Project
Took a look at the provisional dates for project work on the website and noticed that the deadline for project proposals is 10th October.
…that’s not very far away. So, I’m going to have to do work on that and more reading in the meantime to really flesh out the proposal. Should probably have a word with my supervisor too, which… will be tomorrow. Must remember to sign up for a time slot.
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Posted by Rachel on September 30th, 2005 — Posted in Meta-blog, Miscellaneous, The Hate List
Adding wordpress plugins to the Hate List. Or at least my inability to get them to work!
Reading is so boring, but sadly it must be done! I don’t want to miss any of the good bits. If there are any in this book. Heh.
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Posted by Rachel on September 28th, 2005 — Posted in Meta-blog, Miscellaneous, Project
The new semester has just started so I’ve been spending money on secondhand books for modules, doing reading and note-making for my project and going to lectures. I’ve found that a good project reading time is the hour before my Monday and Tuesday lectures, as my housemates have a lecture an hour before mine start, so I walk to campus with them and loiter somewhere doing my reading. Or as I like to call it, “project reading for great yay”.
Didn’t manage to do as much work over the holiday as I would have liked… various family things got in the way mostly as well as the “lounging recovering from family things” part of the last few months.
Other than academic activities, I’ve managed to spend mildly scary amounts of money on perfume oils from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. On the plus side though, any oils that don’t smell good on my skin or in an oil burner can be easily ebayed.
And when did “ebay” turn into a verb? The same time as “google” and “blog”?
Oh! And I’ve been trying to fiddle with wordpress to get my current playlist to show up in the sidebar, but all the current wordpress plugins I’ve looked at completely fail to work. The one that’s stuck on there at the moment is being eyed dubiously as to it’s workingness. I may just stick in some kind of javascript doodah working from my Last.fm rss file.
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Posted by Rachel on September 15th, 2005 — Posted in Miscellaneous
Well. They probably didn’t actually steal it, but Google has just launched their Blog Search tool.
Which is kind of like my project. In a way.
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Posted by Rachel on August 23rd, 2005 — Posted in Miscellaneous
My lovely hosting people wrote about spammers and our old friend, the nigerian businessman/prince who wants to share his millions. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that these people sign up for webhosting to do their spamming, and 20% of sign ups is quite a big proportion really.
Mostly though, I think “Fraudinator” is a great name for a fraud detecting system. 
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Posted by Rachel on July 29th, 2005 — Posted in The Hate List
I have decided to start a hate list for all the things I come to hate either generally or because of my final year project.
This will either be healthy or crazy but amusing.
So, the first things on the hate list:
Programming – I… have always not liked programming. It’s not really a hate, it’s more dismay at lack of ability and OMG WHY WON’T IT WORK *stab*. Perhaps downgrade this one to the “a tad annoying” list.
Reading technical books – Not sure if this would be better if I didn’t have to do the third thing on the list.
Making notes on books – So annoying. What do I note? What do I miss out? What if I miss something important and I can never find it again. Oh the angst. Plus, making notes on intelligent agents isn’t nearly as funny as making notes on why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a boring boring book.
Procrastination – How can it be bad if it feels so good? Well, if it stops me working on my stupid project. If only there was an anthropomorphic personification of procrastination that I could physically harm. Perhaps I have been reading too much Neil Gaiman.
Not having an mp3 player and getting into podcasts – Nothing to do with the project, but podcasting is a bit like blogging. I want to be able to go on the train and listen to my lovely, wonderful geeky podcasts without having to use my laptop to do it. There is much woe. This item of hate can be sorted out though, by the purchase of a cheapo mp3 player.
And that is the end of the hate list for today.
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Posted by Rachel on July 7th, 2005 — Posted in Bibliography, Project
Constructing Intelligent Agents Using Java: Professional Developer’s Guide Series
Joseph P. Bigus, Jennifer Bigus
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc
amazon page
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Posted by Rachel on July 7th, 2005 — Posted in Notes, Project
- 3 major phases of development in AI research.
- - formal
problems (structured with well-defined problem boundaries)
- emphasis on creating general “thinking machines”
- sophisticated reasoning + search techniques
- - recognition that most sucessful AI projects had v. narrow problem domains + encoded specific problem knowledge.
- specific domain knowledge added to more general reasoning systems led to expert systems.
- rule-based expert systems (knowledge representations, knowledge engineering, advanced reasoning techniques).
- computer workstations specifically developed for Lisp, Prolog + Smalltalk apps. -> featured powerful intergrated development environments.
- -solving: machine vision+ speech, natural language understanding + translation, common sense reasoning, robot control.
- connectionism (neural networks for data mining, modelling + adaptive control)
- genetic algorithms
- alternative logic systems (fuzzy logic)
- agents that move through network
from here
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