My First Mac

So I finally broke down and bought the Mac mini I'd been eyeing for several months now. I originally planned on buying it as soon as I returned from my trip to Mississippi, but hesitated because of the WWDC-announced migration to Intel CPUs. But since I was eager to set up my 'Media Center Mac' I decided to go ahead and get the damn thing.

I drove up to the Apple Store in the Christiana Mall because I don't like waiting for shipping and the store has a nice military discount. To get the most out of the mini as a media center computer I elected to go with the so-called 'ultimate' package. Basically that's the mini with all the options: faster CPU, more RAM, bigger hard drive, SuperDrive, Bluetooth, Airport, yada yada...

Mac mini 'Ultimate'
1.42GHz PowerPC G4
512MB DDR333 SDRAM
80GB Ultra ATA drive
4x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Internal Bluetooth + AirPort Extreme Card

After the discount, that came out to $795 (no sales tax in Delaware). I added an Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mouse set for about $100 more. They were also offering $100 off any printer with the purchase of a Mac, so I picked up the HP PSC 1610 All-in-One ($29 after rebate).

So far, I'm really happy with it. As I expected from Apple, it was very easy to set it up out of the box. The only difficulty I came across was getting it to look right on my Samsung 32'' DynaFlat HDTV. I had to buy a DVI cable from Best Buy on the way home ($49), but I had a hell of a time getting the settings right. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that this model HDTV is not 16:9 widescreen, but I finally got it working on 720 x 480.

Connecting it to my home network was a breeze. I transferred all of my music and photos over from my laptop into iTunes and iPhoto. I've used iTunes for Windows before and I've always liked it. iPhoto, however, feels a bit clunky to me. It won't let me organize my photos the way I want to, but maybe I'm just not familar enough with the program yet or OS X doesn't like my hierarchical way of thinking.

Since then I've been going download-crazy, grabbing tons of cool videos from GrouchyMedia.com and QuickTime movie trailers. Video plackback quality is excellent on the HDTV- exactly what I was hoping for.

I haven't used a Macintosh regularly since before Windows 95, and I have to say I am as impressed with OS X Tiger as I thought I would be. Finder is so fast its scary. Safari is ok, and its growing on me, but I might just have to try out Firefox for Mac. The interface is simple yet beautiful, but I'm going to have to get used to only having the one mouse button. All in all, OS X lives up to my expectations and I'm eager to tinker around with it.

All in all, the Mac mini has integrated nicely into my home theatre. I wanted to be able to watch videos, browse photos, play music and surf the web on my TV while sitting on my couch with a wireless keyboard and mouse, and the Mac mini does all these things very well. Not a bad little setup for less than $1000.

Now I just have to figure out how to watch TV and use the Mac at the same time...

Natural Language Processing in the Global War on Terrorism

I came across a NY Times article recently discussing software used by the CIA to scour the web for terrorist messages.

The company behind the sofware, Attensity Corporation, has developed tools which can take the near-infinite masses of unstructed data on the Internet, and turn it into meaningful information. They've developed algorithms that can parse sentences, extracting the subject, object, verb, etc. enabling the computer to process the plain text and take contextually relevant actions.

This type of software, teaching a computer to read and extract read information from text, is exactly the sort of project I have in mind. I guess all those grammar lessons spent diagramming sentences in elementary school were actually important.

JWords Alpha Release

I am pleased to announce that the first alpha testing version of the JWords Java Interface for WordNet has been released under the BSD License.

JWords is a simple and easy to use Java interface for the WordNet 2.0 command line tool. It provides classes and methods to create and use JWord objects containing the information stored in the WordNet lexical reference system.

I created JWords because I wasn't happy with any of the other Java APIs available for WordNet. I plan on using WordNet as the primary lexicon for autosummary software I am creating, and I needed to create a custom-tailored interface to suit my needs. By treating words as objects, and using the WordNet command line tool to handle the burden of reading the database files, JWords offers a simple and versatile way to access a wealth of lexical information.

JWords is available for download at SourceForge.net http://sourceforge.net/projects/jwords/

Javadoc documentation for JWords is available here.

Teaching Computers to Read

While trailing far behind in skills such as long division, the average three year old human is a much better reader than even the most sophisticated computer program. But for how long?

Two professors at RPI are working on software that can read text and answer questions based on the relevant information. They hope to one day develop a system which can analyze and act upon real-time information "by either reading or listening to spoken instructions."

The difference between these guys and me? They've got a sweet grant from DARPA.

Semantic Knowledge from Google

Again, people out there are stealing my ideas. Where the heck did I put my tin foil hat?

As posted on Slashdot, a team in Amsterdam is working on an unsupervised system that can perform Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google. This is quite similar to the idea I have of building a much more broad and extensive knowledge base for AIML bots using a web crawler with built-in semantic analysis. Except these guys are limiting the scope of their project to distinguishing "between colors and numbers, and [...] 17th century Dutch painters."

Mac mini TV

That new Mac mini has got the wheels in my head spinning. I think if I hooked it up to my HDTV it would make for a pretty sweet media center computer.

I had been thinking about getting a Mac for a while. I've toyed around with OS X a bit, and I'd really like to get to know it inside and out. At the same time, a lot of my friends have been setting up dedicated media center PCs, and I was considering following suit. Now I just might be able to combine both ideas into one.

I can run a DVI cable from the Mac mini to my Samsung HDTV. Add the optional internal Bluetooth module and wireless keyboard & mouse, and I'll be able to have a great OS X experience on a 32'' screen from the comfort of my sofa.

1.25GHz Mac mini: $499
Bluetooth add-on: $50
Wireless keyboard & mouse set: $99
DVI cable: $99

Total cost: $747

I should be able to swing that no problem, but I think I'll wait until 'the first half of 2005' for Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger before I take the plunge. I'm still planning on building the RAID 1 development platform for the project, but that's on hold for now while the paychecks roll in and the prototype software comes together.

I guess this makes me a pro?

Finally got a chance to write (well, edit actually) some code at work today. Besides some freelance web design I did a while back, this was the first time I was paid for programming.

In all reality, it really wasn't that big of a deal. Last week, I was asked to take a look at some PHP for a web interface to a pretty high-profile database we use. There was a bug somewhere that was generating incorrect entries. Today I got a chance to poke around in there, and I quickly isolated the problem and wrote a very elegant fix if I do say so myself.

I showed it to the database administrator, and she was visibly excited when she realized it was working properly. Now she won't have to go in and manually edit every single new entry.

I showed it to my supervisor, and he was pretty impressed. He doesn't have much experience in this area, but he had had another CS grad working on the problem for at least a couple of weeks, to no avail. When I showed him exactly how simple my solution was, he remarked that the other guy will be kicking himself when he sees it.

I honestly didn't think it was that I did anything special, but I certainly impressed a few people. What I did fixed an annoying problem in a pretty important system we use. Hopefully, this will lead to more oppurtunities for me to work directly on projects like this in the future.

And besides, it's pretty sweet to think that code I helped to write is running on a military system. :)