For those following along, misspellings are critical. If you missed the boat, then SMCs are not necessary.
I wish I could quote a friend of mine by name here. "The fat man walks in the moonlight." I'm guessing he'll smile at that one.
(preview: personal perspectives and some forecasts)
The termites have really been pushin' it. If you don't know of the termites, start at the beginning of my writings here and cursor forward through each entry until you find their definition. I've been getting feedback from my readership (there are now 3 readers) and I'm told that I should slow down a little bit. Now the termites think that my rabbit holes are not deep enough. Hey, TERMITES, get your own blog (I hate that word). And I'm really catching heck for my math. I hate living in the second quartile.
Everyone who is anyone is at the big Tech Ed bash in Orlando. "I WON'T BE THERE". On my application form, it asked what languages I know and I responded binary; you know, 0's and 1's (the 1 was invented right before I started in computers). Perhaps the conference organizers were concerned that that language did not end in .Net. Next time I'll respond with binary.Net, on that machine Eniac, yeah, Eniac.Net, that was what I worked on in at my last consulting gig. Besides, I looked through the schedules and didn't see anything titled "Code Examples for Adding Really Big Numbers in Whidbey", "Using .Net 2.0 to construct side channel attacks on Elliptic Curve Cryptography", "Innovative Techniques in calculating Ramsey Numbers using ASP.Net 2.0" or "Replacement Techniques for Changing Vacuum Tubes in your Windows 2003 Server Cluster in High-Availability Environments During a Power Outage". I put in a request to see if anyone would speak on these topics at the next Tech Ed. Of course, I made certain to change that last request to cover Longhorn as well.
Since I'm not inverted, I'm going to have a little fun this week. I had three failures on my home network, recently. I have a *few* servers running on two Gigabit Ethernet backbones here for the typical stuff that guys do in basements: GP and EC models, some *tiny* BizTalk 2004 simulations, a *little* financial data munching (new additions to the stack includes an extra dose of Raid-5 1.6TB), some number theory straight out of the bible and a whole lotta other stuff. The three failures all seemed to disappear this weekend.
Kid update: My daughter has her driver's license (temps). She's 15 and 1/2 years old. She doesn't mind my using her name here, but I normally would mind doing so. She said something today that the "dadness" in me has to repeat it. Her name is Elizabeth. She prefers Liz. Anyways, it's 80+ degrees in Milwaukee and sunny. It's late in the day and Liz and I have been doing some driving, cause that's what dads do with daughters at this age. She had just gotten a new nose ring for her right nostril (not septum, I won't allow it) and we had just had a fun pizza dinner at a local pizza dive on the East Side (great food, college atmosphere) and we're on our way back home. For those not from Milwaukee, Lake Michigan is a natural resource treasure and provides for spectacular views. We had just turned the corner and entered the roundabout at the North Shore Lighthouse on the hill near St. Mary's Hill Hospital. The lake was in the foreground about 700 yards away; the sun was in the background. The waves were splashing and the water was a beautiful dark blue. Liz was driving, but we were stopped in traffic. She turned to me and said, "It's a Dad and Liz kinda day today." Teenage daughters and their dads, what more can I say? This is going to be a great summer.
Forecast: I have heard that we're supposed to have a blizzard. Granny's joints are aching, so it must be so.
The lower cased one just posted up some coolness again here. The full source is here and a video(!) can be found here.
Let's see if I can understand the significance of this. This is an application that runs on Windows MCE as a Hosted HTML application. It uses SALT (the eventual replacement for VoiceXML). Using this app, the lower cased one can speak and command the MCE. He demonstrates navigating his blog with speech using SALT and the MCE in his video.
Give this a look.
When I started working with GAs some 13 years ago, I picked up the seminal books of the time: "Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems" (ANAS) by Dr. John H. Holland and "Genetic Algorithms in Search Optimization and Machine Learning" (GASOML) by Dr. David E. Goldberg. Holland's book is thick with math (you'd think that I'd love this), but I found as an introductory book that it did not provide for a practical treatment of this discipline. It jumped in head first into theory (somewhat as I do in many of my posts here). I now find Holland's book a pleasure to review and revisit on a regular basis.
The book that gave me a formal introduction to GAs, including a gentle introduction, was Dr. Goldberg's book. So after 13 years of this stuff, I decided to email Dr. Goldberg and thank him for the groundbreaking work he has done. I'm certain that I'm not the first nor the last to do this. Goldberg, Holland, Koza and many others paved the way in GA and GP as we know it today. I received a great response in return and am happy to find him both approachable and thoughtful.
Dr. Goldberg has been blogging for some time now and you may find him here. He is affiliated with the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (home of the Fighing Illini, the bane of my Wisconsin Badgers in basketball) and has a great deal of resources available for the GA professional, academic and practitioner alike. I've noticed that he has a recent book available as well "The Design of Innovation" that may be found here. I've ordered it and will post a review after a thorough read as time permits.
If you wish to be competent in GA and have no formal exposure in this discipline, GASOML is a MUST. If you are a math guy or gal, ANAS is the foundation for this discipline.
His recent post here, leads me to believe he has a better grasp of both GAs and the ability to unwind than I. I'm curious if there is noodle salad on board . . .