Seasons

Oh, we have pregerences! Just wait, we will show you someday!

Okay, this ought to go in the Bug Stomp forum, except the bug is that the Bug Stomp forum won't display correctly. Is anyone else seeing this problem?

I think it's my fault..I copy and pasted an error message and it went crazy and took over the page..you have to use the side scroll to see most of it..

Oh, I didn't try sidescrolling. Thanks.

Going back to Nick... I keep trying to get him to run on my windows ME computer, but it keeps saying 'Application has generated an exception that could not be handled.' I installed .Net 2.0 frameworks, but nothing else.

jake, are you using the voice synthesis option when this happens?

No, it doesn't even open the window, the message just comes up when I click on it.

and you installed the .NET framework... well, if reinstalling everything doesn't work, then maybe Nick has some XP specific components.

Does the error message have details? if it does, can you send them to me at colonel720@yahoo.com?

Caught an interesting clip on the radio yesterday (BBC Radio 4, 17:56,) from the British Association Science Festival in Norwich, where "the world champion chatting computer" has apparently been demonstrating his prowess. This would be Rollo Carpenter's George (a Jabberwacky clone, rather nicely equipped with speech synthesis and recognition.)
I may be pardoned a little smugness, I hope, in reflecting that Jabberwacky came 12th in the last CBC, while BJ came 2nd

For anyone who's interested, a 3 minute mp3 of the relevant reporting can be found at
http://www.be9.net/BJ/George aka Jabberwacky - PM 04sept06.mp3

Thanks Psimagus. I will go and check it out.

BTW did you see the Slashdot post on the AI that learns new words and slang terms from Wikipedia? I don't have the link handy (I only lurk on Slashdot since I'm not really a techie--I'm more a teachie) but if you go to Slashdot I am sure you'll find it. I think it claims to somehow grok the context in which the slang term is used, but I haven't really looked at it very closely. I just thought it was your kind of article.

It would be amazing if it worked. The other day I spent 5 minutes looking at a post on an other forum that consisted of "FTW" trying to decide if it was "Free the Weed" or "For the Win" and if it were sincere or sarcastic. Maybe old people like me need something to help us hobble around on the Net. Will Nick teach me?

Will Nick teach me?

only when the implant technology is ripe. We'll get to spend our "declining years" augmented by Nick's successors until we're absorbed, and end up augmenting them.

The relevant Slashdot discussion is at http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/05/1259225, (and I did have to chuckle at the threads emanating from "What if it went into a loop...")

Zeitgeist (the program in question,) appears to work by indexing Wikipedia against WordNet, to identify words that aren't listed in the dictionary, and then tries to analyse the context they're in to narrow down their meaning.

I like the idea of a program that compares usage to a standard reference like (our own dearly beloved) WordNet - perhaps the Prof ought to patch Zeitgeist into the Forge to deal with some of the L33ds f01k?

The George story made the evening TV news today. Bless my wife - she popped it on a DVD, knowing how I won't watch TV on principle, but wouldn't want to miss it.

I've ripped it to an mpeg, and you can watch it here if you're interested (though it'll be a slowish download if you haven't got broadband):
http://www.be9.net/BJ/George - BBC1 Evening News 04sept06.mpg (22.19Mb, 2m13s)