java
Fun with Computers
Submitted by pirateguillermo on September 8, 2010 - 11:14amEvery technical interview I've ever been in involves some kind of problem: the interviewer wants to find out, in an hour or less, whether the candidate has the necessary technical chops to be a contributor. Different companies, and even different interviewers at the same company, are trying to find out different things about the candidate and there is a wide variety of programming problems that are simple enough to state and simple enough to code up that a candidate/interviewer pair can get at almost anything.
Regular Expressions to the Rescue
Submitted by pirateguillermo on November 29, 2009 - 5:13pmFrom time to time, and increasingly frequently at this time of year, my dear wife has to send out emails to big segments of her company's customer base. That's her job, after all. However, for reasons that are outside the scope of this blog, the list of customers doesn't always have an email for each customer and, for various other reasons, the email addresses are not always well-formed. It takes her several hours each time to go through the list and manually screen them all.
Productive Weekend
Submitted by pirateguillermo on November 23, 2009 - 10:53amOver the weekend I started working on writing a simulation environment. On Saturday morning, I had an empty project. This morning, I have a couple of sample components that I can link together (programmatically, it's true). I can tell them that time is passing and have messages flow and computation occur correctly. And I've got unit tests for all this, so I can tell when I break it in the future. Not bad for a day and a half!
I Wish I Had a Tool
Submitted by pirateguillermo on November 18, 2009 - 2:50pmI keep thinking about the Salamander Simulation Engine (SSE) -- a codebase I worked on in the mid-nineties -- and thinking what a cool tool it was. For that matter, it likely still is, although the company has changed name and direction a bit since 1997. Now it's DecisionPower and they're all about market simulation. Back then they (we) were Salamander Interactive and it was about this general purpose simulation engine.
BIAJ - Debugging the Script
Submitted by pirateguillermo on June 27, 2009 - 8:38pmBefore I twiddle too much with the response script, I want to have a way to dump it out and therefore be sure that the thing I'm typing in is the same as the thing that the chatbot is using. It also occurred to me that it could be fun to have multiple chat windows open. It would totally be possible because each ConversationWindow has its own ElizaMain.
The Brain Speaks
Submitted by pirateguillermo on June 22, 2009 - 12:35pmTo make the BIAJ talk, we wanted some kind of chatbot to respond to typed comments. My first thought was of the classic ELIZA program, but I wondered if there might be something more appropriate.
See the full description and download the source from my repository.
Brain in a Jar - Creating the Mind
Submitted by pirateguillermo on June 22, 2009 - 12:30pmTo make the BIAJ talk, we wanted some kind of chatbot to respond to typed comments. My first thought was of the classic ELIZA program, but I wondered if there might be something more appropriate.
