Something about the combination of the hair, the glasses, the Grinch, the book, and the sketch just clicks.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Man Reading Book
Something about the combination of the hair, the glasses, the Grinch, the book, and the sketch just clicks.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
It’s Just A Dream
When I’m Earth Overlord, all dream sequences in movies and TV shows must be approved by my Ministry for the Eradication of Overused Tropes.
AUTUER: Oh no! Little Johnny fell down a well and can’t get out!
MINISTRY: What?!
AUTUER: Ha ha. I’m kidding. It’s just a dream having little to no importance to the plot, but it made a great clip to put in this week’s preview. Can I interest you in a cat jumping out from an unexpected place?
MINISTRY: Oh no! It’s the dungeons for you!
AUTUER: What?!
MINISTRY: Ha ha. We’re kidding. Your show is cancelled.
AUTUER: Oh no! Little Johnny fell down a well and can’t get out!
MINISTRY: What?!
AUTUER: Ha ha. I’m kidding. It’s just a dream having little to no importance to the plot, but it made a great clip to put in this week’s preview. Can I interest you in a cat jumping out from an unexpected place?
MINISTRY: Oh no! It’s the dungeons for you!
AUTUER: What?!
MINISTRY: Ha ha. We’re kidding. Your show is cancelled.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Dungeons & Dragons
If you ever played Dungeons & Dragons, this blog has some information on its history you might find interesting.
I remember first playing D&D with the original set of rules at a friend’s house around 1976, but I eventually grew tired of the dungeon crawls and Monty Haul style of play that the game mechanics seemed to encourage (intentionally or otherwise). If I wanted to simulate a Vietnam search and destroy mission, I’d play a war game, not a role playing game.
It stands to reason that if you have a rule book full of magical items that players can acquire, they’re going to want to acquire as many of them as they can. One of the (unintentionally) funniest lines I’ve heard a dungeon master utter was “You’re limited to one magical artifact per day.”
Many of the D&D magic items have somewhat comical names, such as “Boots of Dancing.” On the infrequent occasions that I was playing with a Monty Haul group, I’d often claim my character possessed mock magical items. My favorites were the “Dagger of Healing” (1d6 of healing and 1d6 of damage) and the “Sword of Surgery” (2d6 of healing and 2d6 of damage).
Here’s how it works, I explained, I just keep stabbing myself until I start to feel better!
No one ever batted an eye.`
I remember first playing D&D with the original set of rules at a friend’s house around 1976, but I eventually grew tired of the dungeon crawls and Monty Haul style of play that the game mechanics seemed to encourage (intentionally or otherwise). If I wanted to simulate a Vietnam search and destroy mission, I’d play a war game, not a role playing game.
It stands to reason that if you have a rule book full of magical items that players can acquire, they’re going to want to acquire as many of them as they can. One of the (unintentionally) funniest lines I’ve heard a dungeon master utter was “You’re limited to one magical artifact per day.”
Many of the D&D magic items have somewhat comical names, such as “Boots of Dancing.” On the infrequent occasions that I was playing with a Monty Haul group, I’d often claim my character possessed mock magical items. My favorites were the “Dagger of Healing” (1d6 of healing and 1d6 of damage) and the “Sword of Surgery” (2d6 of healing and 2d6 of damage).
Here’s how it works, I explained, I just keep stabbing myself until I start to feel better!
No one ever batted an eye.`
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Join Activity
I've been an expert system tool developer for the last twenty-nine years, but it's only been the
last nine years that I've had a significant amount of ongoing year-to-year experience developing and maintaining programs from the other side as a user of expert system tools.
One of the pain points I encountered was trying to determine which rules were causing performance issues. A typical scenario would be that the rules would pass validation testing by the business users, but then weeks or months later an atypically large data file would be processed uncovering a performance issue (requiring hours for the data to be processed rather than seconds). Isolating the problem was accomplished by strategically deleting rules until the performance issue went away. The offending rule(s) were then inspected and analyzed with respect to the data to determine the cause of the problem. This was hardly an ideal approach and only worked best if there were a few rules causing the issue.
From a user perspective, It would be nice if you could profile rule performance much as you can profile the amount of time spent in functions/methods in languages such as C and Java. In fact, CLIPS does have profiling functions which allow you to track the amount of time spent in the actions of a rule. Unfortunately, the performance issues in rules are usually caused by the way the conditions have been written. Because rule conditions can be shared, it's difficult to assign time spent while pattern matching to a specific rule.
When I was developing performance improvements for CLIPS 6.3, I added code to track the number of operations performed on partial matches in the join network to gauge the benefit of using hash tables rather than linked lists for the join memories. It occurred to me that this could be a useful metric for identifying performance issues, and from this idea came the join-activity command in CLIPS 6.3.
This new command easily identifies the offending rule in the manners benchmark program:
Using the verbose mode allows you to examine the information for each join in the rule.
One of the pain points I encountered was trying to determine which rules were causing performance issues. A typical scenario would be that the rules would pass validation testing by the business users, but then weeks or months later an atypically large data file would be processed uncovering a performance issue (requiring hours for the data to be processed rather than seconds). Isolating the problem was accomplished by strategically deleting rules until the performance issue went away. The offending rule(s) were then inspected and analyzed with respect to the data to determine the cause of the problem. This was hardly an ideal approach and only worked best if there were a few rules causing the issue.
From a user perspective, It would be nice if you could profile rule performance much as you can profile the amount of time spent in functions/methods in languages such as C and Java. In fact, CLIPS does have profiling functions which allow you to track the amount of time spent in the actions of a rule. Unfortunately, the performance issues in rules are usually caused by the way the conditions have been written. Because rule conditions can be shared, it's difficult to assign time spent while pattern matching to a specific rule.
When I was developing performance improvements for CLIPS 6.3, I added code to track the number of operations performed on partial matches in the join network to gauge the benefit of using hash tables rather than linked lists for the join memories. It occurred to me that this could be a useful metric for identifying performance issues, and from this idea came the join-activity command in CLIPS 6.3.
This new command easily identifies the offending rule in the manners benchmark program:
When used in terse mode, the join-activity command returns a multifield value containing the number of comparisons made between the left and right memories, the number of partial matches added to the join memories, and the number of partial matches removed from the join memories. For this program, the find_seating rule has much more join activity than all the other rules combined.CLIPS> (clear) CLIPS> (unwatch all) CLIPS> (load manners.clp) :%%%%%%%******** TRUE CLIPS> (reset) CLIPS> (load-facts manners128.fct) TRUE CLIPS> (run) CLIPS> (progn$ (?r (get-defrule-list)) (printout t ?r ": " (join-activity ?r terse) crlf)) assign_first_seat: (1314 1315 1315) find_seating: (5847660 7067211 7067211) make_path: (49549 16510 16510) path_done: (127 254 254) are_we_done: (128 255 255) continue: (0 127 127) print_results: (257 258 128) all_done: (0 1 0) CLIPS>
Using the verbose mode allows you to examine the information for each join in the rule.
In conjunction with the sort function, you can create a ranked listing of all the rules. Here's an example using the waltz benchmark.CLIPS> (join-activity find_seating verbose) Activity for CE 1 Compares: 0 Adds: 127 Deletes: 127 Activity for CE 2 Compares: 8128 Adds: 8128 Deletes: 8128 Activity for CE 3 Compares: 28255 Adds: 28255 Deletes: 28255 Activity for CE 4 Compares: 2487321 Adds: 1241614 Deletes: 1241614 Activity for CE 5 Compares: 2483228 Adds: 2483228 Deletes: 2483228 Activity for CE 6 Compares: 823428 Adds: 1660994 Deletes: 1660994 Activity for CE 7 Compares: 17300 Adds: 1644865 Deletes: 1644865 (5847660 7067211 7067211) CLIPS>
CLIPS> (clear)
CLIPS> (unwatch all)
CLIPS> (load waltz.clp)
%%%%:!!!!!!********************************
TRUE
CLIPS> (reset)
CLIPS> (load-facts waltz50.fct)
TRUE
CLIPS> (run)
CLIPS>
(deffunction ja-lt (?r1 ?r2)
(< (+ (expand$ (join-activity ?r1 terse)))
(+ (expand$ (join-activity ?r2 terse)))))
CLIPS>
(progn$ (?r (sort ja-lt (get-defrule-list)))
(format t "%-35s %10d%n"
(str-cat ?r ":")
(+ (expand$ (join-activity ?r terse)))))
initial_boundary_junction_L: 1165683
initial_boundary_junction_arrow: 511101
make_L: 163364
make-3_junction: 128960
label_arrow-1B: 59799
label_tee_B: 55991
label_arrow-2B: 39455
label_arrow-1A: 35692
match_edge: 32072
second_boundary_junction_L: 26984
label_tee_A: 17095
label_arrow-2A: 16217
label_L: 14926
label_arrow-4A: 13811
label_arrow-4B: 13811
label_fork-1: 12727
reverse_edges: 11618
plot_boundaries: 9830
second_boundary_junction_arrow: 9641
done_reversing: 3878
label_fork-2: 2213
label_fork-3: 2213
label_arrow-3A: 1838
label_arrow-3B: 1838
label_arrow-5A: 1838
label_arrow-5B: 1838
plot_remaining: 1808
label_fork-4: 614
done_detecting: 7
done_plotting: 5
done_labeling: 2
begin: 0
""
CLIPS>
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
This Feedback is Worthless
Over the last couple of years I've received hundreds of emails from users of my List! and List! Lite apps. Most are for assistance or requests for additional features, the vast majority are courteous, and occasionally I get really nice emails such as this one:
Sometimes it's not.
And sometimes it's a little wacky.
But my favorite criticism is this email I received the other week.
Clearly the free version of the app allowed you to determine that you didn't want to purchase the paid version, so it was of some worth to you as exhibited by your gladness. In return, I would prefer that you thank me for my consideration.
And what’s the point of sending me an email, but not leaving a bad review in the App Store to warn other people? If it was to convince me that you're a bit of a jerk, then mission accomplished, but I suppose the irony of your email is lost on you.
Thank you! I just reviewed this app and it is better than 5 stars.I also receive criticism, mostly through the reviews in the App Store. Sometimes it’s constructive.
I love this List app and i cant tell you how many other apps i have tried and deleted and waisted money on.
Your app does everything i wanted and more.
As a firefighter-medic and working in a hospital to home life.. This app has a list for everything I need.
Thank you again
Sometimes it's not.
And sometimes it's a little wacky.
But my favorite criticism is this email I received the other week.
This app is worthless....glad I did not pay anything for it. It well be deleted....What a maroon.
Clearly the free version of the app allowed you to determine that you didn't want to purchase the paid version, so it was of some worth to you as exhibited by your gladness. In return, I would prefer that you thank me for my consideration.
And what’s the point of sending me an email, but not leaving a bad review in the App Store to warn other people? If it was to convince me that you're a bit of a jerk, then mission accomplished, but I suppose the irony of your email is lost on you.
Friday, July 4, 2014
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Sugar Flavored Toothpaste
This is one of the last things I would have expected to see on my toothpaste tube:
No ADA-Accepted toothpaste contains ingredients that would promote tooth decay, so it would have been a little more honest to say “artificial sweetener” rather than sugar, but nonetheless after reading about the ingredients it’s no wonder they don’t want you swallowing this stuff.
No ADA-Accepted toothpaste contains ingredients that would promote tooth decay, so it would have been a little more honest to say “artificial sweetener” rather than sugar, but nonetheless after reading about the ingredients it’s no wonder they don’t want you swallowing this stuff.
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