I’ve spent a couple of weeks reading about various methods for document classification, keyword recognition and other methods of automatically working out what documents are about. It seems that my initial idea was over-ambitious. I had intended to take groups of weblog posts and work out what each was about and then present the user with a list of the topics found. This would mean that they could choose the topics that interested them rather than having to read all the posts to find the interesting ones.

I sent a girl a text message; these are the times when you learn what the phrase a watched pot never boils really means.

update : true to form, a reply comes when I’m eating lunch in the other room!

Someone asked about it, so here’s the “I’m not going to explain terms, no nonsense” version. The idea is to combine a natural language parsing engine with an RSS/Atom feed reader and see what useful things come out the other end.

I want to see if it is possible to try and cluster feed posts into topics, where the topics are chosen automatically via the contents of the posts themselves. The NLP engine will hopefully aid in pulling out the interesting bits of feeds. For example, the nouns are probably the most likely items to be used as topics, so we can try to pull them.

I downloaded and have now installed Mono 1.1.4 — the recommended development version. I’ve also got the newest gtk# installed. In combination the two allowed me to compile and install the svn version of gst# (finally). What this means is that I now have a cutting edge Mono stack, pretty much.

I have a rather messed up stack too, however: some of my stuff is from tarballs, the rest from Portage (Gentoo’s package manager). I think my best bet is to remove and Portage Mono packages and build all my Mono stuff from tarballs. I generally like to have Mono very up to date — far beyond what Portage has — so this seems like a good idea.

Evesdrop on your childrens’ l33t h4×0r talk and discover that they’re all terrorists! Or is that t3rror157s?

Microsoft shows you how. I find it interesting that the page is in the security section of the site… Stop the kids before they pwn the 1nt3n3t with their l33t 5ki11z!