• A new services section describing in detail the consulting services I provide
• A few of my recent presentations
• My demo from the Web 2.0 2007 San Francisco conference (after my hosting provider decided to upgrade from Perl 5.6 to 5.8 I am now able to host this live)
  

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Encode::Guess;

if(@ARGV != 1)
{
    print "Usage: perl $0 <file to analyze>\n";
    exit;
}

my @files = glob($ARGV[0]);

foreach my $file (@files)
{
    open(FILE,$file);
    binmode(FILE);
    if(read(FILE,my $filestart, 500)) {
	my $enc = guess_encoding($filestart);
	if(ref($enc)) {
	    print "$file:\t",$enc->name,"\n";
	}
	else {
	    print "Encoding of file $file can't be guessed\n";
	}
    }
    else {
	print "Cannot read from file $file\n";
    }
}

close(FILE);

1. For profit. Services and software that add value for the customers are to be sold for profit (otherwise I'd make it a non-profit)
2. Open. Where reasonable source and data should be open. What do I mean with reasonable? In regards to source code my goal is to use open-source as much as possible and contribute improvements back to the community. I think open-source works particularly well for infrastructure that is used/useful for everybody (e.g. operating systems, general algorithms like the ones you can find in an algorithm book, algorithms that implement standards). Algorithms that implement the "secret sauce" of a company's main idea into an application are neither reasonable to open-source (see 1.), nor do they necessarily benefit from open-sourcing and neither do they benefit the community (often they are too specialized). I guess in this approach I'm not too far from Google's.
   The same approach applies to data - data gathered from public sources or raw data provided by the user should be openly accessible (user data of course only to the user who provided it). Data derived from this data by the "secret sauce" algorithms however, should not be openly accessible.
3. Green. Any software my company provides should be as power efficient as possible while still reaching the stated purpose. The operations of the company must be run in a sustainable way (reduce, reuse, recycle).
4. Secure. Software needs to follow commonly accepted industry security standards. Data needs to be kept secure to standards.
5. Human Rights. Any projects that the company participates in must respect human rights. It shouldn't be necessary to state this, but I'm afraid nowadays it is. (I will contribute to open source projects that could potentially be used violating these rights. The open-source licenses unfortunately don't usually address this issue.)

s1|s2|s3|...|sn

• All steps create their own processes and get scheduled according to their resource needs by the operating system.
• The steps can be written in different programming languages.
• Steps can be easily exchanged without recompiling.
• Additional filtering steps can be inserted into the chain (provided they obey the data formats).

• Do the steps warrant creating individual processes? (nowadays process creation seems to be relatively cheap)
• Can the data be serialized efficiently into a byte stream? (Note that I don't say character stream here - character encoding in a command shell is a topic for another post - see this older post of mine on this topic).
• Do the performance benefits of exploiting the multiple cores outweigh the additional overhead of process creation and data serialization?
• Does the OS do a better job of using the resources than my code can do? (Considering the OS developers spent years on optimizing this the bet is against you)
• Debugging could be harder.

The Lambda the Ultimate blog had a good discussion on this and the relation to functional programming concepts a little over a year ago.

for($i = 0 ; $i < 1000000 ; $i++)

{

    $array[$i] = some_expensive_function($array[$i]);

}

• it is true that users are in control and have the choice to participate/not participate - one reason why controlled languages likely won't work in this context
• online communities need a balance of the opportunity to create subcultures but also provide a degree of leakage so that people can get to know "familiar strangers" - an interesting question here would be how to create this leakage across multiple languages and of course if this makes sense
• machine translation doesn't have to encode the cultural conventions of the developer - especially statistical machine translation systems are quite language-independent

Just a case in point for what I wrote in my last post. Over in the Spiegel magazine an article (in German) about the Darpa Grand Challenge where more civilian oriented technology beat out more military oriented technology. 

Via Wired News: War-Zone Test for Babel-Fish Tool. This seems to be a good field test for integrating compling components to create something like a babel fish, but for me this still falls in the category "shoot first, ask questions later" category. I do not believe war is or should be the mother of invention. We need to find ways to use these technologies to avoid conflicts.

Via Tim O'Reilly I found a reference to a recent George Dyson talk on Turing's Cathedral. It talks about how von Neumann's model in computing is going to be displaced by Google/search engines because "All the answers in the known universe are there, and some very ingenious algorithms are in place to map them to questions that people ask." and this is going to help avoid having to have addressing and make computing more robust.

I don't quite see this yet - there is still a huge semantic gap between what is found by search engines and what a computer can use for automatic processing. Every search engine user does this semantic work when browsing through the search results and picking the links that most likely contain answers to what the user "meant" with the query.

Which reminds me that I should probably get back to working on the search engine that is due as homework in two weeks ;-)

Nevertheless a good read and source of an insightful quote from Turing regarding AI: "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children, [...] Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."