Grace’s Olympics Scratch

August 12th, 2012

Grace has been starting to get to grips with Scratch – a visual programming tool aimed at children.

She seems to like it so far, and has made a couple of little animal games. She’s also made a more topical animation…


Grace’s Olympics animation

Controls:

  • Green flag means Play from the beginning.
  • Red dot means Stop.
  • The full-screen button in the top-left seems to need you to Shift-click to work.

Scratch’s web player is Flash-based. If you’re on a mobile or other non-Flash-friendly device, sorry – you’re missing something awesome 😉

It doesn’t seem to like Internet Explorer very much. If you’re on IE, what you’re seeing is pretty broken. There is a Java applet version that seems to work better on IE though.

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How to make a phone call from “Microsoft”

August 11th, 2012

Step 1: Establish trust
Reassure the person you’ve phoned by saying that you’re calling from Microsoft and that you’re Microsoft Certified

Step 2: Introduce a problem
Make them a little nervous by saying that, as you’re calling from Microsoft, because of the “international routing” you can tell their computer is infected with “malacious” viruses. Explain that you’ve been receiving error reports from “the computer” at this phone number and that it is urgent that you fix it.

Step 3: Panic
Scare the crap out of the person you’ve called by getting the user to navigate to C:\Windows\inf . Explain that “inf” stands for infected, and that these are viruses. Exclaim in horror that, as it has so many files and folders in there, this machine is badly infected.

Step 4: Save the day
Start to sound reassuring by reminding the person that you’re Microsoft certified and can fix it.

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Using a screen reader

August 4th, 2012

What might it be like to read the BBC News website with a screen reader?
I thought this was interesting.


Using a screen reader :: YouTube video

Imagine if you needed to rely on a screen-reader to use the Internet. Seriously – give it a try.

Start the video playing, put the volume up a bit, and *shut your eyes*.

Try and follow along.

What’s it like? Imagine if you’d not seen the page before, and had to try and figure out the structure of the page from what is read out.

Choose a story that you’d want to click on, and without looking, try and work out how many times you’d need to press up/down/tab to get to it.

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Using JMX to monitor UIMA running in a servlet

August 1st, 2012

Overview

A quick howto for if you’re running UIMA in a servlet, and want to be able to monitor your AE performance using JMX

Background

I’ve mentioned JMX before. Basically, a Java app can expose information and methods through a standard interface. Tools like jconsole, which come with Java, can then be used to monitor and administer the Java app.

UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) is an Apache project, providing a standards-based way to perform analytics on unstructured text. It hosts a pipeline of annotators: individual components each performing a specific text analytics task. As a document moves down the pipeline UIMA runs each of the annotators on the document. Each annotator adds it’s own annotations for the things it looks for in the text.

UIMA and JMX

UIMA supports JMX. UIMA registers an MBean for each annotator, letting you see the performance info for each annotator. In a pipeline of several annotators, it lets you see (amongst other things) how much time your document is spending in each annotator.

jconsole

In a stand-alone UIMA application, you basically get this for free. Start the application with the standard Java -D property for enabling JMX:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote

It is ready to let jconsole connect to it.

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Half-term

June 10th, 2012

Another half-term week is done – tomorrow I’m back in the office.

Apart from the usual (playground, Lego, visiting the library, board games, cooking, face paint, soft-play, few visits to the swimming pool, visiting family, that kinda thing) we did try a few new things worth mentioning.

Half-term

TK Maxx had a 100x microscope for only 8 quid that actually works surprisingly well, so we spent ages looking at stuff around the house.

We made bouncy balls out of zubber which managed to bounce seriously high in the park. Before kinda falling apart.

We built a miniature brick house, from clay bricks we moulded ourselves.

We went to see Cerrie from CBeebies in a kids show and visit the Living Rainforest near Newbury.

Oh, and listened to the girls sing “Rule, Britannia!” and “God Save the Queen” over and over and over again. They can’t be stopped.

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Talking about Watson

May 31st, 2012

I was in London yesterday to give a talk about the work that has been done with Watson in the last year or so. Rather cruelly, the organisers filmed me and put it on the Internet. 😉

If you can ignore my ridiculous voice, some incoherent rambling, an uncomfortable and ill-fitting suit, and a lot of “erm” and “umm”, there was some interesting stuff in there, so I thought I’d share it.


YouTube : Dale Lane – Keynote at PCTY London 2012

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Natural Language Processing – Stanford University

May 25th, 2012

I passed a course this week. For the last few months I’ve been studying a distance-learning course on Natural Language Processing taught by Stanford University lecturers, Professors Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning.

Now I’ve finished I thought I’d share my experiences of doing the course, partly since they run these courses again so you may be considering doing one like it, in the future.

More importantly, because I’ve been working hard on this (Seriously. Blood, sweat and tears went into this.) so I’m damn well going to shout about it. 😉

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Running

April 30th, 2012

Inspired by Grace’s running post, there are a couple of running-related things worth mentioning today.

My run at lunchtime today means that I ran over 59 miles in April.

To put this in context, it’s kinda a big deal for me. I’m pretty rubbish at running. If you need proof… that’s what the pictures above are for. Do I look like someone who enjoys running? 🙂

If you prefer context in numerical form, (ignoring whatever running I couldn’t avoid in school P.E. lessons) I’ve only ever run 330 miles.

I ran 152 miles in 2010.
I ran 62 miles in 2011.
I’ve run 115 miles so far this year, 59 of which this month.

So I’m starting to get more into running – running more often and for longer distances.

With that in mind, before I can come to my senses and change my mind, I’ve entered the Great South Run 2012. Want to come and run 10 miles with me?

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