Johnny's Software Saloon

Weblog where I discuss things that really interest me. Things like Java software development, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Macintosh software, Cocoa, Eclipse IDE, OOP, content management, XML technologies, CSS and XSLT document styling, artificial intelligence, standard document formats, and cool non-computing technologies.

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Location: Germantown, Maryland, United States

I like writing software, listening to music (mostly country and rock but a little of everything), walking around outside, reading (when I have the time), relaxing in front of my TV watching my TiVo, playing with my cat, and riding around in my hybrid gas/electric car.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Mozilla 1.7 rc2 just released

New release candidate of Mozilla 1.7 just released. Yay!

A new version of Camino browser was just released too, based on this latest version of Mozilla (the 1.7 branch). Lucky Mac users!

Sunday, May 16, 2004

Stanford's Protege A.I. package


Protégé is a nice little knowledge base kind of program.



It is a little hard to describe precisely what Protégé is. They say it is a knowedge acquisition program. Well, that is something - but I think there is a lot more to it. I can tell you things about it. That might make its possibilities and characteristics a little clearer.



It uses the CLIPS (A.I. expert system shell programming language) file format to store its knowledge.

It has aspects of object-oriented programming (concrete and abstract classes, instances, inheritence) and list processing (such as frames and slots) built into it.

It stores information in a knowledge base, which you can subsequently retrieve by writing queries.

It can interface to databases, using JDBC, which in turn uses SQL.

There are free plugins for it that can do fancy new knowledge management standards like OWL and stuff from the mid-1990s like RDF.

It is written in Java.

It runs on the Macintosh, MS-Windows, etc.

It is free.

It's on version 2.0, with 2.1 already in beta. So it is clean and pretty expansive in its capabilities.



Here is where it is based so you can learn more about it: http://protege.stanford.edu/



My recommendation is, if you are a programmer and you are not a novice and have become acquainted with object-oriented programming, information technology, and some kind of list processing or A.I. programming or programming language - that you check it out. You will probably find it a very fluid, smoothly interactive, and uncomplicated way of defining a structure for information and adding it very quickly. These days, that is important stuff.





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Lets Get Started

A couple years ago I started a 'blog using Radio. I used it for a while but then I got distracted by work and didn't use my computer much at home for a while. I checked last week and it looks like my subscription has expired.

Google has bought the original blogging company and made it shiny and new. So I figure I will try things out here for a while.

My setup here at home is a Macintosh running latest Mac OS X, any web browser but IE so that my computer stays safe and for compatibility with the broadest selection of web pages (generally I find Safari, Mozilla, and Firefox, the best bets at the moment), and at some point I will probably try using NetNewsWire if it can speak Atom instead of just regular RSS.

My job is in software engineering. This has not changed in a quarter of a century - although the technology sure has! When I first started out, I was writing programs in Pascal, BASIC, assembly language and a dialect of a language called MUMPS (used in hospitals) called "MIIS" which was running on a Data General Eclipse C350 minicomputer and later an Data General MV10000. A half decade later I was programming in C for Intel 80286 and Motorola 68010 microprocessors and a Gould Powernode 9000 running Unix.

Well, Data General, Gould, and MIIS are no more. However, today I still use Unix-like operating systems - and I also use the great grandchildren of those ancient Intel and Motorola microprocessors. If there is a lesson there, it is that the non-proprietary or high-volume low-cost options will be the ones to survive. The expensive, monolithic ones tend to die off or get replaced with something unrecognizable from the originals.

Hopefully, the weblogs we create today will survive.

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