Graham Glass, etc.

Making Minds, Part 1

When I was 5 years old, I spent a lot of time thinking about life and death. Where was I before I was born? What would happen to me when I died? But the one question that was even more important to me was: where do thoughts come from?

From then on, I was always intrigued by minds, and read as much as I could about Artificial Intelligence, Brain Research and Computer Science. Books like the Society of Mind and Godel, Escher, Bach fanned the flames of my interest, and for a while I considered dedicating my entire career to the goal of Making a Mind.

However, the engineering side of me wanted to build something right away, and the practical side of me wanted to make money, so I ended up as a serial entrepreneur instead. Deep down though, I still have a dream of getting back into A.I.

So rather than doing nothing until some magical moment in the future, I've decided to write a blog series called "Making Minds" that documents some of my thinking and ideas on the topic of A.I.

Should be fun!

Annoying Voicemail Instructions

One of my pet peeves are annoyingly long voicemail instructions. Here's a typical one:

"Hello, this is the voice mail box for 415-420-xxxx. To leave a message, press 1 or wait for the tone. To send a numeric page, press 2. At the tone, please record your message; when you have finished, you can hang up or press 3 for more options. BEEP."

This kind of message is especially irritating to iPhone users, since in order to press the 1 key and cut to the chase,they first have to press a button on the phone to display the keypad, then press the 1.

How about the following alternative message:

"Please leave your message after the tone or press * for help. BEEP."

This is optimized for the 99% of the time that a caller just wants to leave a message, doesn't require any key to be pressed, and allows a power-user to get help if they really want it.

Panasonic Camcorder

I'm going to start using video more often in my blogs and edu 2.0 website so I decided to buy a nice high-end camcorder. My final choice was a Panasonic HDC-SD1 AVCHD.

This camcorder is 100% solid-state, with a 4Gb flash card that stores about an hour of high-resolution video. It has so many great features that it's best to just visit the Amazon site to read about them all.

I also recommend getting a tripod and umbrella lighting system.

iPhone: First Impressions

I just got an iPhone and activated it about an hour ago. My first impressions were very good. The main glaring omission is the lack of gmail and gcalendar sync. For now, I'm going to have to re-enter my contact list by hand which is pretty silly in this day-and-age. Hopefully this will get fixed soon via a software update.

Encyclopedia of Life and Freebase

The Encylopedia of Life is going to contain information about every species on Earth. Freebase in going to be an open database of the World's information that anyone can edit.

These two projects seem like a match made in heaven. If the Encyclopedia of Life used Freebase as its database, everything in the Encyclopedia would automatically be available to other applications that wanted to slice and dice the same information.

Worst. Error. Ever

My Norton Security system has been reminding me to upgrade for several weeks now, so I finally decided to spend a few minutes ordering the new version.

After logging onto the Symantec site and laboriously entering my order information, I pressed Submit. The response has got to be the worst error message ever. Click the image below to see it in all its retarded glory.

First Demo at Ruby Meetup

My education product will go into private beta later this month, and I'm demoing it for the first time tomorrow evening at the San Francisco Ruby meetup. It will be interesting to see what kind of reaction it gets!

Future Development Kit Podcast

Christopher St. John recently interviewed me for his Future Development Kit web site. The podcast covers a range of topics including the pros and cons of starting a company in Dallas, my new education venture, RDF and tuples, and a good book I read recently.

Google Base

My list of 2005 predictions included the following:

Google releases "Google Forms", a way for people to share structured documents with each other. This could be used to share contact information, resumes, matchmaking information, medical records, etc. and would include security permissions so that users could restrict information to, say, their current doctor or to their friends.

In addition, I wrote a much longer blog entry about this idea here. According to buzz on the net, Google has indeed created this product, although it is called "Google Base" instead of "Google Forms". Because it's not official, the product could of course just be a rumor, but I doubt it. Some screenshots are here and here.

New Venture, Part 5

This is part 5 of the series; part 4 is here.

I've been working about 2 months on my new venture, so I thought it would be worth posting an update. Right now, I'm in prototype phase, which means that the main goal is to get a proof of concept working without worrying too much about things like a beautiful user interface, scalability, and other such distractions. After a few false starts, I decided to base the prototype on MediaWiki, which runs Wikipedia.

MediaWiki is written in PHP and uses MySQL as the underlying storage system. I didn't have experience with either until recently, but they've both been pretty easy to learn.

PHP is a dynamic language that added object-oriented features on top of procedural features. Overall, I don't like PHP very much, but its dynamic method lookup is similar to Smalltalk's and really useful for making powerful proxy classes.

The MediaWiki code base is bloated and not that easy to understand, but once you've gone through the learning curve it is not too hard to hack. The main thing I added is support for semantic web properties so that you can attach attributes and relations to concepts that are represented by wiki pages. For now, I use a single SQL table to store the tuples.

The prototyping has gone very well so far, and by the end of November I should have a rough version of the entire system working. At that point, I'll be able to demonstrate it to teachers, children, schools and parents. Assuming that the feedback is good, it'll then be time to create a production version.

I've been doing some research on languages, platforms and databases, and I'm leaning towards writing the production system using Ruby on Rails with a pluggable tuple storage backend. Working with PHP reminds me of the power of dynamic languages I've used in the past like LISP and Smalltalk, so I don't like the thought of going back to Java. The initial storage system would use SQL for simplicity but the pluggable design buys me the option of replacing SQL with an optimized implementation at a later date.

The worst part of working on the prototype is that it's so much fun that my days tend to be 18 hours long followed by 8 hours of sleep, which equals 26 hours. The result is that I wake up 2 hours later each day, which after a week means I end up going to bed around noon. I'm trying hard to get back to a normal schedule, but it's not easy.

Part 6 of this series is here.