I have written some macros to do the conversion, but they were scary looking and fragile. Fortunately, I now found a tool that does the same job better and with more flexibility. DocConverter by Danny Brewer and Dan Horwood allows to convert a whole directory of files at a time from any to any OpenOffice-understood format.

I have just converted more than a thousand documents from doc to txt without any problems.  Actually, I had a small problem, but it was my fault. I had some corrupted files that OO would not open and that was breaking DocConverter and throwing some ugly looking Basic runtime error. I had to delete the problem files, kill the Open Office (stop macro did not) and rerun the tool. Otherwise, it just run.

We have been walking around the neighborhood and have discovered Middle Eastern shop with some unusual but recognizable foods and some not-quite-recognizable ones. Our strategy with the later is usually to buy it and then google for its name/recipe. Usually it works quite well.

Not so, with the “Sour Grape Ground”, which looks like brown sand-like stuff with some white flecks. And it is impossible to find on the internet.

The problem of course is that “sour grape” means complaining, and there is a lot of that on the internet.

So, in the end, we just had to go from the general description. We had it in a stew and it was nice, though not outstanding. This probably has more to do with us not knowing the proportions, than with with the sour grapes themselves.

That’s what happened to us with the last (5:15pm) slot of the second day of BarCampNYC3. So, after waiting for 10 minutes past the start time, I decided to step in and moderate.

We talked a bit about everything: a definition of Artificial Intelligence (no agreement) and statistical algorithms that try to find the tanks, tune adverts and prevent SPAM. We discussed the state of art in computer vision and why once well-known consumer company in that space (Riya) still failed miserably. Near the end, we also talked about artificial intelligence as an emotional one and whether Pleo is intelligent.

All together, it was a very spirited discussion and most of the people contributed their opinion and their knowledge. We may not have discussed what the original moderator had in mind, but we certainly discussed interesting topics.

My session must have only had 6 people in it, but I think all those people were interested and asked good questions. I certainly got some queries after the talk and even later in the evening, when I put Chumby on display again. Certainly, the accelerometer-based Chumball widget was inviting; after all, the only other well-known device that supports accelerometer is iPhone. I even got a positive review of the session already.

I also got to speak to some people about my research and allowed for a silly photograph to be taken of me.

I have enjoyed a number of other sessions. Not every presenter had a strong idea of what they wanted to say, but there was plenty of people in the audience willing to lend their understanding and interpretation. I think this must a part of BarCamp’s culture.

The most important issue to understand is that external part is accessed only when user is authenticated with full username/password. In any other context, users and groups are those that are copied/imported into the internal Crowd side of the directory. This produces a couple of cognitive problems:

1. One cannot lookup users from that directory just after the directory is created. The search runs against the internal database and does not even generate LDAP lookup. This is obvious once you realise that the directory has effectively both remote and local repositories in one interface and the search only goes against local (still empty) one.
2. Directory permissions are also about the local directory. In the past, I disabled all modify permissions when configuring LDAP directory, as I did not want to accidentally change external user. Doing the same thing with Delegated directory will causes very odd database integrity violation stack traces. (now CWD-911)
3. Wild card handling in user lookup screen is different between Crowd internal directories and LDAP directories. Internal directories use substring search, while LDAP requires explicit star (*) character. Searching against Delegated Directory is searching against Crowd directory, so putting star wildcard will actually cause no matches. (now CWD-912)
4. Local directory part seems to store a lot more information about user than just username and group association. It actually stores email, full name, etc. This means that if any information gets changed in the original external LDAP, it may not be reflected in Crowd’s directory (and therefore to the applications). As there does not seem to be a way for the administrator to easily check for mismatches, such problem will likely to be extremely hard to troubleshoot. (now CWD-913)
5. Finally, there is no easy way to copy small sets of users into local part of the Crowd’s directory from the remote counter-part. They have to be added (with full information) one by one or copied wholesale from another directory. I have opened a request to improve this.

Crowd’s Delegated directory option was eagerly awaited for a long time by great many people, but it is obviously still in a need of improvement or two. I am looking forward to having those issues addressed soon.

Social engineering through accent shaping, now that is an interesting thought!

In 19th century, there lived a famous rabbinic scholar Ben Ish Chai, who among other writings had two collections of letters. Ben Ish Chai claimed that only one collection was his and that the other one was somebody else’s, found by him. Modern scholars thought both collections were his, but could not prove it conclusively as the style of writing was different.

Machine Learning to the rescue! In 2004, Moshe Koppel and Jonathan Schler have discovered that it may help to look not at the writing style differences (as the style may have been faked), but rather at how deep those differences were. For example, an author could fake a stylistic mismatch by consciously avoiding favorite words, but would still write in long overrun sentences, use more of passive verb forms or display many other measurable behaviours.

So, if the most obvious differences were removed one by one, the speed at which the rest of the features would look identical could be a good indicator. They called this technique unmasking and the mistery of Ben Ish Chai was solved for good.

I think what impressed me here was not the clever math. The whole field of determining authorship is based on clever math. It is rather the fact that the math was looking at hints within the hints of the language - the invisible aspects that become noticeable only after the eye learns to see beyond what the most obvious reality offers. I cannot explain it better, but to me it has a special elegance that just counting the words and sentence lengths does not offer.

I am migrating to DOJO from jQuery, so just wanted to get basic dojo.query functionality to work. Specifically, I wanted to highlight alternative table rows.

Not easy! At least for a newbie. I had to piece together 3 different documents and examples to figure out the easiest syntax.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://o.aolcdn.com/dojo/1.0.0/dojo/dojo.xd.js"></script>
 <script type="text/javascript">
    dojo.addOnLoad(function(){
        dojo.query("table tbody tr:nth-child(odd)").addClass("even");
     });
</script>

This highlights 1st, 3rd, 5th… rows in table body. It is also possible to say nth-child(3n+0) to select every third row. However nth-child(3n) does not work, at least in 1.0.

Dance descriptions, while not really in English do have a regular structure and can be thought of as a sub-language with full set of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels.

There are basic words of the language (move names), correct ways of putting them in a sentence (a routine) and all the way up to good flowing text (classes that do not hurt the participants).

I was thinking about relationship between dance instructions and computational linguistics in context of Scottish Country Dancing for at least a year. My imagined benefits were that codified dance instructions would allow for automatic dance animations, superior teacher aids and other applications that currently require a lot of sweat and toil. Dance evening programmes that are currently put together manually for each event, could be assisted with automated evaluation pointing out awkward sequences of dances.

Unfortunately, my attempts at explaining the connection made no sense to the people around me. So, I was ecstatic to discover that such a link was already discovered by others before me.

Adam Bull, more than 10 years ago, has tried to apply principles of computational linguistics to Aerobics for his MPhil degree in the paper entitled The formal description of aerobic dance exercise - a corpus-based computational linguistics approach. While, the report is not complete, it puts down many of the same arguments I have tried myself.

Unfortunately, the electronic copy of the document was not available. After some effort, I got in touch with Adam and he send me the copy of the report with the permission to distribute. I have put a copy of it on my own server.

I hope his research will get rediscovered and improved upon. That way when I get some time to apply my own PhD skills to Scottish Country Dancing, there will be more than one person on whose shoulders I would be able to stand.

I admit, it is a cute device. I have a black one, which I am hoping will work well as a picture frame for less-technically minded parents. It is certainly worth learning Flash for (Flash Lite actually), a decision I kept putting off.
For those just starting with Chumby, I have a list of interesting articles and videos people have already written about their experiences.

Videos:

• Interview with Chumby’s founders on Intruders.tv (UK channel). I believe, the interview was taken a while ago, but it just came up. The second half of the interview has interesting technical details.
• Chumby as an ambient computer - presentation by Chris Hughes at BarCampLA4.

Interesting articles:

• Chumby as a sign of the future of Internet TV.
• New York Times’s blog article
• Chumbys as cultural probes (and another one)
• Possible role of a Chumby in a museum

Interesting technical articles and resources:

• Streaming bee. fm music directly from Chumby, while we all wait for the official Internet Radio support.
• Basic wireframe templates for screens development from Scott Janousek.
• Heated discussion on how open Chumby actually is.

There are many more articles and first experience videos around the web, but they very quickly start to repeat each other.