Shoechicken: AI Learning Agent 2
In the previous post I mentiond that I will be working on a side project called shoechicken. I was invited by my friend,James Horsley, to work on the project.
Background:
James Horsley and Mike Wootten (He has not setup his blog yet) started the project on Source Forge in 2005. The first implementation of the project was written in Java. They also wrote a paper on the concept of shoechicken with the assistance of a professor at University of West Florida that specializes in artificial intelligence. The paper was presented at the International Society for Computers and Their Applications in 2006. If you are interested, the paper can be found here.
What is Shoechicken?
As posted on shoechicken's website...
Shoechicken is an intelligent system for rating RSS and Atom news content based on user preferences. The system builds a user profile implicitly by observing user interactions with news content. Shoechicken rates incoming content based on user preferences, and adapts to both long term and short term changes in preferences. The system is interoperable such that it can supply rated content for use by any news aggregator.
Where is Shoechicken going?
Instead of continuing the implementation in Java, we are going try to do it in Ruby using Rails. This also means we will be starting from the ground up. Why Ruby? None of us have done much in Ruby so this gives us an opportunity to learn a new language. Oh yeah, this application is meant to conquer the world ;)
New Home
I bought a new laptop recently, why not a new blog? I have been thinking about hosting it myself, so I figured this would a good time for the switch. One of the primary reasons for the move is because I will be working on a side project called Shoechicken. Shoechicken is an AI learning agent. I will talk more about the concept of Shoechicken in the next post. The focus of this blog will be mostly an archive of my Shoechicken journey. The project will be a distributed Rails project, so I will also document my Ruby and Rails experiences. I have never worked on a Ruby project before, so this will be good learning experience.
Hello Mac 1
This is my new toy.
My Dell laptop recently died, so I was back in the market for another laptop. I had never owned a Mac before, but I had always wanted to. After doing some research, the MacBook seemed to fit my needs.
After using it for a few hours, I felt right at home. It has the best of both worlds, UNIX and Windows. I am a big fan of UNIX-like Operating Systems, but I have not had time to play around with one for quiet some time now. Mostly it is because I have been working in a pure Windows environment in my current project.
One of the first things on my Mac checklist is to get Rails running on my new Mac. I found a great tutorial on setting up a Rails development environment. It contained the following programs:
The directions are explicit and easy to follow. I would highly recommend it if you are trying to get Rails running on your Mac.
I downloaded Textmate once I got all the Rails components installed. It just felt right to develop Rails using Textmate :) In fact, I am currently blogging using Textmate right now.
In the past, I had a lot of problems with my Dell laptops (two to be exact). They usually turned into paper weights after about a year. I hope my luck will change with my new Mac. Only time will tell.
