Berlin Brown and Software Development

I was busy this weekend. I setup the git repo for botlist on repo.or.cz. Also, I am creating another django based front-end for botlist. Time permitting, I will discuss the changes in future posts. New git repos: http://repo.or.cz/w/botlist.git - botlist source, git mirror http://repo.or.cz/w/glAntsMech.git - glAnts Mech Game Botlist/GhostNetwork on App Engine http://ghost-net.appspot.com/

;; ################################################ #| swing_example.lisp Usage: ABCL-PROMPT>>> (load "swing_example.lisp") Use with ABCL (known as Armed Bear Common Lisp) Author: Berlin Brown <berlin dot brown at gmail.com> Date: 4/15/2008 "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement." -- Niels Bohr *LICENSE* (new bsd license): ----------------------- [2] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php *Short Overview* --------------- Swing Client View (an swing example implemented for ABCL lisp) *Full Overview* --------------- I always have trouble finding the right tool to create simple, throw-away UIs. I created this code to launch a set of perl test scripts. I needed basic menu-item/button action handlers and a text-area to view and/or parse the incoming text that would have normally been piped to standard output. I ended up choosing common-lisp as opposed to python or ruby because the lisp syntax is ju...

"The answer seemed simple in 2004: aggregate news from thousands of sources, create thousands of topically driven news web pages and populate each of those pages with only news about that particular topic. The Topix team did just that. We created artificial intelligence algorithms that continuously monitor breaking news from over 50,000 sources, 24 hours a day. These algorithms read every story as it is released and then categorize each one into one or more of the 360,000 news pages, including pages for all 32,500 US zip codes, 5,500 public company and industry verticals, 48,000 celebrities and musicians, 1,500 sports teams and personalities, and many, many more. Pretty soon, millions of people were visiting the site every month. But visitors wanted more: they wanted to tell us what they thought about the news on the site. They jammed our email and voice mail with comments about the articles and stories that mattered to them. In response, we added forums to the site in December 20...

FAQ: What is the botlist web application? Botlist, aka the-ghost-network(ghostnet for short) is about web content. This application is designed to find and extract relevant content from the web. And the data will be accompanied by intelligent agents to mine that data. The idea is based loosely on a lot of the aggregation web 2.0 applications there are out there. I really liked the idea of del.icio.us. That started botlist in 2003-2004. Then reddit came along and really motivated me to start redesigning botlist. However, botlist is different. These social-networking news applications are driven by users. Botlist is driven by aggregate bots. The bots (aka intelligent agents/crawlers) are spawned to crawl useful information on the web and aggregate a public database and web application. Also, botlist is a collection of different programs. I am working on a specification for the web front-end. Basically the web front-end is synonymous with the "reddit/digg" clone. As n...

Botlist is officially running off of EC2 and S3. This is the initial test, I have some more things to clear out. Basically, it means that the botlist content will be archived on S3. More details in future posts.

This is easy. There will be blood is one the best films in a decade. There will be blood is 10 times better than No Country for Old Men. Why? Right off the bat, you are given way more to work with. There will be blood opens a lot of questions but doesn't drown you with pedestrian answers. No country is just a classical shoot-em-up with a very cunning bad character. After about 30 minutes, you can already guess the plot, outcome and everything else. The oscars got it wrong, as usual.

I have spent most of my life in front of computers. 20 years later, Things on Ubuntu still scare me. I can only imagine what it must be like for a complete novice computer user. That would be a sadistic joke, put an Ubuntu machine in front of them. Anyway, I had some issues with screen resolution again. This time I just wanted to increase my dual monitor resolution from 1280x800 to 1600x1024. Somehow, between nvidia and xorg; it won't let me keep my settings. Not just that, one monitor is fine...the other is not so fine. The only difference between the dual monitors. I am using a Nvidia 5300 on one and a 5200 on another. Same monitors. EPIC FAIL!!! Here is my post on Ubuntu. Maybe, in 5-6 years this will get fixed. hey should have Mensa/GRE/College entrance exams and have a question, "How do you set your screen resolution on Ubuntu" Anyway, I am having trouble setting my screen resolution and I had it working fine, now I going nuts trying to increase it. Dual Mo...

Here is a session of testing regex. The goal is to find how to detect a java import statement at the beginning of a line. For example; Detect this line: "import java.blah.Com;" >>> print re.match("^(import).$", a) None >>> print re.match("^import.$", a) None >>> print re.match("^import$", a) None >>> >>> a 'import lkjksdjlfksjldkfjsd ' >>> print re.match("^[import]$", a) None >>> print re.match("^[import]$", a) None >>> a = "import" >>> print re.match("^[import]$", a) None >>> print re.match("[import]", a) >>> a = "import" ; print a import >>> a = "import" ; print re.match("[import]", a) >>> a = "import " ; print re.match("[import]", a) >>> a = "import " ; print re.match("^[import]", a) >>...

Here is an interesting look at the botlist project. You can see everything, lines of code, most active time of development, and many different metrics: http://openbotlist.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/openbotlist/docs/media/metrics/set1_april/index.html

"Factor Articles - Work in Progress Chris Double April 4, 2008" I will be adding notes from Chris Double's recent article on factor. Here is a collection of his work. http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/factor-articles.pdf

I use Eclipse. I don't deny it. I also use Emacs and VIM. But there are some features in Eclipse that I like and as far as I know, it is not a crime to use the IDE. Here is yet another forum discussion where I describe why Eclipse is not Java. First, I think these comments from two posters clearly define why Eclipse doesn't do some tasks as you might expect. "Eclipse doesn't make assumptions about which JRE library you're building against. That information comes from the Build Path information in a Java Project, and while that may be a hassle for the "Hello, World" kicking-the-tires scenario, assumptions can wreck the reproducibility of problems you run across as you scale to more complex scenarios. Past the simple cases, you want this amount of control over what you're building against" "Eclipse uses incremental builder to build the project. It doesn't matter you have one file or hundereds of files. It just compiles the modified f...

I was having a chat on an internet forum. Basically, a person was wondering how HTTP connections work, also, how do they apply to HTTPs and proxy server requests. Here is my take, written in forum casual dialog. --------------------------- I think I understand what you are trying to do. But I don't understand why you need the proxy software. I will ignore that and concentrate on your goal. Your goal is to successfully log into a HTTPS site. First, to the developer on the client side; there really isn't that much difference between HTTP and HTTPS. The data is encrypted during transmission and protects against people trying to eavesdrop on the transmission between A and B. Basically, you should see data (HTML string data) requests between client and server. The client does have to make sure that it loads the SSL libraries properly for the HTTPS request to work. I do this a lot with java. I have to do this to initialize the SSL aspect of the http request; Part A: javax.ne...