AI Class DOS attack Homework 6

It seems that some student has decided that rather than concentrate on the homework they would simply run a DOS attack on the site to give them time to complete the task.

Now that's what I call dedication.

Siri and AI

Being involved with the AI class and being a career programmer I am very well aware that the machinery behind Siri is nothing but a computer system. However, when one interacts with the computer system using a voice interface that understands so well as Siri does, one is almost obliged to be polite. I found myself automatically saying please or thank-you in the same way as I would if a human being were performing a service on my behalf. Interestingly Siri responds with things like "I'm just doing my job" or "I exist to serve you."

I meet a lot of people in my work and I have to interact with folks from many cultures. Some have different rules for what is polite, what is considered as necessary and what is completely wasteful of the effort of speaking. English children of my generation were taught that "manners maketh man" and were most often brought up with the idea that one should go through the motions of being polite even if you loathed the person with whom you were dealing so the habit of being polite for me has extended to a machine intelligence that seems to be more than it really is.

I spent a while watching a presentation given by Dr Sebastian Thrun who teaches part of the AI class. In the presentation he showed off the Google driverless car and was explaining some of the aspects of the AI system. The car stopped several times for people who had crossed late at a pedestrian crossing and on a couple of occasions, the person gave a little thank-you wave to the car. Obviously the car didn't care but this begs the question of whether it should or not.

Reinforcement learning in AI could very well take notice of the user’s approval as a cue for better understanding the intent of the user or the people with which it interacts. It seems obvious to me that this would work out well but when faced with someone who was mentally ill, aberrant or just plain obtuse a machine system that takes cues from its users could potentially become very weird indeed.

Isaac Asimov invented three clear and precise laws of robotics which many people make the mistake of considering for real robotic systems. They are at first glance precise and unambiguous with seemingly no nuances but we should also remember that Asimov's genius was creating such a set of strong rules with the express intention of finding ways in which the robots in his stories could misinterpret them. I believe that as machine intelligence becomes more competent and more capable of interacting with the human race, the auditing systems that will be needed to ensure that the system doesn't become twisted will be more difficult to create than the intelligent agents themselves.

Omnia 7 Vs iPhone 4S

I dusted off the Omnia 7 yesterday and did a full update to Mango including firmware and OS. When I went to bed last night the Omnia had just come off charge and was 100% full. Apart from showing my wife how lovely the OLED display was, I didn't use the Omnia at-all. It wasn't downloading mail or browsing the net.

During the same period I used my iPhone 4S from a full charge which it got at about 11:30 last night. It got my mail several times during the night, I used Siri to text my son and read his replies, I looked up flights to Malmo for a conference and generally messed about with it.

This morning the Omnia is at 76% charge and the iPhone at 92%.  Samsung have some work to do. The battery for the Omnia is too small. The omnia is physically larger than the iPhone and should have more space for a larger battery but it seems to fail the test in a straight comparison.

Windows Phone 7 debugging on the device...

A few moments ago I posted on this blog that I had updated to Mango and that I needed to get the phone registered for development.

Well, That process took all of twenty seconds. I created an Hello World app from a panorama template and uploaded it to the phone where it is working just fine and all in the space of a few minutes.

Contrast that with my initial experience of putting an application on the Apple iPhone some while ago and the difference is clear.

I find myself in a strange situation. I really like Apple products. I also really like Microsoft products and I don't suppose I have a net bias for one or the other (ha ha pardon the pun) but that experience tells me that when one works with Microsoft developer tools, the process of getting the job done is secondary to the process of deciding what you want to do. This is almost the opposite with Apple development where the walled garden approach extends to the heavily fortified and guarded potting shed that stands in the corner of the garden.

I might just be tempted to ressurrect Trakkus now that I have all three platforms to develop upon.

Windows Phone 7.5

Well, what a rigmarole. I tried to apply a firmware update and bricked my Samsung Omnia 7 phone. Luckily the machine has a crash recovery mode and I managed to find a procedure and all the files for unbricking the poor thing. I will admit though that for a moment I was feeling a bit upset at having trashed my phone. Anyway, all's well that ends well and now I have WP7.5 build on the machine.

The next step is to recognise the phone as my development device and start cranking some Mango code for this puppy.

Siri

So funny. Siri understands "Make it so" as confirmation of a task.


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AI class midterm

Just got my scores for the AI class midterm exam. Well. I'm not pleased with myself because I feel that I put in a lot of effort for a 59% score on the exam. I attempted all of the questions but I missed out on some stuff that I feel I should have been able to get right.

I didn't realise when I started out that I would become so invested in the class but the work put in by the professors and particularly the attitude of Sebastian Thrun whose cheery and encouraging videos show that he is teaching a subject for which he has enormous passion. That makes for a great teacher.

I suppose that I have suffered from the bad luck of having my PC go totally haywire in the last week and being forced to spend a couple of days rebuilding and reinstalling all my stuff again. Still, I blame no one but myself for my mediochre score.

Bob Powell must do better.....

My bad...

The home button on my wife's iPhone 4 died recently leaving her much loved companion a useless cripple. I thought I would be clever and replace the button as I had successfully disassembled and reassembled my iPhone 3G to replace a battery and an earphone socket and replaced a broken back glass on her one.

I ordered the button from some dude on eBay and set to work with my big magnifying glass light and my tinest screwdrivers. After carefully following the instructions and laying all the components out in order of disassembly I finally put the home button in, rebuilt the phone and...

The blasted screen looks like all the ink has run. I'm guessing I screwed up the connections to the oled panel somehow but it has faded colours, lines and bits missing BUMMER!!

I had to go buy an iPhone 4S but I'm cagey, I restored Chrissy's backup to my own iPhone 4 which is only a couple of weeks old and I'm keeping the 4S for "important development work" ;-)

BUSTED! Speed of light gets a ticket!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

Ok, so maybe still not dramatic? Maybe wrong? Maybe someone's huge cock-up like they didn't take account of the rotation of the earth or some dumb thing but this story is set to run and run.

Don't you just love science?

Octogig up and running

So my new PC is up and running and currently installing Windows 8 Developer preview in a virtual machine. The VM has a couple of processors and 2 gigs of RAM dedicated to it as the real motherboard board has hardware virtualization and I can't see any difference between running Win8 in a VM as opposed to directly on a machine.

I had a moment of panic when my old hard-disk wouldn't unlock with the Bitlocker encryption key but I discovered that they don't like working over USB very much so I slapped it on a spare SATA cable and now the old disk from Quadratic is a spare drive on Octogig.

I'm really peeved because all this faffing about made me miss out a question on the AI class homework 5. The I was unable to complete the questions. Ah well, Stuff happens...

Big ugly stupid box

but four cores, 8 gigs and hardware virtualization. Ahh well, I suppose one takes the rough with the smooth, as the bishop said, watching the actress smear the pineapple liberally with butter.

Saying goodbye to QUADRATIC

My original quad core PC...

Metro, a home away from chrome

Looking back, the geekiest thing ever was the introduction of the bevelled edge on a window. Just the merest hint of three-D and every morsel of geek DNA screams out for drop shadows to reinforce the ever present hint of morning sunshine that the window bevel shading suggests. Reading that stuff however is a pain and the use of bevels, drop shadows, halos and so on did nothing more than show off that one had a graphics card capable of colour gradation.

When reading, there is nothing more pleasing to the eye than the impression of a beautifully cut font. The simpler the font is to read, the better. The famous Swiss Font, Helvetica and its rip-offs, Verdana, Segoe et-al are icons of the dying years of the first electronic century. A time when designers ruled and were tasked with creating easy to read signage in busy metropolitan transport systems. Signage that was textually unambiguous and that was easy to understand by the droves of foreign tourists that passed through the great transport halls.

The Bauhaus design movement and the Swiss font sought to bring uniformity and simplicity to advertising so that the message became clearer and the nuance of that message relied not upon the typeface to imply class or style but to simply and firmly deliver the advertising slogan. The printed word became the vehicle upon which rode the fortunes of capitalism. Capitalism’s one true message delivered by capitalism’s one true typeface.

A hypertext document, web-page to the likes of you and me, has the possibility of being clean and simple to read but it requires elements of visual cues which tell the reader that the text is indeed a hyperlink. In the past, because we could, UI designers have reinforced the utility of onscreen controls by making them look like photorealistic representations of real things. Washing machines and other appliances sometimes had buttons moulded from clear plastic with the text pressed into the back of the button and painted or illuminated. We emulated that with gel-buttons.  We like to see buttons that sink down when we press them because that’s the way they work on our Hi-Fi systems or microwave ovens.

Can we express complex user interfaces in a clear and unambiguous manner without resorting to visual gimmickry? Can we return to the UI of GEM and the Apple Lisa while still retaining the ability to deal with situations far more complex than those systems ever dreamed of? In some way, I hope so. Maybe Metro can help with that.

Finally had enough...

of my sick computer. Although its a quadcore, trying to run VMs on it is a pain because it only has 4 gigs of RAM and that's all the board will take. I can't shoehorn more in there so my machine is unexpandable.

I'm going to buy a new motherboard that I can put at least 8 gigs of RAM in and another four core processor to run it then see if I can make sense of running all these VM's Also, I can repurpose my old machine to run Windows 8 full time and maybe make inroads into the Metro stuff.

I'm hoping tht by tomorrow I'll have the new beast up and running.

Opting

Google will serve you advertisments according to your demographic information that it may infer from sites you visit. According to my demographic, I am male. Ok, that's acceptable. My demographic also suggested that I am between 24 and 35, cool, I'm 51 but I am young at heart. I like tech, cars and apparently, Ukrainian and Phillipino girls for fun and friendship. Hmmm... I like them so much that the grinning vacuous wenches seem to appear on every AdWords served page I visit.

Strangely, as I've mentioned in this blog before, I actually believe in the ad-driven process because I really like the idea that I can get my searches for free and that someties I may be presented with an advert that I will follow and even make use of. I've certainly bought software online after clicking through an advert and my purchase of a Honda Jazz (Fit if you're in the USA) car was also influenced by ads after I had spent time looking for details on japanese cars.

I went through the process of redacting my demographic as inferred by Google yet still the wenches appear. In desperation I opted out entirely for a day or so but now, after a pang of guilt and no desire to have to pay Google for searching for my antique Sinclair Spectrum 48K or RM-380Z to complete my collection of retro-computing hardware, I am opted back in so now my new demographic info will accumulate again.

Well Google. I've been married for almost thirty years to a seriously sexy blonde who knocks the spots off you're wenches. Also, as a father of children who are now approaching their late twenties, I can't imagine a worse situation than being in a poor sad old man mid-life crisis situation with a twenty four year old kid who would be as frustrating to talk to as my own children sometimes still are.

If I start to get more and more dating site ads I'll opt out for ever and block your miserable cookies till the day I die. That's a promise.

Apple Vs Microsoft

I recently installed the Roslyn bits on my machine, a process that has totally screwed my PC. My Visual Studio install progressively ceased to function, reinstalling it was no help. Programs run slowly and IE crashes all the time. I discovered that there are no system restore points on my machine! A circumstance I found more than bizarre because I added restore points explicitly before adding several new programs. I have also used the iobit uninstaller which creates restore points automatically before uninstalling anything. Where did they go? Well it seems that Windows 7 has a bug that deletes all restore points when rebooting. Joy. My machine is utterly knackered without the possibility of restoring it to sanity even though I made every effort to protect it.

Here's my experience with my Mac and my iPhone. I wanted to update my mac hard drive so I got an external hard drive, plugged it in and enabled Time Machine on the drive.
Next day, I took the hard drive out of the Mac Mini, Plugged in a new one and booted up. My whole OS, all my files, all my work was restored to the drive in a matter of a couple of hours and I continued as before with a new 500GB hard drive as my root drive.
Later, I deleted a bunch of files by mistake because I don't really know how to drive the Mac apart from as a user. Time machine put them all back instantly, Phew! Today, IOS 5 update over the air effectively "bricked" my phone which had to be restored to factory settings. Less than 10 minutes after the phone came back to life, the cloud backup had been restored and my phone was working perfectly again with all its files and settings intact and I haven't even plugged it in for months.

I have always been and will continue to be a Microsoft user because I make my living with their systems. I am a great exponent of their products, reccommeding them to others all the time but I'm sorry to say, that when the chips are down and the disaster strikes, Microsoft has a great deal to learn from Apple.

Even more Virtual PC

Don't try to install the virtual machine additions. They bluescreen the VM.

More Virtual PC 2007...

Sadly VPC 2007 won't let me install a 64 bit Windows 7 inside it but it seems happy with the x86 version.

Virtual PC 2007 running on Windows 7

In desperation to repair my seriously sick PC and un the situation where I cannot reformat and reinstall my work PC due to the requirement for some paid-for software that I have lost the install CD's for, I decided to use a virtual PC to run Visual Studio which is so busted it won't work at-all these days.

All the problems started when I installed the Roslyn CTP. Flash quit working immediately and now, Visual Studio has progressively failed such that it's unuseable. Windows Forms designers won't load screens or controls, no intellisense etc, etc.

I was inspired to simply set up a virtual machine using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 downloaded from MSDN but after installing it, it refused to run due to compatibility issues with Windows 7. After much head scratching and a bit of thread following I discovered that Virtual PC 2007 will run just fine on Windows 7 as long as you uninstall the Virtual PC update in the programs and features control panel.

It seems that VPC 2007 and this update don't play well together. After removing it I was able to set up a new Virtual PC VHD and OS without further ado.

Metro, the phone - desktop dichotomy

Metro is all about clean and simple design with an engaging experience for the user. I wholeheartedly agree with that principle and applaud the fact that Microsoft has at last brought graphic design to the public face of the operating system. The look and feel of PocketPC / Windows CE et-al was always firmly based on desktop and that was surely a mistake. Small form factors, low resolution screens and intermittent usage demands a clear and concise way of presenting data.

Web design principles are too informal, too loose, for an operating system so although web sites are eminently usable and can be design works of art, the need to provide a consistent experience for users across a broad range of applications does not allow the unrestricted use of web design principles in a phone application.

Windows Phone 7 / 7.5 / Metro answers that requirement in a way that provides both the design simplicity and the ordered operating system expectations of the developer. This means that to design a good Metro application, one must follow the design guidelines.

Interestingly enough, the design guidelines for Metro have been made partly because of hardware design limitations for systems with limited memory and processor power. A Panorama application should have no more than five screen widths of content for example. Joy of joys, reduction of content implies fewer active controls on the page - a great design principle anyway - and also serves to reduce processor load for controls that do more than just display visuals.

How then does Metro translate to the desktop? Well, although the session yesterday was clearly phone oriented, the idea of reduction of complexity, user centric usability and ease of navigation is something missing from desktop applications. As a developer of desktop line-of-business applications I see that there must be a clear decision made whether one chooses to go the more conventional application design route or the Metro route.

On more capable systems such as those having flat panel displays and desktop type processing power, Metro us an ideal choice if, and only if, your application is aimed at consumers. By "consumer" I mean a consumer of services provided by the system, rather than a creator or power user. Metro is a beautiful glossy presentation window for all the complicated stuff you don't need your users to worry their pretty little heads about. Metro should absolutely not be the choice of UI for your next line of business application unless of course you are using untrained chimps to actually run your business.

Morning sessions at Paris WP7

Metro apps use a particular design style. Very clean and minimalist. Having one foot firmly in the print industry, I can relate to the Swiss style of simple graphics and clean typography.

I was just about to suggest to the presenter that the film Helvetica was a good reference for this design style when he asked the audience how many of us had seen it. About four hands went up in a crowd of about a hundred and fifty so a low percentage. Personally, I love that film even if it is a little obscure. If you haven't seen it and you're interested in modern graphic design it's a must-see.

Metro is clearly a response to graphics on a low resolution system. Keeping graphics clean and simple makes for good readability on a small form factor regardless of the fact that the phones are quite capable of running computationally demanding three dimensional games.

The days of gel buttons, drop shadows, bevels and halos are over, at least for the moment and frankly, I breath a quiet sigh of relief at that news.

For the phone, Metro is an obvious solution. Metro on the desktop is great, if you never use your PC for anything other than running the apps behind the super large icons or tiles. Metro is definitely not a system for those who make their living with the computer and who need access to deep functionality.

The starkly clean lines and supersaturated colours don't play well with complex tasks.

I was frankly disappointed at the same old same old of the application structures of all the demos. Once again, we are shown the wrong way to create a solid application. Too much intelligence in graphics with lots going on in the code behind. When will MS realise that demos should reflect the real world requirements of software and actually teach best practices from the outset.

Corrina B's design session was informative and showed of the ease with which an application can be crafted by a practice designer using Blend. Again though, I found her session, while fascinating, to be too full of minutiae and not as clear as the clean design that she was trying to promote.

More from me on this subject tomorrow as the 250 mile drive home was a pip.

Windows Phone 7 day

I'll be blogging and tweeting live today from the Windows Phone dev event at the Microsoft offices in Paris.
Follow me on twitter @bobpowell1



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Allée du Bord de l'Eau,Paris,France

Grrr.. template cockup!

'nuff said!

Maker madness.

How to create a low cost maker lab.

Hardware:
  PC: The one you might be using to read this blog?
  Mac: as above:
  Arduino open source hardware: @ $20 ebay and various vendors (the hardware of choice)
  PIC microcontroller starter kit: @ $40 from Microchip (PIC controllers end up more bang for the buck than ATMEL)
  Parallax 32 bit multicore microcontroller @$25 from Parallax (Serious power but a wierd programming concept. not at all mainstream and needs understanding.)
  Hand-held digital oscilliscope: @$50 from ebay (optional but a really excellent tool to have)
  Soldering iron: $20
  Various small tools, screwdrivers, wirecutters, etc.

Software:
  Microsoft Visual Studio express: Free...
  Arduino development system: Free... (Mac or PC)
  PIC development system: Free with PICKit mentioned above
  Parallax dev kit: Downloads for free from Parallax Inc.

Optional:
  If you can wangle a full version of Visual Studio get the VisualMicro Arduino development addin. This is brilliant BTW.

You can literally get going with programmable electronic coolness for the price of a half-way decent lunch in a restaurant near you someplace.

Fusion of WPF, Arduino and other cool stuff from Jeff Albrecht

Jeff has some cool projects going in the Arduino space, notably SAMI, his Semi Annoying Mechanised Intruder that is a wheeled robot based on Arduino hardware that has various sensors. Watch a video of SAMI here...

Jeff recently adopted the code I created to draw Lissajous figures using WPF on a bitmap buffer to show the ping returns from the ultrasound sensors on his robot.

For me, these sorts of projects are the most facinating. Sitting in a technology space such as Windows or Mac or iPhone or Arduino is one thing but when we can so easily merge and fuse these technologies, especially in the context of the maker and hobbyist culture, we begin to see the possibilities of what a hands on approach to tech can provide.

I really think that the computer revolution is coming full circle because the availability of development equipment that would have cost thousands just a few years ago can be had for literally a few tens of dollars or sometimes for free today.

Interest in hands on programming, repurposing and reprogramming is rising amongst tech savvy young folks again. I can see exiting times ahead for innovation and understanding in the years to come.

AI-Class.

I do believe that the planning portion of this weeks AI class is even more annoying than the logic portion.
I started my career as a teacher and I know that if I presented a class as poorly as Prof Norvig's last couple of efforts I would have lost students in droves. They would have all bogged off to the pub!

Friends of mine...

Great work!

http://www.nemrod-software.com/new/

Congratulations China.

On the successful docking of your space hardware. This is a great achievement and deserves praise.

Shame on the United States and Europe however for imagining that more earthly financial matters preempt the space race. There are no more frontiers on Earth. The only direction for the human race is up and out into the solar system.

Vast resources, more than have ever been dreamed of by all the oil tycoons of this world, oceans of fuel, entire planet masses of metals, precious elements by the billions of tonnes are just sitting there ready for exploitation if only the powers of the world would make the effort to go there and get them.

Complacency and the belief that "we are the greatest" is the worst possible attitude to take in the face of what is coming. The United States and Europe must fight to maintain its power, not over the earth but over the solar system and the universe.

If we leave the planet we must work to ensure that a balanced perspective leaves it with us...

AI class.. not so much fun today

The explanation of propositional logic and particularly the uninformative waffle about first and higher order logic has been the most obtuse of the course so far.
If you want to educate people, don't write a lot of crummy and abstract examples and waffle about them in some little known dialect of Klingon!

AI class. Light dawns..

When I was a little kid I hated math because I couldn't see a use for it. My grandfather, who was an expert toolmaker, began teaching me trigonometry when I was seven or eight and in those days we used a slide rule to do the calculations. The great thing about slide rules is that they give one a sense of accuracy given a magnitude.
Later, when I became interested in computers, I wrote programs that used little math until I became friendly with a chap who showed me that even seemingly simple problems can benefit from some clever mathematical shortcuts.
Later still, I became interested in 3D graphics and wrote a rather cool, even if I do say so myself, 3D modeling program to generate the scene lists for Polyray and POV ray-tracers. I admit that i worked too hard on that problem and although I succeeded, the path was painful and full of nasty kludges.
Now I am taking the Stanford AI class and Doc Sebastian is introducing me to a lot of math I have never needed or even thought I might need one day. I will admit I'm finding it hard and I wish that I had spent more time discovering the math when my brain was young and fresh.
All that being said however, I'm finding this course a really interesting and enjoyable challenge. I have been frustrated from time to time but as I go through it I find myself understanding it more and more and really enjoying the course content.
My poor old neurons are getting a good workout but its definitely fun fun fun!!!