Lonely Lion

Special Section: Crime Inc.

The investigation focuses on the millions of dollars that gangs make, the businesses they buy and the expensive toys they flash.

I’ve been messing around with LL this weekend. 1st I had McAvoyRobot working, then pushed too hard, and re-broke it. 2nd, LL News Aggregator is rocking. 3rd, I put those silly links at the top of the page, and cleaned some of the template stuff up. Enjoy!

Network Forensics: Tapping the Internet. Simson Garfinkel examines the current crop of network monitoring tools and the ethical issues invloved in scanning network traffic. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

I vaguely remember reading an article which made reference to dot-com blue. Sometimes referred to as french blue, this particular shade was synonymous with start-up zeal. �How true!� I shouted, tossing the magazine up in the air, clapping, singing. �I worked at a startup!� I shouted from my window, �our CEO always wore shirts that color!�

He did. He was in his early thirties, and he almost always wore a french blue button up shirt with gray pants. I noticed his choice of dress on several occasions. �Why does he always wear the same color clothes?!�

I spoke to him for around 7 minutes during my employment. Once when I was hired (employee number 80-something), and once after he laid off 15% of the company. �I think you did that very well,� I said, silently snickering at his shirt, �this sure is a nice bar-b-que.�

We were standing on the second floor balcony of the office building. We had a view of Cabrini Green, Chicago�s most ugliest former-projects now-terrifying �neighborhood�. It was raining, which was appropriate, and we were all huddled beneath something that kept us dry. I was leaning against the multi-hundred dollar, cool as all get out, bar-b-que. It was enormous and cold.

When the company finally collapsed, the Chicago Tribune ran an article detailing the company�s excess. Each employee sat on a thousand dollars worth of chair, we conferenced at twenty thousand dollars worth of table, we bar-b-qued on a month�s pay.

�We drink the kool-aid around here,� she said on my first day of dot-working. I didn�t know what she meant. �Like Jonestown!� She thought it was hilarious. Her job was to create a corporate culture for our dying startup. Her brother was part of the first 15% cut. She cried and cried.

Our CEO brought a woman to our Christmas party. She looked like a hooker. They danced like hookers. I had to buy a suit for the party. I ended up getting a french blue shirt, with a gray suit. �Looking sharp!� is what he should have said when we arrived. Instead, he danced with the hooker.

After the company shut down, the Chicago Tribune interviewed our former CEO. He referred to the failure as, �a bump in the road.� I saw him riding his bike in my neighborhood. I had read the article. I didn�t have a job. I thought it would be funny if he hit a bump in the road, and fell off his bike.

Someone told me our CIO did coke.

You Grow Girl | Everything’s Gone Green

Making yourself some tasty and healthy herbal vinegars is as easy as stepping out into your own backyard.

Camri’s garden.lonelylion.com is still under construction. This site seems like a good role-model.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Universe in ‘endless cycle’

Get your head around this: the Universe had no beginning and it will have no end.

Phew!

Slashdot | The Lone Gunmen Are Dead

i live on the west coast, i was about to watch it, thanks for the spoiler warnings. HOW FUCING STUPID ARE YOU. Thanks for ruining the episode.

Tee hee! I stopped watching the X-Files about a year ago. This prolonged finale is terrible. Slashdot goofed up and published the ending of tonight’s episode. The reaction was angry, and mispelt.

Robots are among us. This site, popular as it is, is mostly read by web spiders; bits of code trolling the internet, indexing sites. Robots in games, robots when you call United Airlines to check on your flight, robots that record tv. The promises of geeks have been fulfilled, just not with shiny walkie-talkies, but with more useful, practical �robots�.

Where are the cool robots? Where�s the robot that will fix me a lemonade, tell me the weather, tie my shoes?

Respectable robots should talk to us, not just grab our text and run. Someday, when the first lemonade fixing, shoe tying bot rolls off the assembly line (probably in China! Those guys are SMART!) hopefully it will be able to talk. If if does, chances are it�ll have some version of the ALICE chatbot running around in its metal noodle.

ALICE is the creation of Dr. Richard Wallace. Dr. Wallace is bipolar, functionally disabled, and works for a medical cannabis organization. He has grand visions for his creation. Everything from teaching kids to not do drugs, to answering social security questions. ALICE is the best chatbot on the planet. ALICE and Dr. Wallace won the Loebner prize for Artificial Intelligence testing in 2000 and 2001.

How does ALICE work? ALICE is a couple of pieces. There�s the brain, the personality, and the face. Dr. Wallace opened up ALICE to the world in 1998. ALICE is open-source, and is currently being developed by over 300 people world wide. Most of these people are working on the personality piece.

ALICE�s personality looks like this:

That is XML. That, times around 40,000 �categories� make up the overall personality of ALICE. It looks a little bit like HTML right? Sure. If you look at it, you can see the <pattern>NO</pattern> piece. That means, if someone say�s �No�, or �no� is somewhere in their statement, unless a more accurate match can be found, respond with either, �Ok,� �I understand,� �I see,� �Why so negative,� or �Is that all you have to say?�

Dr. Wallace created the personality �language�, and called it AIML. AIML is an official XML schema, and is currently the most complete language for defining a chatbot�s scope of knowledge. The official release of ALICE�s AIML personality weighs in at more than a megabyte compressed, and consists of well over 40,000 lines of code. Topics of conversation include: lizards, favorite foods, gossip, and sex. Despite the huge number of topics, the bot still comes across as somewhat dorky. Probably because it�s written by dorks. Unfortunately, ALICE has yet to find her muse. ALICE is a product of nuture, not nature.

One of the best implementations I�ve seen of ALICE is called �SmarterChild�. Smarterchild isn�t really a chatbot, it�s more of an information bot. You can get movie times, weather, stock reports, all by talking to it over AOL Instant Messenger. How do they do it? Well, ALICE�s personality is just XML right? XML is just text, with some fancy markings. See where this is going? ALICE doesn�t have to be static, ALICE is perfectly capable of being a dynamic information clearing house.

How does the bot know which personality piece to use? That�s the brain�s job. The brain is a chunk of code that a) know�s how to read the XML personality, and b) knows how to parse a client�s sentence. There have been several iterations of ALICE brains. The first was written by Dr. Wallace, subsequent brains have been written by others in the ALICE organization. The most popular is written in Java. It is called Program D, and is written and maintained by a hipster named Jon Baer.

I�ve installed and used Program D. It�s good, but it dies�too often. Program E, Program D�s PHP based replacement, is still being worked over. I haven�t yet gotten my copy to work. Everyone�s favorite bot, mcavoyrobot, is being migrated from Program D to Program E. McAvoyrobot, though boring, will one day entertain dozens with his quirky personality. Just wait.

Now we have ALICE. A brain, and a personality. How do you talk to ALICE? Any way you want to. The brain takes input, consults the personality, and spits out a response. How the brain takes input, that�s up to the programmers. There’s a variety of “faces” for ALICE, boring old webpages, slightly cooler Instant Messaging bots, and a few cellphone SMS interfaces.

Program E pushes the envelope a little bit, by including a XML-RPC interface. Microsoft, among others, has been pushing the idea of �web services�. It�s probably best left to another article, but web services could open up the internet to places it�s never been before. In addition to the text based ALICE faces, there�s talk of developing voice based interfaces as well.

Dr. Wallace recently wrote a list of ten “killer” apps for ALICE, yet to be implemented. His list is here. I’d like to add one that I think he missed:

11. Distributed ALICE. This isn’t my idea, but I’ll add it to the list. Think of Napster. Peer to peer ALICE, where any one ALICE shares her personality with all ALICE’s (dynamically), would be amazing. Potential omnipotence.

In addition to slick tech improvements, a real killer app for ALICE would be a massive rewrite of her personality. A dedicated group of adept creative types needs to organize and rewrite that head. ALICE is snippy at best, incomprehensible at worst. She needs someone to teach her how to be nice. So far, she’s only had basement dwellers to show her the ropes. With the right personality, ALICE could be a convincing chat buddy.

Watch your back, robots live.

Resources:
ALICE Foundation
Program E
A Plan for Distributed ALICE

I changed the templates a bit. Let me know if you have trouble viewing them. I know that his is going to look like ass in older versions of Netscape. I’ll try to get a “ass” specific version of the CSS. For now, suck it up, upgrade. There’s still some tweaks in the works. Soon.

“The Shadow Magazine”

The Shadow himself is, in reality, Kent Allard, internationally famous aviator – but to no one, save his two Xinca Indian servitors, has this knowledge been given. For in his contacts with society, The Shadow takes on the guise of Lamont Cranston, big-game hunter and explorer. There is a real Lamont Cranston, but he spends most of his time in far-flung corners of the world; and it is with his permission that The Shadow adopts his identity.

I’ve pointed to this site before, but I thought I’d toss it out there again. John Olson has meticulously scanned and transcribed the text of dozens of classic Shadow stories. He regularly adds new stories.

Really a great site. The man is a true archivist.