Wednesday, October 08, 2003

The Other Eclipse. The Haley Project is Paul Haley's commercial exploration of rule system technologies and advances.  If you haven't paid much attention to rule-based programming, you should become familiar.  I've written on the topic before, and you didn't listen, did you?  You should check out Jess, from Sandia.  You should also check out Eclipse, The Haley Project's powerful rules engine.  One of the best things you can do for yourself once you get past the initial familiarity phase of CLIPS and rule programming is read the downloadable manual for Eclipse.  It is chock full of advice for the rule systems programmer; serious advice, on how to structure facts, information, and requests.  It was an unusual read for me -- I didn't think that anything like that existed.  I have been painfully creating my own structures for performing many of these tasks, and I would have had a huge head start if I'd read the Eclipse stuff first. Eclipse also comes with a powerful debugging system that allows you to really pull apart the rule network and understand what's going on inside of it.  Being able to observe these things gives you the ability to fine-tune your rule network.  Eclipse's variant of the CLIPS language provides additional mechanisms for specifying network structure that can come in really handy for tuning.  It also provides very powerful agenda handling; this can be used to avoid a lot of the salience games you normally play in CLIPS. Haley also has the AuthoRete product, which allows you to build rule systems from plain english statements.  And it understands quite a bit of english, if you follow some reasonable structuring guidelines.  I'll be examining this one closely over the next few days. 8:36:28 PM

I Like Mozilla. Kicking mozilla to the curb. ...in a manner of speaking. The Firebird and Thunderbird Mozilla projects have both been working very well for me. In particular Firebird gets rid of the vein-poppingly infuriating UI decision to put 'Close Tabs' and 'Close Other Tabs' right next to each other, and when looking at your 'Sent' folder Thunderbird can actually display the recipient rather than the sender, which is always you. Thunderbird in particular seems a bit snappier when marking junk mail and deleting messages. And both seem stable on Win32 (XP) and Linux. [cwinters.com] You know, I've never really understood why people keep complaining about it.  It's way cool, stable, fast, everything.  The usual complaints are too big, too bloated...what kind of machine are you running on, anyway?  On my box Moz sits in resident mode, and it's up and browing in a fraction of a second, whenever I want it.  It's a small download.  It installs painlessly, without requiring reboots.  Popups are a thing of the past.  It has comprehensive newsgroup handling, chat, and lots of other cool stuff.  You can customize the heck out of it. What's not to love?  Where's the love, man? I am anti-dissing Mozilla. 4:11:01 PM