ORF 2011 and other stuff

October Rules Fest, aka, Rules Fest, is coming up rapidly: Monday, October 24th to be exact. AND, it's going to be in San Francisco just a few miles from the Airport with a shuttle from the airport to the Hilton and/or the conference in the Hyatt Regency. The ORF motto changed last year to "By Developers, for Developers."

So, having racked up thousands and thousands of air miles AND thousands of Hilton points, I'll probably stay in the Hilton and shuttle to the Hyatt just five (really long) blocks away. This conference features such notables as

• Dr. Charles Forgy (Rete, Rete 2, Rete 3 and Rete NT)
• Paul Haley, inventor of Haley Expert Rules.
• Dr. Said Tabet, RuleML Guru
• Carlos Seranno-Morales, inventor of the FIRST Java-based BRMS
• Career Center for those job hunters out there'
• Three days of Exhibitions by Vendors
• And, of course, Mark Proctor and the Drools team
• Dr. Jacob Feldman, inventor of Open Rules
• Daniel Selman, guiding light behind JRules from ILOG/IBM
• Boot Camps on
• Drools (Mark Proctor)
• Rule-Based Design Patterns (Wolfgang Laun)
• SOAR Architecture (Nate Derbinsky)

Now, to the blog itself. I had a spina bifida corrected (spinal surgery for eight hours!) so I was out of touch for a few months beginning in May. The, it took over two months to get my password reset because Google kept sending me around in circles. Over and over and over again. Finally, today, they let me give them my "secret" info to get in rather than going through the password reset routine. So, the news is that this will no longer be just about rules, rulebased systems and things like that. From now on, I think that I will follow the title of the blog and just wander around on various topics.

Governor Rick Perry: Please don't vote for this guy unless his opponent is a complete idiot. Rick Perry brought lots and lots of jobs to Texas, true; but they are pretty much mostly low paying, minimum wage, 30-hour per week without benefits, jobs. Texas is rapidly becoming an outsourcing country, er, state. I would vote for him over Obama, Malkin, Palin or that other guy who is a Democrat that tries to look Republican. On the other hand, somebody might emerge at this late date who is a real leader.

Obama: You know, every elected President (even Carter and Ford were Lieutenants in the Navy) had prior military service. The exception seems to be Obama. Well, as Perry said, it was apparently his choice and he chose to stay in Chicago and play politics. Personally, I don't know how he gets the gumption to return a salute from a military officer as "Commander in Chief." Maybe that's why he turned down the sale of the F-16s to Taiwan today; whether to get back at Perry (F-16s are made here in Texas) or because he supports Red Communist China against their main (and tiny) foe, Taiwan. [See? I told you I was going to just wander around from now on.]

Forecasting: Well, my short talk this year at ORF 2011 will pick up from last year with more details and more math and a preview of the rules and why we need them. So, if you want to attend my talk, get last years' presentation from ORF 2010 and you'll be ready to take off on Part Two of RuleBased Forecasting, RBF. Right now I have about 100 rules but we'll only discuss two or four of them. After all, there is a bit of math to cover first - nothing tough; just summations and first order derivatives.

My Plans for the future: Probably heading to another gig for three or four months and then off to graduate school to do my Ph.D. in AI if everything gets worked out OK; probably focusing on stats and/or forecasting. Maybe - depends on which mentor I get at the university. The Forgenator has been bugging me about this for years now. I figure if Col. Sanders could start his empire of KFC at age 66, then I can do my Ph.D. and teach somewhere the rest of my life. ("Those who can, DO. Those who can't or won't, TEACH!) :-)

Rete Performance as done by Dr. Forgy:

• Rete, the original version invented by Dr. Forgy for his Ph.D. Thesis, has been improved and optimized by almost every vendor in existence. But, so far, none have come close to
• Rete 2: A dramatic improvement over other versions of Rete in terms of performance except for CLIPS (a C/C++ version in the original LISP language) that is as fast if not a wee bit faster than the Java Rete 2.
• Rete 3: Rete 2 with some hooks for BMS tools such as Rules Power.
• Rete NT: About 10 times faster than Rete 2 or Rete 3 if the customer forces the vendor to put it in their engine at the nominal price of $5K per CPU. Small price for 10X improvement, don't you think?

Well, stay healthy, keep the sunny side up and the dirty side down, and maybe we'll all meet at ORF 2011 in San Francisco. I promise to wear my Texas Flag Shirt for my talk so everyone knows that "I'm Southern by birth, Texan by the Grace of God." :-)

SDG

jco