IntelliFest 2012 - It's Official

Greetings:

OK.  It's official NOW.  IntelliFest 2012 (aka October Rules Fest 2008 - 2009, aka Rules Fest 2010 - 2011)  will be at the Bahai Resort Hotel in San Diego, CA (USA) Hotel on October 22 - 26.  (The hotel link is NOT the link for the official room rates - just an early link to see the hotel.)   The sign up links are not there yet BUT BE PATIENT!  They should be ready by the end of the week.

This year something different about the conference.  Ergo, the name change.  Jason (Morris, that is) is encouraging management and academic attendees to the conference, something that wasn't done in the past.  And, from my perspective, that's a good thing.  If your management personnel is not aware of what you are doing then you won't get the funding that you need to do the things that you need for research and/or new tools.  If your track is academics, you really need to be aware of new frontiers in commercial applications and vendors need to be aware of new adventures in academics.  Thus the new name of IntelliFest to mean gathering of intelligence on all fronts; commercial, management, academic and applied AI.  The inventors and researchers need to interact with the vendors and developers of AI products.  Management needs to see what is happening with both sides of the fence to understand how these things are interacting to understand how they can use these tools back home in their business to improve their bottom line.  Developers can get new ideas, either during the special vertical markets, the conference or the bootcamps, on how to improve strategy on development of their own products or new products.  All in all, the IntelliFest conference should prove to be fertile grounds for ideas for everyone in the BRMS, rulebase, AI or Intelligence fields.

So, make plans now (sounds a bit like hucksterism on my part but I don't make a dime on this stuff) to attend IntelliFest.  Since the speakers have not been chosen I can't say that it will be the greatest show on earth, but going on past performance I will say that I haven't been disappointed in the past.  So, watch for the speaker list, see if it meets with your approval and, if so, sign up early and get the Early Bird discounts and other advantages, like group discounts and some freebies for bootcamps, etc.  Tell'em Old Jim sent you.  You won't get anything special except maybe a wry grin and an exhausted sigh.  :-)

SDG
jco

D-Day + 18 hours at Normandy in 1944

Greetings:

Well, about 18 hours ago (0600Z) in 1944, the worlds greatest armada arrived at Normandy.  My Uncle Bill (Sgt. William L. Leach) had already arrived with the 82nd Airborne (The Famous AA patch, along with the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne from the "Band of Brothers" HBO movie, as well as the British Airborne) who landed behind the German lines about 0200Z or so.  The Americans paid dearly at Omaha and Utah beaches that were heavily armed.  General Erwin "The Desert Fox" Rommel had done a great job there.  And even though Gen. George S. Patton didn't get in on the action, he was used as a decoy to hold the 2nd Panzer and 116th Panzer tanks up north who were expecting the real invasion to come in at Pas de Calais.  As a matter of fact, the 2nd Panzer and 116th Panzer didn't move until the 14th day of the invasion.  To quote the 82nd Airborne report "By the time the All-American Division was pulled back to England, it had seen 33 days of bloody combat and suffered 5,245 troopers killed, wounded, or missing. Ridgway's post-battle report stated in part, "...33 days of action without relief, without replacements. Every mission accomplished. No ground gained was ever relinquished."  What a report for such a small brigade.  They went on to fight in Operation Market Garden (what a fiasco) and Bastogne with the 101st Airborne and the British Airborne both times.

Anyway, sorry this reminder is so late.  All in all, England, USA, Poland, France, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, The Netherlands, Norway, and other nations - all chipped in what men they could afford (but mostly England and USA as well as Australia, Canada, France and NZ).  Of the 1,300,000+ men who invaded Normandy, over 120,000 men lost were KIA, MIA or wounded on the first day.  Of the 380,000+ Germans more than 113,000 were reported KIA, MIA or wounded on the first day.  It usually takes a ratio of 10:1 to storm a fortress successfully so losses of 1:1 were somewhat commendable - but sad nevertheless.  Unfortunately, it had to be done.  The USA was late getting there since the war for the rest of the world started in 1939 with the invasion of Poland by Germany and the subsequent declaration of war by England, France and most of Europe.  Only England was standing a year later while the USA congress argued and drug their feet in an isolationist mode.  Today, they are accused of being overly aggressive.  You just can't win.

So, lift a glass of cheer to the American, English, Aussies, New Zealanders and all the rest who stormed the beaches long, long ago.  If not for them, we'd be all be speaking German.  Not that Germans are all bad, it's just the Nazis that I can't stand.  The real German army was actually kind of neat.  At least they tried to kill Hitler.  Only a table leg saved him and he never was the same after that.  So, maybe they sort of succeeded after all.  At least he was crazy enough to keep the Panzer divisions at Pas de Calais until July rather than sending them to Normandy on June 6th- right?

SDG
jco

2012 - Memorial Day for WW II and 'Nam

Greetings:

Here we are again - Memorial day and remembering our war dead (KIA), missing in action (MIA), and those who returned home alive but still were MIA to their families.  My father and uncle were like that.  My dad was a WW II vet who was a First Sgt (Master Sgt with the star in the middle) in the 1st Special Service Forces (predecessor to the Green Berets) who landed at Anzio beach and fought their way to Europe through Italy through the Alps and some of the bloodiest fighting that was rarely reported except for that bit about the mountains and the chapel on top full of Germans.  The Force (as it was called then) was one of the US Army's first attempts at commando operations.  It was the ONLY outfit that never lost an inch of ground, regardless of what General Patton claimed.  And they paid for it heavily.  Only about 10% of the initial outfit that went to war returned home, my dad being one of them.

And there lots of kids like us.  Our dads came home from war and they were lost to us for many years.  We didn't know what happened and they wouldn't talk about it to us.  They didn't know how to tell about the horror of it without bringing the nightmares back or sounding like a grave digger.  You just didn't do that kind of thing in those days.  So my younger brother (15 months younger than myself) and I spent our youth not talking with our dad except that he had the theory that children should be seen and not heard.  We worked in the one-acre garden after school every day and all summer after summer-school.  We went to summer-school to get away from  the house.

My uncle wasn't much better.  He was in the 82nd Airborne and made all five jumps in WW II.  He met up with my dad in London after the war, exchanged phone numbers and got together in Alabama after the war.  He ended up marrying my dad's oldest sister.  Both of them used to talk about the war to each other but not to the kids or the wives.  During the war, their rations were packed with Lucky Strike's or Camel cigarettes and they were encouraged to smoke because, supposedly, it calmed the nerves.  It also led to cancer and other lung problems for both of them.  The other war problems were mental and loss of family but, by at that time, the army just didn't seem to know or care about those things.  The children became the biggest loss of that age.

During the rest of those years, the children grew up and in the late 50's and early 60's joined the armed forces in the early Viet Nam War during the "Consulting" days of the Viet Nam War.  That was when we were there but we weren't there in an official capacity.  My brother was in Cambodia in a remote outpost that could have been overrun at any time while I served my time in what was an effectively remote outpost in West Texas.  Using long-range radar we watched the southern border and the Gulf of Mexico for invading Russian aircraft that never showed up.  The Cuban Missile Crisis was about as close as I got to the actual shooting war.

But, the thing was, both my middle brother and I never did get close to our father until after my middle brother was killed in an auto accident in 1968.  After that, slowly, my father softened and allowed my younger brother (12 years younger than myself) and I to talk with him about things but still not about the war until just before his death in 1988.  I inherited his war papers, medals, etc, and discovered that he had effectively earned, among a lot of other stuff, five bronze stars during WW II for combat during his war time in Italy.  Five!  Three bronze stars, two with an extra star on them for the same action making it effectively five bronze stars.  And he never once mentioned them to us.  He just couldn't talk about them to us.  Only with his buddies from the war or to Uncle Bill from the 82nd Airborne.

And, now, every memorial day I remember him and Uncle Bill and wonder what it would have been like if we had had programs something like the programs today back then.  Maybe we would have had a dad with whom we could have talked and been friends.  Maybe...  Maybe not...  That was a really bad war, just like Nam and Korea.  No bullet-proof vests and only tin-pot helmets.  Lots of dead guys left and right.  And the guilt feelings that you could never explain to your family and friends back home.  And now you know the rest of the story about the "Lost Generation" of WW II.

SDG
jco

IntelliFest 2012

Greetings:

October Rules Fest (2008, 2009) in "Big D" morphed into just Rules Fest (2010, 2011) in Silicon Valley and it looks as though Rules Fest has morphed into IntelliFest 2012 - possibly again in Silicon Valley or maybe back in Big D (Dallas), just not in August as the Web Page used to say.  Count on October.  (Maybe November but probably October.)  This year, according to our Fearless Leader, Jason Morris, we're going to have several tracks - one of which will be a management track and another will be an academic track and maybe a medical track.  All of this to go along with the regular rulebase and BRMS tracks.  The home page should change next week to allow registration and the REAL location and dates; so be patient.  Jason just started his Ph.D.work la few weeks ago in Australia so now maybe he will have some time to devote to more serious things - like IntelliFest in Silly Valley.  He still has a long way to go on the AU thing but he's back home now.

So, you heard it here first.  This blog is totally unauthorized and I'll probably get booted off the Intellifest Organizing Committee for doing such a dastardly deed but somebody had to get the word out to the rest of the Great Unwashed Herd of Programmer Elite.  :-)  Now you know, so go to your managers and start needling them for the funds to go to the meetings.  Plan on the first or second week  in October.  Tell them that this will be the Greatest Show of Technical Fireworks since Java One back in 1998 or 1999.  And if you don't get to go, then you will be branded for life as having missed out and will be (technically) left behind in the dust of your companions who were fortunate enough to have nice managers who were smart enough to send their smartest and brightest programmers to IntelliFest 2012.

This post was updated on 27 May 2012 by jco.

SDG
jco

Money_Power_Fame

Greetings:

Engineers are rapidly disappearing.  Why?  Because the learning curve to be a "real" engineer, of any kind, is extremely hard.  Usually the second semester of Calculus causes lots of dropouts.  If not, then Partial Differential Equations gets another 1/3 of them.  Finally, if the school still offers it, Abstract Algebra and/or Advanced Statistics / Forecasting will cook the goose of any slackers left over by their junior year.  The senior year was actually a breeze.  By that time, the professors had weeded out the slackers and "engineer wannabes" and we had fun doing fun work.  Even the Masters programs were run about the same way.  The first year was bad.  The last years were fun.   But most students can't make through the first three years of Engineering Basic Training - much like the Navy SEAL training. 

Very few programmers ever have any of the aforementioned items in the title of this blog.  Not in any quantity of any consequence.  Not if they remain programmers.   However, Chris Taylor recently pointed out that the gigantic Obama Recovery Act that laid out $845 BILLION USD to various places (of which the great State of Texas claimed about $17 Billion for such projects as The First Methodist Church of Dallas and a moving company in Denton) that created darned few jobs but lots money for Health Care IT and other stuff - meaning money for existing doctors ($40K - $65K per physician) and hospitals (about $11M each hospital) that was supposed to go help create jobs.  Did you get any of that???


Well, I certainly hope that the quack that screwed up my back got his share of the "Great American Bailout" since he has now proclaimed me "healed" when my insurance ran out.  That guy would make a great TV evangelist - but I've never seen a TV Islam Evangelist.  Too bad...  He would have made a good one.  Originally he was supposed to have fixed the problem of the breakdown between the 5th and 6th lumbar - instead he decided (with my previously written permission that you have to give or they won't operate) - that he would fix my slight sway back (technically, scoliosis) that I have had since I was a child and it really never bothered me. 

Now I can walk more than 25 yards only with the help of two canes.  At my last session he finally told me that I would have to come back in a year or two and fix that 5th lumbar.  I came really close to being convicted of 2nd degree homicide in a later court appearance.  And I had two canes in my hands with which to accomplish such a task.  Oh, well.  Y'Shua, an Essene Jewish Rabbi two thousand years ago, taught that forgiveness was better than vengeance.  (How do I know he was Essene?  He had a Passover supper the night before the rest of the Jewish population had their Passover supper meaning that he followed the Essene calendar and not the "new and improved" Jewish calendar.")

Enough on religion and bad doctors!  How about us, the lowly, the pale-skinned, cube dwellers who toil long hours under artificial, fluorescent, mercury-vapor, cool-white lamps to help the middle managers make twice or three times our salary and bonuses while the CxO (Charlie Guys) make 10 times our salaries and/or bonuses for driving us to higher and higher production with fewer and fewer people who work for less and less money.  Well, most of us, that is.  Some of us had the good sense to quite the rat race part and become "consultants"for just wee bit more money and HECK (H E Double Tooth Picks) of a lot more freedom of movement.  Unfortunately, that also comes with long periods of unemployment and a sense of loneliness that is lost only with Webinars and Skype conferences with others of the same ilk.  Or playing chess against the computer at higher and higher skill levels.

Here's the real two-pronged problem: First, The Charlie Boys gave the Middle Managers some short term (three to twelve month) goals to improve production with less personnel and less money.  So, the MM cut their top money makers (meaning the older, higher-paid troops with the experience) and hired off-shore or recently on-shored labor (i.e., Green Card Guys) who were lots cheaper but didn't know diddly squat about programming enterprise projects nor really technical tools.  Yeah, they know Java, J2EE/Spring and some other "cool" stuff but they don't have the engineering background of the REAL programmers.  Things like Unix internals, nor real OOAD nor how the Rete Algorithm actually works, nor Conflict Resolution in the Rete Algorithm - all that they have are some highlights to fool middle management. 

Second, HR is too danged (this gets me a PG-13 rating since I didn't use the real D-word) lazy to do the ground work for themselves so they hire off-shore or recently on-shored companies to do a "warm-body" search for people to fill "warm-body" slots in the company.  The few technical people left at the company are allowed to interview ONLY the lowest-paid 10% of the ones that HR found, not the real programmers that cost more than the ridiculous amount that HR had set as the maximum that they would pay for a certain position. 

OK, this has now turned into what sounds like a previous rant but it has to be said over and over again that HR and Middle Management (at the direction of Upper Management Charlie Boys) are screwing up the world, not just the USA.  Only in the UK and a couple of other countries are they actually hiring and paying their technical people what they are worth.   The next few years will see if the USA companies have learned their lessor or not AND whether or not the difference between the two policies (USA vs UK / France / Deutchland / etc) will pay off in the long run.  China has that policy and it hasn't worked for them very well in the long run.  I've learned to looks at labels and those that say, 'Made in China" I drop like a hot rock in West Texas. 

So, if you got this far in the blog, you deserve at least a "B" for having the perseverance (or the stupidity) to read this far.  Leave a comment and have the bravery to at least sign it.  ;-)

SDG
jco

Seven Programming Myths

Greetings:

Neil McAllister of InfoWorld wrote a great little article (which he probably plagerized from some other editor somewhere - just my guess, not fact!) but it's really great and should be read by all of us.  You can check it out for yourself at http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/7-programming-myths-busted-190890 and be sure to read them all.  The first one really caught my eye was #1; off-shore programming is cheaper.  Another one (this should catch the eye of all those Jess and Drools programmers) was Myth # 5:  The more eyes on the code the better the code, meaning that open source has more eyes on it and therefore it will be better.  Boy! Neil took that one apart.  Sorry Mark, but I have to kind of agree with his analysis - most guys don't develop Drools, they just use it and develop the part that fails when they use it.  :-)  Note, I said most, not all.  (Most could be 51%.)

Anyway, take a look at it.  I'll list them for you here so you can see if you want to look at them: 

1. Offshoring produces software faster and cheaper
2.  Good coders work long hours
3. Great developers are 10 times more productive
4. Cutting-edge tools produce better results
5. The more eyes on the code, the fewer bugs
6. Great programmers write the fastest code
7. Good code is "simple" or "elegant"     

So, there you have it - Seven things that you thought were set in concrete busted up and pulverized into dust for all time.  Of course, there are 27 comments already; some for (most) and some against (few) so jump in and either cast your own pundits or plaudits.  Me?  I liked all of them.  Which is why I'm writing this silly blog about some else's blog.  :-)

SDG
jco 

Benchmarks Summer/Fall 2012

Greetings:

OK, we're off and running again on benchmarks.  CLIPS, Jess, OPSJ and Sparkling Logic are in the running since they have agreed to provide their programs to run on my machine; a Dell i7 with 12GB of RAM, a 7200rpm 1TB HD and a wonderful graphics board.   Oh, and a 32" High Resolution monitor that can display anything that I throw at it.

Anyway, now the technical part.  The first hurdle will be WaltzDB-16 that will build 16 3-D boxes from a series of random lines generated from another program.  After that will come the more cumbersome WaltzDB-200, WaltzDB-400 and WaltzDB-600.  All of these will have to be written and run for a specific rulebase.  CLIPS, Jess, OPSJ and Sparkling Logic have been done for DB-16 and DB-200 and published for OPSJ in InfoWorld as the introduction for Rete-NT some time ago.  Drools DB-16 was written some time ago but I haven't checked it for accuracy yet since it seems to run inordinately fast and doesn't fire the same number of rules as other rule engines.   I've been told that WaltzDB-16 was written for ILOG JRules but we don't have a copy here.

However, I'm going to re-write the benchmarks so that I don't use the number of rules as the acid test that it actually ran correctly.  Rather, it will check that it built the 16 boxes correctly for WaltzDB-16, 200 boxes for WaltzDB-200, etc.  The 36 or 37 rules are absolutely non-trivial rules and should prove to be a good starting point for testing any rulebase.  I'll have to get FICO to provide me with Blaze Advisor as well as get IBM to provide me with a valid copy of JRules rather than that silly sandbox that they now provide. 

Also, I would like to run Open Rules, Drools, and some others (they do provide their engines) as well as the code for the WaltzDB-16, 200, 400, 600.  I can check the code but I refuse to write the code for all of the engines in the world.  These tests will more than stress the ability of the engines to run large, complex problems.

After that, Mark Proctor of Drools (Red Hat) suggested that we have a 1K, 5K and 10K rule set with  sufficiently large data set to test what he and others call "real world" problems.  I have no issue with this approach but I do no have such a test suite and, to my knowledge, neither does anyone else.  Or, rather, no one has offered to provide one for testing purposes.  I'm sure that there are many of them out there and I have seen them but they usually exist at some customer's site and are not for publication.  I do have one that maybe I can use later but it will be 2013 before I can get around to producing a general purpose rulebase with all of the proprietary information removed from both the rules and data.

So, let me know if your company would like to participate and, if so, send me a working version of the engine and a 12-month license and we'll get cranking.  Also, I will need a technical contact person at the company for help should something go bottoms up.  :-)

SDG
jco

Beware "The Cloud"

Greetings:

Today everyone seems enamored of "The Cloud."  Don Adams of Tibco recently blogged about this at http://www.thetibcoblog.com/2012/04/20/living-in-the-cloud-cool-vs-critical/#comment-10034 when he had the audacity to say that there is a possibility that "The Cloud" is not secure.  THANK YOU, DON!!  This is what I have been saying for six months now!  I don't want my software running on YOUR servers somewhere (who knows where?) and controlled by (who knows who?) and subject to backups (what and when) and subject to security attacks of all kinds. 

Sorry - I don't want to have to go to your company to inspect every month and examine all of your security and backup procedures when I'm already doing that very same thing for my own servers.  Why not just do this ONCE at my own place of business and not have to worry about YOUR security, YOUR network lag, YOUR performance problems when your other customers are crunching up the CPU time that I need for my customers.  Nope, I want MY software on MY machines where I can control everything myself.

Any bank, insurance company, stock brokerage or other financial firm that allows their software to reside and have their data to travel across "The Cloud" is insane.  Keep your data and software at home under your own control.  If some miscreant breaks in (meaning you were using Windoze rather than Unix servers) then you are at fault, not the company managing "The Cloud" software. 

Besides, real data security never allows itself on the internet in the first place, right?  Of course, right!!  You would keep your data and access off the internet and run them securely only within a tight, on-site environment.  Difficult?  Darned right it is!  But it's the only way to be 100% secure and 100% sure that there are no outside hackers.  Inside hackers?  Well, that's another problem for another article at another date.  :-)

SDG
jco

Reality

Greetings:

OK, this is a blog to grouse about the world in general but somebody has to say something!

• Golf Tournaments have all been renamed from their founders to some fancy company name.  It's like the founders just passed into the sunset and we can now forget about them and focus only on the big company.  Hey!  The guys who founded this thing should STILL be honored and remembered that they were the ones who started this blooming thing - not the fancy-schamcy company with the big bucks who can afford to buy out the little guys.

• The Bing Crosby ProAm Clambake => AT&T Pebble Beach ProAm. Not only that but they keep running the same stupid commercial with the same two slackers "that is so seven seconds ago" over and over and over.
• Jackie Gleason Inverrary => The Honda Classic
• Dean Martin / Joe Garagiola Tuscon Open => defunct
• Sammy Davis Jr. Greater Hartford Open => Travelers Championship
• Bob Hope Desert Classic => Humana Challenge
• Andy Williams Sandiego Open => Farmers Insurance Open
• Glen Campbell Los Angeles Open => Northern Trust Open
• Danny Thomas Memphis Classic => FedEx St. Jude Classic
• Ed McMahon - Jaycees Quad City Open => John Deere Open

• The world is facing a nuclear war with Iran that nobody is talking about
• We have a bus-sized meteor headed our way that will pass between us and the moon (hopefully) sometime in December - more coming in a few years so if that one doesn't get maybe one of the others will.
• Greeks are throwing Molotov cocktails at the police because they don't want to work
• The Syrian population has been begging the USA and the Arab League for months for help against an evil dictator who is slaughtering his own people - for six months everyone just watches and watches while he kills more and more with the help of the Russian government
• The USA is going deeper into debt and the depression is deepening and nobody blames the President for any of it.  
• Our President still bows to the Arabs and Nicaragua while denying Canadian oil after promising that he would cut off the evil oil barons of the east and South America when he was running for the office of President.
• We have an oil glut in the USA that came from our ground that Exxon/Mobile and others are selling on the international market at ridiculous prices and at our own oil pumps
• Israel and Iran are killing each others diplomats and soon we will have WW III
• The news shows during the day (and evening a few weeks ago) were mostly tied up with details about the accidental drowning of a singer. Now I loved Whitney Houston. I have only 15 or 20 Direct Disks vinyl recordings that I bought when I was a starving student in the 70's and one of them is hers. But we need to get a grip and face the bigger issues in the world.
•  Every day this week we see more about the fiasco in Columbia with the Secret Service
• Every day this week we see more details about nothing that leads me to believe that we don't have decent news to report so they have to run something and they can only rehash old news just like they rehash old movies.

Well, I've done my grousing so I'm going back to the reality of my programming.  It seems that the last place that I have for truth is my own silly computer that does exactly what I told it to do and not necessarily what I wanted it to do.

So, in conclusion, keep the faith, be strong, protect the widows and orphans and screw the politicians and big business companies to the proverbial wall for all of their lies and false promises.  Especially Exxon/Mobile and President Obama.  (This is not a political message, just a personal opinion)

SDG
jco
(updated 25 April 2012 1715hrs)

Gatekeepers to my Clients

Greetings:

Yes, it's been a while since I've written anything of anything of any consequence lately. But something has been bugging me of late - the "gatekeepers", those hired by increasingly indolent HR personnel whose first question, without having read my CV, is "What is your lowest all-inclusive rate?" and their second question is immediately, "Is there any room for negotiation there since that seems a little high for this position?" Now, remember, these gatekeepers are keeping about 40% or more for themselves when they used to keep only 5% (this was 10 years ago when Maxim and TekSystems were the "biggies") of the payout from the client.

Also, in the "Golden Days of the Programmers and Designers" the real recruiters actually screened the potential candidates rather than being "body shops" and they delivered actual workers who could deliver "the goods" for the clients. Today, what gets delivered to the client just happens to be a cousin or an uncle from the gatekeepers village or home town who can spell Java or BRMS that gets the chance to get the job. And all that the person has to do is to know a few "buzz words" to impress the poor manager that has to hire "someone to fill a slot."

The "real deal" guys who have devoted their lives to the industry to learning the technology for 10 or 20 years? Well, you don't stand a chance. First, you cost too much; or so the "gatekeepers" say. Secondly your rate has to be "all-inclusive" at $60 per hour. $60 per hour when it costs about $35 to $45 per hour to fly in and out of town every three weeks (not weekly like 10 years ago) rent a car by the month, rent a room by the month, pay for food and incidentals, pay for laundry and/or dry cleaning because you are there for a month at a time, etc, etc. That leaves the worker bee (you) clearing about $20 to $30 per hour (before taxes) working out of town when you could stay home and make $70 per hour (or much more) working for a local company if you are in a town like Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, San Diego, NYC, etc.

My advice? Set up your OWN corporation - it can be done for about $200 or less. Hire a CPA (about $500 per year or so - and they will save you way more than that) to be sure that everything is OK with the IRS and local government agencies. Stay the heck away from Dice, Monster, and other major head hunter swamps. Now, just network with your friends and the major companies that you used to work with in the past; let them know that you are still available and maybe at a lower rate than before since you can now work direct rather than going through head hunters. Work with a GOOD local designer and make up some GREAT brochures that tell an HR and an IT guy what you can do for them. Make some cold calls on major local Fortune-500 companies and leave lots of those brochures and business cards around. Work with HR and get your company on the "Approved Vendor" list. (You might have to take someone from HR to a nice place for lunch a time or two but it will be worth it in the long run.) Be your own boss and forget about the "gatekeepers" who take all of the profit out of a job and do absolutely nothing in return for that small fortune except send for more relatives to employ more gatekeepers!

Oh, one other thing: If at all possible, make sure that you can do training for their personnel on whatever subject you are going to work, whether Java, C#, C++, Unix, BRMS, whatever... That will really impress them. Be sure to have the training materials, programs and software; they'll have the rooms and laptops.

SDG
jco

Connectionism and the Mind

Greetings:

Reprinted in 2007, original 2nd Edition in 2002, by William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen, Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-20713-9.

A friend recommended three books for me to read if I wanted to pursue my research on Parallel Computing. This was one of them. If you can find a copy (purchase or library), the story on page 12 about the two sisters of AI is really worth repeating. I don't have permission to plagerize but the title page does authorize short passages for review. So, here 'tis (actually taken from Seymour Papert's book on Perceptrons, page 3):

Once upon a time, two daughter sciences were born to the new science of cybernetics. One sister was natural, with features inherited from the study of the brain, from the way nature does things. The other was artificial, related from the beginning to the use of computers. Each of the sister sciences tried to build models of intelligence, but from very different materials. The natural science sister built models (called neural networks) out of mathematically purified neurones. The artificial sister built her models out of computer programs.
In their first bloom of youth the two sisters were quite equally successful and equally pursued by suitors from other fields of knowledge. They got on very well together. Their relationship changed in the early sixties when a new monarch appeared, one with the largest coffers ever seen in the kingdom of sciences. Lord DARPA, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. The artificial sister grew jealous and was determined to keep for herself the access to Lord DARPA'a research funds. The natural sister would have to be slain.
The bloody work was attempted by two staunch followers of the artificial sister, Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, cast in the rold of the huntsman sent to slay Snow White and bring back her heart as proof of the deed. Their weapon was not the dagger but the mighter pen, from which came a book - Perceptrons... (1988, p.3)

And that was the extent of humour in the book. Now, about the rest of the book; it is extremely well laid out and covers Parallel Procssing, Dynamics and Evolutions in Networks (as it says on the cover page) from a new and updated outlook and perspective. This is a thoughtful and well-thought-out approach to Connectionism, Modeling and Neural Networks as well as discussing Rules and other related topics. I especially appreciated the complete overview of the entire field of computers versus psychology versus the mind itself. Meaning that if you are doing rulebased systems, psychology, neural networks, AI or anything loosely associated with those fields, it might be helpful to what you are doing. According to others, it is a great improvement on the original book published in 1991. I think that the reprint corrected some earlier misprints in the 2002 edition.

The chapters are:

1. Networks versus Symbol /systems: Two Approaches to Modeling Cognition
2. Connectionist Architectures
3. Learning
4. Patterns and Recognition
5. Are Rules Required to Process Representation?
6. Are Syntactically Structured Representations Needed?
7. Simulating Higher Cognition: A Modular Architecture For Processing Scripts
8. Connectionism and the Dynamical Approach to Cognition
9. Networks, Robots and Artificial Life
10. Connectionism and the Brain

A short read (350 pages total text plus other stuff) and, while mostly centered on neural networks, it covers other fields as well. Unlike most books on neural networks, the math is simple enough for those who have forgotten most of what they learned in school. Summation is about as hard as it gets. The Rulebased (BRMS) guys will probably turn first to Chapter 5 (as did I) and then discover that they need to read the previous four chapters for it to fit what the author is saying in that chapter. The final chapter is the capstone of the book (as it should be) and brings everything together nicely. Read through the table of contents first and get a good idea of the lay of the land and what you're going to discover. Consider it a map of a new and wonderous adventure.

As with the other books that I have been privileged to read recently, Buy The Book! Even it you have the 1991 or the earlier 2002 editions, this one is an improvement. Also, it makes for a nice addition on your book shelf. If nothing else, it might impress your girl/boy friend or wife/husband that you are an in-depth "thinker" who is entitled to be a little strange sometimes. (Your cherished off-spring probably will never see it and, if they do, they will think you are really weird - which, sometimes, is nice.) And, maybe, you might read it and discover a whole new world. For those who HAVE already read it (or will read it in the future) I would appreciate your comments. And, please: Don't say things like, "Great book." or "Really liked it" only in your comment. Try to be more specific about what you thought of the book. OK, maybe "Really liked it" would be permissible, but, honestly, try to pretend that you actually struggled through the whole thing. :-)

SDG
jco

Brief Review of "Agile Business Rule Development"

Greetings:

[Rewrite 1] Two of the industry's leading gurus of rulebased systems, Dr. Hafedh Mili of UQAM (University of Quebec at Montreal) and Jerome Boyer (pronounced Boy-yaa for those who don't handle French very well) have blazed some new ground with their book on ABRD, Agile Business Rule Development.

Dr. Mili wrote all of the training manuals for ILOG up through version 3.x somewhere as well as being heavily involved in versions 4, 5 and 6. Jerome is a Senior Solutions Architect for IBM / Websphere / ILOG. Dr. Mili has been involved with JRules andILOG since 1996 and Jerome has been doing JRules since 2000 [ref: Dr. Mili]. More on that later.

Anyway, on to a review of the book. The extremely brief accompanying web site is http://agilebrdevelopment.wordpress.com/ but, to date, there is only one comment - I'll add mine after I complete my reading of the book. Let's just say that this is an overview or a synopsis of what I found and think.

First, the darker side: Reading through the table of contents is always a good start in any review of a book. This particular book is divided into eight parts. The introduction contains a couple of different approaches to reading and using the book. The parts are:

1. Introduction
2. Methodology
3. Foundations
4. Rule Authoring (JRules only)
5. Rule Deployment
6. Rule Testing
7. Rule Governance
8. Epilogue

The other place to which I normally go next is to review the references that I might expect to find in the book or article. This book does contain a fairly decent set of (brief) references in the back. Yes, they also referenced Dr. Forgy's work on the original Rete algorithm although I doubt that more than 15 or 20 people in the world actually have sweated through the original Ph.D. thesis (all in LISP) and understand totally how it works. Dr. Mili has been through the synopsis and is responsible for the early implementations of Rete in ILOG Rules (C/C++ version that has been discontinued) and somewhat in JRules.

In any event, Dr. Mili and Jerome did a "fair-to-middling" job of research disclosure but nothing really exciting nor earth-shattering. BUT, remember that this is a book that focuses on the agile approach to writing rules and not the MYCIN approach to more advanced rule writing, even though MYCIN is referenced in the back of the book. (As a matter of fact, I know of only one or two guys from the Rules Fest who have sweated through the MYCIN approach.) The references are broken up into these sections:

• Books
• Articles and Papers (Trade Journals, Magazines, etc)
• Web Sites (lots of them)
• Documents (standards, web documents, etc)
• Tools (short list of most common BRMS and Open Source)

[Ed.Note: Dr. Mili's Ph.D. was in AI and he did quite a bit of research on MYCIN and eMYCIN during that period. However, he says, "I made a deliberate decision not to make it into an academic book because, a) that is not the public we are targeting, and b) rule engine science and technology is NOT where the main challenges in implementing business rules in the industry lay." A good enough reason, although I personally would like to see more medical systems and insurance underwriting systems - among other - research the approach of MYCIN and make rulebased systems once again a real AI product and not just and IF-THEN-ELSE rulebased Rete system.]

The end of each chapter also contains a "Further Reading" paragraph pertaining to that chapter that is sometimes a bit brief but in others quite good and extensive.

There is one drawback: All of the examples are in JRules, a very expensive -and very good -commercial product. However, JRules is very similar to Blaze Advisor, Drools or OPSJ. I would that they had used either an Open Source product or use very generic, English-style rules. They do explain their reasoning for using JRules in the introduction. But I found it kind of weak, especially considering that both of them have been tightly coupled with IBM/ILOG for many years. They said that their second choice would have been Drools (an Open Source product form Mark Proctor) which was OK. Even so, they kind of danced around the FICO Blaze Advisor product, which is the number one or number two commercial product in the market place.

Just a personal aside: I would say that there are only two or three real BRMS products on the market today; JRules, Blaze Advisor and Pega Rules. Drools (the free Apache Open Source product) from JBoss is rapidly gaining ground with "Guvnor" and other additions. Probably by the next year or so, they will have caught up with the most obvious parts of a BRMS, especially if they get their debug reporting tools done up to date. But, I wander...

The book is well divided in sections and they do a really good job of explaining ABRD, Agile Business Rule Development. However, I am no longer being a big fan of acronyms since FICO, ILOG and InfoWorld (yours truly) coined BRMS (Business Rules Management System) to my chagrin back in 2003 and then promoted it to the business world. Further, I don't favor writing a book using acronyms that are not an industry standard. That could be because I'm just resistant to rapid change for the sake of being "cool". In addition, I'm not a huge fan of the Agile methods since they were first introduced several years ago. But, still some of the methods are quite good and acceptable. (Yes, I know I'm sounding wisy-washy, but I'm just expressing my distaste for Agile while still finding some useful things in it.) I found trying to fit rulebased systems to the Agile methods to be the same as trying to find patterns for rules. (We have been trying to do that at Rules Fest for four years now.) [See Carole Ann's comment below about the Agile methods.]

Finally, as part of full disclosure, everyone needs to know that I have worked with both Hafedh and Jerome on various projects and all of these statements above are my own personal opinions. I have tried to the best of my ability to forget that we are good friends and talk about the book from an objective point of view.

Good Part: BUY THE BOOK !! Especially if you have never done an enterprise rulebased project and need a guide. It is easy reading if you are a good programmer and not highly technical. However, it might not be really easy reading if you are not a programmer but, even so,it would be well worth your time to read the management parts. Even some of us older troops could learn a thing or two from their fairly lucid explanations of what they are trying to accomplish with a particular chapter or section. The parts where they use JRules code is easily readable by most programmers and even most managers.

SDG

jco

RuleBased Forecasting, RBF, Part 1

Greetings:

I have been asked several times, "How can RBF help me in my business?" A simplistic view of RBF is that RBF is an amalgamation of statistics, rules and data curve matching. By adjusting certain parameters of the curve matching using well-defined and proven-over-time methods and procedures, each iteration of the rules (rules always run over and over) should yield closer and closer match to the real data so that the forecast data are far more correct. Basically, the rules help the forecaster in giving the forecaster a highly accurate initial forecast. The forecaster, of course, can always change some of the parameters of the rules so that he/she can see the difference in what would happen. What a great training tool for forecasters!!

OK, that sales pitch being said, what about some examples? Hopefully, next year at Rules Fest, we will be able to show the rules working on real data (hopefully some massive data sets) and show how changing one small parameter can have drastic (good or bad) effects on the outcome. In the meantime, just drop me a line about what you and/or your company is doing in the field of forecasting. Are you using Linear Regression, Multiple Linear Regression, Box Jenkins, Neural Networks, Econometric Forecasting or what? Sometimes a smaller (or even some rather large) companies don not use ANY software to help with this complex problem. This is what we call, "Flying by the seat of your pants." solution. That SOP solution can get a company burned badly. However, relying on poor data or insufficient data can get you into hot water as well.

For example, if you are using monthly data, you need (OK, should have) at least 5 years (60 months) of really clean data from various internal and/or external sources to give the RBF a chance of accuracy. Other systems that use cycles of yearly data or non-standard cycles, are tougher but a decent RBF should be able to handle that in the curve matching routines and, again, if the system has sufficient data then the forecasting tool will have a much better chance of fitting the forecast to the provided data.

Hopefully, I'll have some more on this next week.

SDG

jco

(October) Rules Fest 2011, Part Deux

Greetings:

That "Cosa Nostra" (our thing) that Greg Barton, Rolando Hernandez and I started in 2008 as nothing more than a gathering of geeks and nerds has been transformed into a real conference by Charles Young and Jason Morris; complete with continental breakfast every morning; sponsor-provided lunch (no vendor pitch during lunch this year) with fish, beef and/or pork, really good veggies and salads. They also provided a really good evening affair (shrimp, ice cream, tandoori chicken strips, etc, for "Pub Time" - complete with an open bar for those who stayed around.

Very few folks went out anywhere at night - most stayed in the conference "Pub" for chatting and the free bar. The conference is now branching into AI and Machine Learning, Event-Driven Process Management, Predictive Analytics and RuleBased Forecasting. I was the only one doing RBF this year while Carlos Seranno-Morales (formerly chief engineer for FICO and now Chief Engineer for Sparkling Logic) will be doing the Predictive Analytics next year. But the invited speakers, such as Dr. Ng and Dr. Tabet, were/are some of the absolute best in their respective fields. We also had the other creators of rulebased systems such as Paul Haley (Inference and Haley AI), Dr. Jacob Feldman (Open Rules) and Mark Proctor (Drools). The ONLY one missing was Dr. Friedman-Hill (Jess) but we had the only approved instructor for Jess there in the form of Jason Morris.

I don't feel that they really gave Dr. Forgy (inventor of the Rete, Rete 2, Rete III and Rete NT Algorithms for rulebased system) the publicity that he deserved in the brochures nor the home page, no formal presentation (he probably was thankful for that), etc. Maybe it was something that he and Jason arranged since he really is not a big-time vendor but more of a "skunk works" (meaning a research center). He only had a scripted chat with Carlos Seranno-Morales during a Wednesday afternoon session. Carole Ann Berlioz-Matignon (CEO of Sparkling Logic) was asking questions of Carlos and Dr. Forgy. Dr. Forgy is now Chief Scientist for Sparkling Logic that was started by Carole Ann and Carlos. Remember, this year we were in San Francisco and only a stones throw from Palo Alto, home of most early Internet companies as well as Stanford, one of the four big AI Universities. (CMU, MIT and Boston College being the other three.)

They stuck Rolo and myself in the small breakout sessions rather than boring everyone with it. Rolo was highly upset and felt insulted because originally both he and I had been scheduled to do our presentations for the entire conference and there was not enough of an audience in the break-outs, usually about 10 or 12 per track. Probably his presentation would be a better fit for The Rule Forum with Ron Ross; I know that he would get a much bigger audience. Especially since he told everyone that he no longer does any code work, which is a Bozo-No-No at the (O)RF conference. Me? Well, truthfully, RBF is highly mathematical (which most programmers forgot when they left school) and, unless you are really into statistics and such, it might be a bit boring. But, for those who are having to do that kind of thing, it was a bit of fun to see that Rules Fest is growing and getting into more and more things.

I didn't stick around for the Thursday and Friday boot camps on Drools, Jess and Open Rules. I'm sure that they were quite good but having grown up with Drools and Jess I would have learned less than the other attendees and probably would have been quite a drag by asking too many "high-level" questions. Dr. Friedman-Hill once asked Richard Halsey (now deceased) to please quit pestering the beginners on his email support lines with statements such as RTFM, Read the Fabulous Manual.

All-in-all, I think that we are watching the development of something wonderful; the birth of a really, truly unique conference; one that is dedicated to the technical aspects of what we are doing rather the the more visible parts, vendor success stories and product demos. As a matter of fact, this is the bridge between the RuleML / RIF / OMG and other semi-technical conference and Rule Forum.

SDG

jco

(October) Rules Fest 2011 Day 2

Greetings:

This conference has been truly outstanding. I had one rule godfather tell me that I should get the video of Paul Haley because it was truly outstanding. The afternoon sessions are great - right now I'm "cheating" because I'm supposed to be watching Carlos Seranno-Morales talk on Data Analytics for Rule Writers, etc. Ronald Bowers of the US Army Research gave an excellent talk on writing rules for very large hospitals for those with massive injuries of soldiers returning from the war front. (He has even read the work on the MYCIN project by Buchannan and Shortliffe.) Fred McClimas gave a talk yesterday on 2020 Foundation for discovering and determining the effect of event-driven rules and systems that would "see" the Tsumani in Japan and alert all markets on the forecast of what would be the fallout in various industries. Fascinating stuff all around. If you didn't come, come next year.

SDG

jco

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

Long Time Passing

Greetings:

"Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing..." Old PP&M ballad. I've been locked out of the system for quite a while due to Google's password problems. But I'm back and I hope to see all of you at (October) Rules Fest, http://www.rulesfest.org - This should be the best one yet.

SDG

jco

Strength of Body and Mind and Soul

Greetings, Programs:

Each of us has some kind of body: good, bad, beautiful, ugly, fat, skinny, wonderful, wobbly, whatever... The thing is that we, the little people of this world, these people, have defined what is good , what is bad, what is ugly, what is too skinny, etc. This is what we did to ourselves - nobody did it to us.

So, now what do we do with what we have? Me? I'm just an old (by the world's definitions) fat, white Jew boy from Texas who can't side kick higher than his waist any more. So what? I'm really, really happy so long as those around me are happy as well. My original goals have moved from

• Electrical Enginer
• Chemical Engineer
• Lawyer
• Writer
• Poet
• High-Speed motorcycle racer (1,000 cc and over)
• Big-Bore Dirt Bike Racer (350cc and over)
• USAF Fighter Pilot
• Back to EE since the others didn't work out
• MBA
• Back to working on AI since my MBA co-students seemed full of chowder heads who just wanted a degree to to move up the corporate ladder
• Rulebased Systems (since nobody needed anything in the AI theory fields)

So, now what? I'm getting old enough to need a back operation next week - hopefully that will allow me the flexibility to ride a bike again; maybe a Ducati 999 or a Harley Big-Bore??? Whatever.... Either would be cool. Especially with white, full-coverage fairing with a red Dragon that wrapped from handle to handle and feet that covered the light. Well, that probably won't happen again either but I can still dream.

But we still have to think of the combination of the parts of the Body (physical), Mind (mental), Soul (spiritual), and then throw in other attributes needed to be a fully developed human being;

• Spirit (to keep the soul and mind in balance)
• Body (to house everything)
• Ambition (to avoid total stasis and avoid being a couch slug)
• Partner-1 (I never WILL be gay, but I would like to think that each of us needs a partner to help unload our feelings and re-load our spirit.
• Partner-2 (Ah, this is the sexual part. Someone with whom to share everything else and have two bodies become become one body. A joining such that nothing can tear it asunder.)

All of this and then maybe, just maybe, we can begin to look for happiness. The sexual partner usually fills most of the requirements, but not always. Above all, we have to be happy and remember that there really is an eternity - a place where time never stops. Our short, life-time, stop-over here is just to see where we might fit into eternity, how we might play our role to Almighty G-d. This takes only a few nano-seconds to see what we're going to do with the rest of eternity - the full lifetime.

Me? I think that happiness is fulfilling what Eternal G-d has called for me to do, whether sweeping up horsey-doo in a stable or being a CEO for a big faceless company. Doesn't matter - I have to remember that He is the one who controls the universe, who keeps the stars in alignment, who - while He is doing all of that - still has time (or at least takes the time) to have a chat with me every morning, noon and night. (For the Muslim it's five times but that's another subject and not meant for idle conversation.)

(And, no, I don't smoke pot, take drugs nor, for that matter, drink beer. An occasional 20-year-old Glen Livet Whisky (Scotch to Americans) once a month is about all.)

And, finally, remember, the guy(s) who just tried to screw you to the nearest cubicle supporter is just trying to "get ahead" and has has no idea of what constitutes true happiness. So, keep happy and keep smiling. (It'll make the others wonder what you're up to.) Life is WAY too short to be bugged by trivialities. And everything except for G-d is trivial.

Peace, Love and Joy to each and every one of you:

SDG

jco

To Blog or not to Blog

Greetings, Programs: (from TRON - the original movie)

(Sorry, Bill, for stealing your words (in the title) from Hamlet.) You know, my last blog (please forgive me for taking so long since then) was back in January on the free-software-policy aspect of Drools. I was thinking of going to see "TRON" in 3D tonight but it's already off the movie screens. (I saw the original many years ago- before Star Wars - and was entranced with what Hollywood could imagine such things happening.) OK, off to the main subject:

If it is that you have a blog, I think that you should write at least once per month minimum to that said blog. Having two blogs is incredibly time consuming on that premise. So, I'm back to having only two rather than the three or four that I had before. So, with that done, let's move on to another subject: Yom HaShoah Week. (See? Sucked you right from one subject to another that has nothing at all to do with the other - and no apologies for such disgraceful journalistic behavior. Disgraceful.) Yom (meaning "day" in Hebrew), Ha (meaning "the" in Hebrew) and Shoah meaning "calamity or destruction" in Yiddish/Hebrew, is actually a hard-to-understand mixture of words in Hebrew that make sense to us. Yom HaShoah is the Day of The Rememberance of the Holocaust from only one perspective. "The Solution" was Adolph's (you haven't forgotten his last name already have you?) idea to get rid of the Jewish "problem" in Germany - and eventually the world - but just getting rid of them. Sometimes in movies it's called "The Ultimate Solution" but even the high-ranking German SS spoke of it in low tones because they KNEW that it was wrong. So, so wrong.

So, this week (today? After all, it it still Shabbos) find a DVD copy (Blue Ray is a waste of money - unless you have a great sound system - since almost everything is Black-and-white in the movie "Schindler's List." Made quite some time ago, it is historically accurate and is kept on the correct historical track by Steven Spielberg (J-Director), Thomas Kneally - Author and historian, Poldek Pfefferberg (Leopold Page) - Author and historian, and many more.

Sadly, it is justifiably rated "R": but mature children, especially Jewish children, should see a part of their heritage and their parents should explain most of the concepts before the movie. The F- word is used extensively and my explanation to my children was that this is a gross, un-educated word used by persons of small minds who can think of very little and these persons think that this makes them sound intellectual. Not good but it worked.

For more on this subject you might want to go see Shoah and other movies (a Google search should be sufficient.) Today, we still have our Holocausts, blood-lettings, and things of that nature, but none that can surpass the callousness as we look back as see the pure (real) killing of people simply because they are of an ethnic minority.

Questions: How did Hitler get away with this when 80 million Germans were watching?? Didn't anyone have a sense of smell any more? Couldn't anyone hear the screams? Yet, today (I went to Munich for six months) nobody was a Nazi and nobody had a relative who was a Nazi. Amazing - just amazing.

I hope that I haven't led you too far astray nor forced you to look (now, how could I do that?) at our own flawed humanity, our own callousness and uncaring attitude. If you want to see the same thing and the same attitude today, just drive through the homeless part of your own town, especially near the missions, see the little old women pushing ALL of their worldly belongings in a shopping cart (they can barely walk), watch as the drug thugs rob them of any thing of value. Dear G-d: Come back soon and rescue a perishing world where saving a puppy is looked upon as something of value (which it really, really is) while we let our own humanity, our own brothers, sisters, mothers, aunts, sons, uncles, grandfathers, etc suffer on the street EVERY DAY and watch as those who are actually willing to work passed by; rather they are allowed to starve to death with only one meal per day in the mission. (That's all that the Nazi prisoners got, remember? One meal per day.)

Better things next time,

SDG

jco

Mene Mene Tekel Ufarsin

Greetings:

Mene, Mene Tekel Ufarsin. Bad translation of this would be "Measured, Measured again, Weighed in the balance and found Wanting." (From the book of Daniel if you are into that kind of thing) And that is the dreaded thing about being a geeky programmer - the fear of being thought of as falling behind - not that you ARE behind, but those around you just think that you are falling behind. I just read a blog from Mark Proctor and then the link by Richard Clayton. Just for giggles and grins, you really need to go out and read all of both articles (and maybe a couple of others from Clayton) to see what he means in the first two paragraphs on Proctor's blog.

However, one sticky-wicket point that I have found with Drools is that there is a perception that sometimse things change TOO quickly. Sure, maybe to some of the newer programmers it is way cool the way that Drools is constantly advancing - and, of course, so they think, everybody needs the changes NOW! But consider that they (the overworked, underpaid programming trolls who keep the wheels of IT turning a better bottom line for the overdressed and overpaid managers) can't keep up with all of the changes to Drools AND the changes to everything else AND be even half-way knowledgeable about any of them.

So, here is my personal opinion and, knowing that it won't be heeded, I'll give it anyway: Drools needs to slow down the releases to every six to 12 months such that each release has significant changes and bug fixes. (Probably the technical Red Hat releases of Red Hat Drools are that slow. Don't know because I don't deal with Red Hat folks in person.) I prefer every 12 months but, then, I'm a slow learner and tend to try and find potential problems rather than fixes for problems that I have in production. But look guys, try to wait at least every six to nine months for each new release! Not only would this give the programmer trolls time to catch BUT it would also give the Red Hat / Drools team(s) time to fix all of the bugs in the last release.

By constantly updating you force the programmers to keep up to date with the latest changes or get lost in the process when they miss something. A year or so ago Drools threw everything out at once (like, FIVE products) and most of them were half-baked and not really ready for prime time, especially the decision table / spreadsheet conversions. A few other things were there that were "fixed" with a few 24-48 hour debugging and testing cycles but some still aren't fixed and ready.

Being a guy who has to learn almost (dang near) everything in the rulebase space and really know what I'm talking about, I spend almost three months (OK, at least two months) on each product that I have to examine so that I can verify that the product will do what the manual says it will do. And when Drools kicks out five changes and then an update within a month and another update right behind that, well, it really takes the glow off the updates and keeps me working WAY too hard for what I get out of it. The other problem with Drools is the documentation doesn't keep track with the changes. They are always late and not terribly clear in some cases.

First Drools used CVS, then Maven, then Subversion, and now Git? All I want to do is control my source code - NOT learn a whole new SCCS language every few months! (FYI) I went from FORTRAN to BASIC (yes BASIC, but multi-user Unix Workstation BASIC), then C, then C++ then Java and now I'm off to Objective C, J2EE, C# and all the others. All this and being part DBA, SysAdmin of eight different variations of UNIX (AT&T Unix, Solaris, BSD, AIX, HP-UX, DEC Unix, SCO Xenix/Unix; and then comes Linux and all of its variations from various manufacturers like Red Hat and Novell).

Oh, and let's not leave out CORBA, COM/DCOM and the mess that all of that caused - MS just HAD to put out .NET to be competitive with Java. Now, put on top of that, 10 different BRMS/rulebased systems trying and scrambling to be concurrent with all of the aforementioned systems above and then the confluence of databases: Informix (absorbed by IBM), DB2, DBase, and the multi variations of OODB. Sorry, Charlie; one guy just can NOT learn all of these things in depth and be worth a flip at any of them. What was that old saying? "A Jack of all Trades and a Master of None." Maybe we need a product called "None" and we can all master it. :-)

So, what do we do? Personally, I chose to focus mostly on Rulebased systems; all 10 (and growing) of them. Then learn enough Java and J2EE to keep my head above water, return to C/C++/C# now and then to keep your chops and be somewhat conversant. Now I want to do CLIPS and Objective-C so I have to RE-read all of my books on that again just to catch up to where I left off and start it all over again.

BUT, fear not, dear reader - another blog will follow this to tell us what wossies we have become because we have to read another book or two. Personally, I blame it all on football, baseball, hockey, and, most of all, television laced with copius quantities of bad beer, chips and tacos. Unfortunately, time is totally linear for all of the humans involved and we just cannot use it like it is not going to end - it will end. And then, will you have finished all of your projects? Probably not. So, the answer, for now, is to do what you can for as long as you can and, hopefully, let history record that you did well and died well; or not. You won't be able to change it then.

SDG

jco