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!

Over the weekend, I did a basic implementation of a Beagle source for Bluefunk. What this means is that you can query Beagle with the name of an artist, song or album and Bluefunk will run a Beagle query for you. There is a screenshot at the Bluefunk site.

It appears that the 0.0.5 release of Beagle doesn’t index music in the same way as a CVS version I was using for testing. Unfortunately the release version doesn’t seem to index the data from the files, it just indexes the file names. The CVS version is also not building for me at the moment, which makes things worse. This means that the Beagle source probably isn’t that useful unless you happened to have the CVS version I used to have! Hopefully the Beagle team will release a 0.0.6 release that fixes these problems.

Bluefunk is going to stay C#, the main reason being one of my friends is trying to port it to the Mac. This seems to be easier if we stick to C#. Major GUI refactoring needed now to allow for a native OSX GUI if possible. Should be, ahem, interesting…