It’s a question, an error, a warning, an information and an idea icon. I currently use them in software documentation using the Shpinx Python Documentation Generator. It’s a very good tool to create beautiful documentation especially for software projects but I also use it to publish my game design document. Here’s an example of how the icons could be used:

I based the icons upon images from the Tango Icon Gallery. You may download an archive containing the source (Inkscape .svg) and PNGs of different size here. Use them as you wish, if you find them useful I’d be very happy if you left a comment here.

On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Charles Babbage

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Antoine de Saint Exupéry

To iterate is human, to recurse divine. L. Peter Deutsch

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it’s original, you’ll have to ram it down their throats. Howard Aiken

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. Alan Kay

And on a less serious note a colleague of mine told me a couple of hilarious science jokes from Brian Malow. Watch a video of the jokes here. My favourite:

A room temperature superconductor walks into a bar. The bartender says, “We don’t serve any superconductors in this bar.” The room temperature superconductor leaves without putting up any resistance.

I admit the graph is a bit ambiguous and it would be much better to count the number of links in blog posts that link to the respective product. But let’s just assume that the graph is an accurate representation of the buzz those products created.

So Wolfram. I like what they did but have a couple of problems with it. For one I feel like they kind of not understood what it is all about these days. They ignore collaboration, wisdom of the crowd, free knowledge and all that good stuff we have today. But they don’t want that, they want scientific accuracy and control over their content. That’s fine I think but I would have loved to see all those smart people to contribute to a project like Wikipedia or freebase. And maybe they could have dedicated some of their enormous brainpower to finally getting NLP off the ground to provide a nice interface to all the information out there and to establish some ground rules about how we should do NLP.

Bing, well – pretty pictures. That’s really all it is for me personally. The name is certainly better than their Live Search thing but I don’t like the interface at all.

And then for Google Wave: I really hope this product will not succeed and will not revolutionize anything. It’s in the first few minutes of the demo why it would be very scary to have Wave around. Lars Rasmussen says that E-Mail is bad because it’s peer to peer, not very comfortable and whatnot. So he proposes to put the Wave (i.e. Google) in the middle of all that communication. Scary.

What’s really awesome is Google Squared. It’s by no means perfect – still a lot of rough edges – but has a lot of potential. I hope to see some serious work done on that thing and maybe an API for us developers to play with and create new things.

We also found a quite professional solution in Funkamateur, edition 12/93, pages 794-796. The article is in German and can be found here. We found another very simple circuit diagram for an amplifier in Elektor, edition 7-8/2000 that we ended up building. Here’s the diagram:

The components cost about 10â?¬. We built in on two breadboards one for the amplifier itself and one for the power supply. With two 9V batteries connected it supplies -9V and +9V. Here’s a picture of the amplifier board:

Green red and black cables are connected to the power supply, the thick black cables are connected to the subject and at the bottom there are two pins to connect the oscilloscope probe or an AD-converter.
We used real ECG pads from the hospital to collect the signal from the subject. At first we used regular unshielded copper cables to connect the electrodes which resulted in a lot of noise. We then replaced the copper cables with shielded thin microphone cables and connected the shield to ground. This hugely reduced the signal noise. Here’s an image showing an EKG taken with our amplifier:

The electrodes are connected to right hand, left hand and right foot. As you can see it’s pretty much what you would expect. You can see the P-wave, the QRS-complex and the T-wave. We’re quite happy with the results.

If you try to build something like this yourself please be advised that you should be careful when connecting this amplifier to anything that carries high voltage (line voltage). The amplification circuit and measuring devices are not separated from each other. So you should only use battery powered devices like a USB oscilloscopes connected to a laptop running on battery. This is important as you consciously connect the subject to your circuit in a very well conducting manner (because that’s what you want) and at very dangerous points. So you should take care that no high voltages can flow between the electrodes at any time.

Looking at that graph without thinking about it one might say: well, looks like the democratic candidate is winning. But all this graph shows is that people talk more about Senator Obama at the moment. The graph doesn’t show if the blog posts are positive or negative. One might argue that any attention is good attention but it’s hard to tell from the graph. Additionally I suspect that when writing about the presidential race, chances are both candidates are mentioned. I’m doing it right in this post. So I’m not one hundred percent sure what the divergence of the trends means.

But extracting keywords is only the beginning. What we really want is a tool that is capable of some form of natural language processing. It should to some degree be able to understand the text it is analyzing in order to extract its sentiment or the connotation associated with certain words or phrases. There are numerous experiments in that direction out there, the most prominent being powerset. They got quite a bit of media attention and they were praised as being Google’s successor and then got bought by Microsoft. For the fun of it here’s a comparison of powerset and cuil buzz created with data from blogpulse.com:

Please notice the logarithmic scale on that graph. I guess the point I’m trying to make with that graph is that ever since they got bought it got kind of quiet around the powerset guys. They are probably integrating their technology into Microsoft’s search engine.

Speaking of Microsoft, the Datamining Blog talks a lot about social streams and in particular the politics implementation. From the blog posts and the FAQ I conclude that they are building some kind of platform called “social streams” that is able to mine various social streams, preprocess the data and then apply various analysis algorithms on that data. Very interesting. They don’t want to limit themselves to blogs but really try to cover as many social media streams as possible (think Twitter or Usenet). They probably have some kind of plug-in architecture where they can add new mining components as they see fit. The data might be stored in a generic way, regardless of the source – at least that’s how I would try to do it (don’t know if it is possible). I’m looking forward to what comes out of this.

At the moment they only seem to have the afore mentioned politics application. I don’t like it that much because it mixes “news”, “blogs”, “people” and “places” in a really strange way. It gets its data from news or blogs and it is about people and places. But what are those 4 boxes telling me? Obama: People 9? Is he associated with 9 people and 9 places? The number is probably rather irrelevant. Here’s a graph similar to the first one taken from social streams:

What I’ve been thinking about doing in this area is the following: I’d like to create a simple blog analysis tool that analyzes one blog at a time. I’d like to provide a time line where one can see when and how often a new post was published. It might also be interesting to automatically extract some key words from the blog that might give you an idea what the blog is all about. Kind of what Google AdWords is doing. And finally a trend search engine that allows you to extract how often and when certain keywords are used in the blog. I thought about using the Google Feed API to grab the content of a blog’s feed in a convenient way. They also provide a history of the feeds which would allow an analysis of not only the current feed but a larger time span. If you’re interested in the Google Feed API check out this and this article.

1. a can of Mountain Dew
2. a Baconator combo from Wendy’s
3. a root beer float
4. a Real Fruit Slush from Sonic
5. a Cookie Dough Blast from Sonic
6. an Oreo Shake from Bruger King
7. a Krystal Chick combo from well.. Krystal
8. anything from Taco Bell with free-refill Mountain Dew

I realize that some of this stuff is gross and that some people despise some of the mentioned fast food places but I still love those food and drinks. Germans just don’t know what’s good!

And because the game is very old and the publisher unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore you can download the game for free. Just google it. You probably will need a DOS emulator if you want to play it using Windows XP or Vista. I recommend DOSBox. The game has a copy protection though. After you’ve been playing for a while the game will ask you an odd question that you have to answer correctly to keep playing. This image right here will help you answer the question.

This game and others released at the time inspired a whole genre that unfortunately appears to be quite dead nowadays. Only browsergames seem to keep this ingenious kinds of games alive.

TCLAP is a Templatized C++ Command Line Parser library that makes your wildest command line parsing dreams come true. Its usage is so simple, it’s almost ridiculous. But it not only has all the features you can imagine but also comes with very well written manual.

Next is Prototype, the famous JavaScript Framework that turns formerly painful JavaScript development into a breeze. I just love how easy it is to develop with Prototype. It hides browser dependencies and makes code readable.

A very special piece of software is TiddlyWiki a reusable non-linear personal web notebook. I use it to document my research and write my thesis. It’s ingenious. In some sense it can also be seen and used as an archive that puts documents into context.

When it comes to text editors I’ve been in love with Vim ever since I attended my first C lectures. When used to the interface code editing at the speed of light is possible. To be fair I also like Notepad++ very much.

When it comes to graphics, layout and design I rely on Inkscape – an extremely powerful and easy to use vector graphics editor. It’s under heavy development and great features are added almost every hour. Nevertheless it is very stable.

I’ve been looking for decent UML modeling tools forever. Seriously. There’s a whole bunch of them out there and I tried a lot of them. Until recently I have been unable to find one that doesn’t suck. Then I discovered BOUML. It’s free and fast. Despites its plenty features it doesn’t come across bloated or sluggish.

Furthermore the draft-posts keep getting more and more. Among others there’s some C++ stuff I’d like to share, some CUDA related code I wrote and a Science Fiction article that’s not quite finished. Hopefully some of this stuff will get published some time in the near future. Stay tuned!

Update: so far the askimet spam filtering service works great. No more spam! Hurray!

Die erste Geschichte hat mit meinem Nachnamen zu tun. So mancher Deutsche hat schon Probleme ihn zu schreiben wenn er nicht buchstabiert oder mit einem aehnlichen Wort umschrieben wird. Die Amerikaner jedoch kriegen einen totalen Schaden wenn sie ihn sehen und aussprechen muessen. Sie versuchen es zwar aber viele scheitern klaeglich und sagen dann lieber nichts. Und ich hatte Probleme ihn zu buchstabieren. Er enthaelt ein C und ein Z und ungluechlicherweise hoeren sich die beiden Buchstaben sehr aehnlich an. Nicht fuer einen Amerikaner aber fuer mich. “It’s S C H..” – “Oh ok so S Z H?” “Yeah.” -”Ok” “Oh no, I meant C not Z” -”Oh C?” “Yea.”. So aehnlich war es jedesmal wenn ich meinen Namen buchstabierte. Mittlerweile erkenne ich den Unterschied und spreche es richtig und wohl ueberdeutlich aus.

Was mir auch passiert und das ist sehr komisch ist folgendes: ich gehe oefter mal joggen. Es gibt eine nette Laufstrecke durch ein ziemlich schickes Viertel, schoen am Fluss gelegen, ein Kiesweg. Die Strecke ist dementsprechend beliebt und man trifft viele andere Jogger, Walker und Radfahrer. Jedenfalls laufe ich so da lang und laufe und laufe und denke ueber dies und das nach; ich weiss nicht ob ich Englisch oder Deutsch denke. Ploetzlich kommen mir Walker entgegen – 2 Frauen (oder wer auch immer) – die sich unterhalten. Ich hoere ein paar Wortfetzen und verstehe erstmal gar nichts und bin furchtbar ueberrascht hier mitten auf meiner Laufstrecke Leute zu treffen die Englisch reden. Natuerlich nur fuer einen kurzen Moment – mir faellt dann schnell ein dass ich ja in den USA bin und das ganz normal ist.

Die dritte Geschichte ist der eigentliche Anlass dieses Eintrags: vorhin traf ich einen Kollegen am Gang und plauderte mit ihm ein wenig. Ploetzlich stellte ich fest dass wir Deutsch redeten. Ich bin mir sicher wir fingen das Gespraech auf Englisch an! Ich weiss zwar dass der Kollege Deutsch spricht weil er lange in Duesseldorf gelebt hat aber ich konnte mich nicht erinnern wann wir anfingen Deutsch zu sprechen wer den ersten Deutschen Satz sagte und wie es dazu kam.
Auf dem Weg zurueck zu meinem Platz habe ich mir ueberlegt dass ich dazu was schreiben muss. Ich begann die ersten Saetze in meinem Kopf zu formulieren – auf Englisch. Ich musste mich schliesslich zwingen Deutsch zu denken, da es ein Eintrag auf Deutsch werden sollte.

Und noch ein kleiner Tipp fuer alle die in einem Motel fragen wollen ob noch ein Zimmer frei ist: die Chancen stehen gut, dass der nette Portier euch falsch verstehen wird wenn ihr nach “free rooms” fragt. Das sind naemlich “kostenlose Zimmer”. Man lernt nie aus.