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

For Little Guys Everywhere

Greetings:

I just finished watching the earlier-taped Rose Bowl. Whatever religion, or none, to which you adhere or profess, you have to admire Andy Dalton's (Offensive MVP) comments after the game and the pure spunk of Tank Carder (Defensive MVP) coming from a broken back earlier in life to win "The Granddaddy of Them ALL! The Rose Ball!!!". And that despite repeatedly falling down due to the short cleats on their shoes (and nobody thought to bring replacements because Nike had designed these shoes especially for this turf and this game) as well as referees who can't see Wisconsin obviously holding a TCU player or a TCU players head being ripped off since they are the upstarts from Fort Worth, Texas. I still think that the Mafia has bought out the referees in Basketball, Football (USA and European) for sure; and maybe baseball and hockey refs as well. It's gotten almost as bad as Pro Wrestling.

BTW, to the Wisconsin Badgers - you guys played a really great game and I don't know HOW those little bitty defensive guys from Fort Worth managed to hold your score down to 19 points. And JJ should be drafted tomorrow by The Vikings (my team). Maybe he, Andy Dalton and Tank Carder can all go the Vikings and start a new dynasty up there.

Maybe NOW the corrupt BCS will allow the little guys, the non-exempt teams, play in the bowl games and (maybe?) begin a REAL playoff system where everyone with a winning season of no more than two lost games gets a chance to compete for the national title. But, TCU is undefeated/untied this year!! To quote the head coach for Ohio State, "The Poor Sisters of Football" did the impossible. Maybe they will let TCU play the winner of the "national championship" game after the 7th? Naaaahhhhh - probably not.

TCU Horned Frogs, 21

Wisconsin Badgers, 19

(Blocked pass by Tank Carder on Wisconsin two-point conversion to a wide-open tight end with only 1 minute to play)

Finally, for those who don't know, the horned frog is actually a horny lizard that squirts blood from his eyes when cornered or upset. OK, that's my last blurt on sports this year (and maybe next year unless LSU wakes up) until the World Games and then only if certain teams get that far. (Being of that Norse heritage, my team for the Super Bowl would have been The Minnesota Vikings but.... ) Kind of funny though: A Norseman / Viking that hates snow?

SDG

jco

[Follow up after the 7th Championship game] Once again, the paid-off referees made sure that Auburn (and, remember, I'm an Alabama / Auburn fan from Sylacauga, Alabama) won. What a rip! Those guys shouldn't be allowed to referee a dog-fight managed by Michael Vick. But, four of my favorite teams are in the fight now: Green Bay (the only team owned by the city in which they play) versus another old-line favorite, Chicago Bears, and the Pittsburgh Steelers (where Terry Bradshaw - a Louisiana Tech boy - led them to FOUR super bowl championships) versus Broadway Joe's Jets. What a weekend that will be and regardless of who wins, I'm happy. The cowgirls might have chance next year if Monsigniour Gerald Jones will keep his long nose out of the coaching business and let the re-headed genius run the team.

SDG

jco

(again)

New Blog to Follow

BTW, Yaakov got, well, let's just say, "Upset!" with the Word Press guys and came over here. Apparently the same guy who had the Yaakov.WordPress.Com has the same one over here and hasn't blogged since about 2006 - but he still has it. Sooo... Yaakov is at http://Yaakov2.BlogSpot.Com just like over there, except now he's with us at Google. Since he's just starting up you might want to check it out and just follow the blog. Usually it's on the TaNaKh (Pronounced Tah-Nahk', or Old Testament to the rest of the world) but sometimes he rants a bit about other problems, sometimes dealing with arcane bits of knowledge that are unknown to most of us.

He's worth following if only to broaden your horizons and provide fodder for discussions - he's quite old now, well, old to most of you. He's somewhere in his late 70's and will probably live to be 200 in Sweetwater, Texas. After all, wasn't Moishe about 120 when he toddled off to be alone with G-d? And they both live(d) in the same kind of dry, sandy, desert environment. I'm just jealous because I don't have the bollocks to follow him over there and get to heck away from this big screen that takes up six days of my life.

So, check it out and leave him a comment if you like. I have asked him to re-post all of his stuff on the Sabbath (or Shabbos to the Ashkenazi) that took him quite a bit of research and that was still incomplete over at WordPress. Maybe he'll re-post it here and then complete it. Kind of interesting if you've ever wondered what was the fuss about the Seventh Day thing - and I don't mean the Seventh Day Adventists.

SDG

jco

Study, study and more study (JSB)

Greetings:

I have just written a rather lengthy blog on the woes and travails of the programmer trolls and mostly dealing with how hard are our lives. Then, leaving it for a while to incubate (as is my wont upon occasion) I continued my reading on "Bach" - a rather large compendium on the boy and the man, Johan Sebastian Bach (there were many Germans in his area named Bach), dealing in minute detail with his life, friends, studies and teachers. At just before the age of 15 he left his home in Thurengia (as well as Ohrdruf and Eisenach) and traveled 200 miles (mostly on foot) north with his close friend who was 18 years old (Georg Erdman) to Luneburg, a city much larger (10,000 residents) than his native home of the Bach family. This was also so that the could be close to the town of Hamburg that was home to the largest and most fabulous organs in the world at that time. His study at St. Michael's church was very prestigious and each class consisted of only 20 noblemen's sons as well as a few highly-gifted singers and musicians.

Students at this Ritter-Academie studied

• theology
• philosophy
• classics
• ethics
• politics
• history
• mathematics
• physics
• French
• riding
• fencing
• dancing

All designed to turn out a well-rounded person in a program in keeping with the civil, military and social obligations of the German aristocracy. The academic year began at Easter and, in addition to the normal classes, Johan Sebastian Bach also had to study (for the first two years at age 15):

• Leonhard Hutter's Compendium locorum theologicorum (Wittenberg , 1610) - a reference work that required a didactic memorization of questions and answers of a complex nature
• Chrstoph Reyher's Systema logicum (Gotha, 1691) who first volume (Prolegomena logica de natura logicae) focuses on the definitions of fundamental terms
• Heinrich Tolle's Rhetorica Gottingensis (Gottingen, 1680) - a concise summary of Aristotelian rhetoric
• Latin Classes included Virgil's Bucolica and Aeneid, Book IV and Cicero's De Catinlina.
• Further classes in Latin and Greek
• Monograph on Alexander the Great by Quitus Curtius Rufus
• Cicero's De officiis
• Selections from Cicero's Epistolae
• Horace's Carmina
• Kebes of Thebe (Cebetis Tabula)
• Phocylides
• Isocrates
• Theoginis
• German Hisory
• Geography
• German Poetry
• Mathematics (advanced)
• Physics (advanced)
• Modern History
• Modern Geography
• Modern Physics

And ALL is this was the "core" of their studies. In order to pay for this schooling they were members of (lowly paid) choirs - usually four or five - and played various parties and gatherings. In addition, they studied fencing, dancing and Sebastian taught himself Italian. All of this is contained in "Johan Sebastian BACH, The Learned Musician" by Christophf Wolff, ISBN 978-0-393-32256-9 ot 0-393-32256-4, depending on which ISBN numbering system is being used by the vendor. My copy was published by W. W. Norton, New York / London. They were very, very busy little boys (young men) who slept very little and ate whatever they could find in the up-scale courts and parties.

All of this to apologize for my earlier complaints that we lowly programming trolls might be overworked. Perhaps we are not worked hard enough and we are raised in a society that values the family and social groups more than one's own work and career. Whatever... I'm much too old to change now but perhaps this might inspire some younger folks to study more and play less? :-)

SDG

jco

What is a Rule Repository?

Greetings:

What is a Rule Repository? What does it do? Why have one? Believe it or not, I actually went out to everyone in the industry that I could think of who might have an opinion, searched the web, went to my old text books on rulebased systems and this is all I can come up with. My friends came up with everything from “Who needs it if you have CVS?” to “Absolutely Critical and 50 reasons why you need it.” (Don’t panic – I won’t give you those 50 reason why.) But, all in all, it’s quite a bit like doing ITIL (Information Infrastructure Information Library) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture); some do it and are quite good at it and can show a HUGE benefit from even getting started. (See InfoWorld Article on ITIL, 10/23/06, page 23+) on how to get started on ITIL and the one on getting started on SOA.) Meanwhile, others just don’t understand it at all. And there’s everything in between. So, here goes. Generally speaking, a Rule Repository is much like a source code control system with some really cool enhancements. First – what are a few of the things that a source code control system like CVS or Clear Case should provide for you?

• Life cycle management, from creation to retirement and store the retirement
• Version control, from 0.0.0.0 to the latest pre-alpha
• Audit trail. For Auditors and bookkeepers (The IT variant).
• Who put what where, when did they put it there and the reason that they gave.
• Check-out and check-in and privileges thereof

So, what should a Rule Repository give you other than that? Well, things like

• Really, really fine-grained access management
• Search for objects accessed during the last run of the rules
• Search for objects not touched by the last run of the rules
• Search for which rule fired the most on the last run
• Search for which rule fired the most on the last ten or twenty runs of the rules,
• Search for which rule never fired on the last run of the rules
• Search for which rule never fired on the last ten or twenty runs of the rules
• Search for which rule has NEVER fired
• Search for which rules ALWAYS fire and how many times, average, for each one
• Stepping through the rules with a debugger for each line in the rule (lots of overhead for this one) and this one is the trickiest of all
• Tracking who put the rule into the system and why but more complex than CVS
• Authorization for anyone to put rules into the system
• And lots more…

Now why in the world would you need all of this (and more) clutter? Answer: Auditing for Sarbannes-Oxley, SOA, IT Auditing compliance, and, most of all, debugging of the system when something doesn’t go according to plan. If you’re using one of the "open systems", "free-ware" or "share-ware" versions like OPSJ, Jess or JBoss Rules you can always integrate the rules with the CVS or Clear Case. On the other hand, if you’re using the rich rule repositories of IBM/ILOG JRules or FICO Blaze Advisor then you will have laid the basic ground work for SOA, Sarbannes-Oxley or any other IT auditor who comes around. All you have to do is do it right the first time. Again, you might want to go read the article in InfoWorld and maybe something more recent.

SDG

jco

Multi-Dimensional Things

Greetings:

Chatting with Mark Proctor just now. He's about to get Drools running on Collection-Oriented, Parallelized Rete - or something like that. However, in the process of working on my forecasting, I'm thinking of the analysis board in "The Majority Report" or "NCIS LA" - but in 3D then in multiple dimensions. Design work by 2012 or 2015 (OK, maybe 2020) will be done by modeling in 3D or 4D using holographic (or some other technology) so that we can move objects around NOT with our hands but with our mind. Hand-movement is WAY too slow for what you can think. And the models will involve time, space and multi-dimensions and massively parallel inputs.

Think about it: Your body has probably a million or more inputs to your brain all running at one time. All in parallel. What I need is a decent tool for real parallel work, not a single processor or even 128 processors, but a few million processors like in the old days of DARPA. Each one doing just a single, simple task. But all in parallel and all controlled by a massive Parallel CPU that can processes a million inputs at once. Real intelligence, real active agents or real-world forecasting will require just such tools.

And it might not be computers as we know them today. I suspect that these will be chemical simulations of the brain or maybe even real brain matter that is trained (something like a neural net but not exactly) such that we can interact with them using our own central cortex in some simple way - maybe like the "Matrix" but that was way too weird to work for what I'm thinking about. Actually, I DO know that the military is working with real brain matter to train it as a "computer" of sorts. I've seen it myself so it isn't just rumour.

Well, the headaches are back. Off to bed. But keep thinking about how to REALLY advance our thought process to model what we're really thinking and doing it quickly and easily. DARPA, TI, HP, Apple, CYC - SOMEBODY has to come up with a solution right away that is not hardware-based junk that we are being forced to use today.

SDG

jco

jco

No Magic Conference starts tomorrow (Sunday)

Greetings:

The No Magic conference will begin tomorrow. It's called a World Conference and since they are working around the world I suppose that it's justified. John Zachman, Richard Soley (OMG), Lynn Meredith (Lockheed Fellow) and lots more. Check

http://www.umlconference.com/dfw/index.aspx

For more details. Cocktails tomorrow evening (this evening now) and the conference on Monday at 8:00. (Good Grief! Charley Brown! Nobody goes to a conference at 8:00 a.m. any more!) If I get to enough meetings I'll blog about it later. But, check out the site anyway.

SDG

jco

Rules Fest 2011 Day 3

Greetings:

I wish I could tell you more about day three but the only one for which I have Notes was Christian de la Maria of IBM/ILOG talk on RIF. My only note there was "A rule is just another data item." I certainly hope that I got that one wrong ONLY because we have been teaching for so long that rules are the logic that are data driven. So if rules are data and data are data then the data are data driven? Naaahhhh... That's not what he meant. Maybe he'll blog and correct me on what I thought I heard.

Anyway, I had to leave early but, again, Michael Small gave Rolando and I a ride to the airport. What a guy. Now I owe him two drinks. :-) So, that's all the news that I have from "Camp Woebegone where the women are strong, the men are good looking and all of the children are above average." [ala, Prarie Home Companion]

SDG

jco

Rules Fest 2010 - Day 2 - Tuesday

Greetings:

[First this is being written a full week after the events from my notes which may or may not be spot on.] Well, here are just some things that hit me on Tuesday - migraine was just setting in good. I always get one the second day after a long flight. Something to do with decompression + recompression of the neck joints.

1. Karen Myers: Work flow for the Masses. OK, that would have been my title. Mostly to do with data flow and work flow; something ALL of us need but not the thrust of the conference. And she talked WAY too fast for this slow, old cowboy from West Texas. :-)

2. Paul Vincent: Former FICO guy and one of the great Brits that I have had the privilege of meeting. (a) Paul defines "real time" as something like 5 minutes. I define real time as something on the order of nano-seconds or less. (b) Brief visit into parallelism and Fail Over Strategy that was pretty good. (c) Just a bit on Forecasting (my favorite part but not much about it) and then he ended up saying something about a "finite state machine." FYI, ALL computer programs are finite state machines. If you have the same program, same data, same OS, same everything, you should always get the same output from a finite state machine. QED.

3. James Taylor: (a) Another Brit but with a stronger accent. Being in the back of the room probably didn't help, but I could understand only about half of what the boy was saying. And I happen to like "Only Fools and Horses" [I have the entire collection on DVD] as well as most Brit-Coms - and some of those have some real Cockney accents. (b) One of his slides was "Decisions Matter more than rules do." Personally, I don't think that you have direct relationship there. If I said, "Data matters more than do rules." (better English, anyway) then it is says nothing. Data matters, decisions matter, process matters, rules matter. To me, a decision is the result of the action of the rules. (c) A couple of other quotes: "Execution is less important than management." I didn't understand the statement nor could I hear the explanation so I'll just let that one slide. (d) "What kills rules is not performance but mismanagement of the rules themselves." Again, one does not negate nor prove the other. Performance and mismanagement of rules are two different concepts. (e) "Data Depth can improve its Width." ??? Your guess is good as mine but maybe I'm just showing my ignorance on database here. (f) "You can't use the same rule on every transaction." OUCH! Yes you CAN! As a matter of fact, that's exactly what a rulebase is all about. Same rules for all transactions of the same type. (g) Then he went into some Champion / Challenger stuff that the boys from FICO Business Analytics would have liked. Overall, good stuff from a business point of view but not very technical.

4. Mark Proctor: Drools Evangelist Extraordanaire! I still have to struggle having with the concept of having only CE elements in a rule, which is called a query in drools. Somehow I think that a good rules debugger would flag that one as a Conditions without Actions flaw. Lots of code. Lots and lots and lots of code. Drools guys loved it because they speak Droolie. I speak Drools about like I speak French - poorly and not in public.

[Another great lunch break provided by JRules guys. Good lunch and good talk by Daniel Selman.]

5. Panel Discussion: OK, but still opinions are like certain parts of the human anatomy; we all have one and they all smell about the same.

6. Andrew Waterman: Missed the whole thing and this was one that I really, really wanted to see.

7. Hal Hildebrand: Distributed Systems. (a) "Failures are the norm." ??? There are times when failure is not an option. And we should NOT tolerate it but the rule sales guys can usually turn them around so that it must be the fault of the client. The client should NEVER stand still for a failure unless they failed to commit enough resources and money to make it happen.

8. David Holz: Good talk, lots of code.

9. Jason Morris: Another one that I missed. It was time for another lie down to get rid of the migraine. Someone else will have to report on that one.

[Tuesday supper with my Executive Editor at InfoWorld with some of the guys from Rules Fest who insisted on bringing their best friend and therefore some didn't get invited to that supper that should have been. Sorry, CAB. How about in December in San Francisco?]

SDG

jco

ORF 2011 and Its History

Greetings:

First there was ORF 2008. The Three Amigos (myself, Rolando Hernandez and Greg Barton) were the instigators at the continued prodding of Mark Proctor of Drools fame. Rolo and I had our talks rejected by Business Rules Forum because they were too technical. So, we decided to start our very own conference for geeks and nerds. Pete Carapetyn helped in the beginning but dropped out because he just didn't want to tell vendors we might have 500 people. I used the term "might" because anything is possible.

I, on the other hand, really believed that if we set the price at $150 we would be swamped with applicants. (Didn't happen, BTW. We only had about 125 applicants and 30 speakers.) But it was lots of fun and I (it was my credit card after all) lost only about $1,000 on that venture. The speakers were some of the best (technically) in the world. FICO stepped in as a Diamond sponsor (God Bless Carole Ann!) and we made it.

ORF 2009: We raised the price to $500 not expecting the market to drop out the bottom. We moved the event to the finest hotel in Texas, the Adolphus (built by the Busch founder and hosted Queen Elizabeth in 1998) that was located right in the middle of all of the restaurants and only six blocks from Dealy Plaze where JFK was shot. FICO (Carole Ann again) and No Magic stepped up for Diamond sponsors but we had only 35 paying attendees. This one lost about $14K. But, once again, the speaker were the best and even improved over the year before.

ORF 2010: I had gone to work for a vendor so I couldn't do the conference and I handed it over to Jason Morris. Jason had the foresight to realize that he could lose his hind quarters so he set up a committee to help. Carole Ann left FICO so there went that sponsor. But, they got ILOG (IBM now) to replace FICO and only Gary Riley dropped out of the top speaker list from the year before. (His spousal unit was in the hospital for repair.) They dropped the October out of the name (buggers!) but the hotel was on the same level (quality wise) as The Adolphus. It's only drawback was that it was located in a sea of residential homes. The committee fell in love with the hotel and forgot that most people like to end the day, walk out of the hotel and wander around at various pubs and bars. On the other hand, the conference was a 100 with 10x bulls eyes. (If you're a target shooter you know what that means. If you're not a target shooter, you should be.)

ORF 2011: I would like to see it moved to San Francisco, Miami, or Nice in France. They probably won't but I'm just going to wait and see. BRF tried to have a BRF in Europe and they had to cancel for lack of attendees. Very, very embarrassing for all concerned. But, San Francisco or Miami? What do you guys think?

So, see you guys in (??) for Rules Fest 2011?

SDG

jco

ORF 2010 - Monday explanations

Greetings:

A couple wanted to know why "diss" the speakers? Well, I don't know. Migraine, bad back, knees without padding between the bones... Whatever, I guess I just get tired of seeing blog after blog of happiness and wonderful accolades.

BUT! Overall, the conference is probably the only technical rulebase conference, top quality speakers, people who invented this stuff and people who are inventing more great stuff today. I learned a LOT and managed to say the wrong thing at the wrong time more than once.

If you didn't come, SHAME on you. If you did, pay no attention to the guy in the western hat sitting in the back. He's nuts! :-)

SDG

jco

ORF 2010 - Day 1 - Monday

Greetings:

What a great day. Lots of fun and good food at lunch. Here's a play-by-play recap of some things that I noted today. Anyone who feels maligned, well, feel free to drop by and we'll share a Glen Livet and see why I say that.

Carole Ann Berlioz-Matignon: (She's dropped the Berlioz these days and I kind of miss it.) She said, (1) "Don't expect business users to think like developers." Well, OK, but they actually can. And, not only that, they kind of HAVE to think like developers and developers have to learn how to think like business users. (2) "Business guys need Tables, Nets and Graphs." Again, not true - nobody HAS to think like anything because we're all different and we all think different so we can't assume that all business users think like that. QED. (3) "Again, focus on the Business Concepts and NOT the rules." Ouch. The rules ARE the business logic!" Business Concepts and rules are one and the same thing. BUT, the presentation was simply glorious - she's using some kind of really cool software that allows her to give really cool, really neat presentations. BTW, since she made probably 150 documented points and we only disagreed on three, that's pretty close.

Pete Voss: (1) "Animals do not do abstract thought." Actually, animals have been shown to be able to count, communicate and express tremendous feelings for each other and ever some for humans. I just have to give animals more credit. (2) "Neural Gas Architecture." I don't know what that is yet but I'll be working on Goole overtime tonight. Supposedly it's a Dynamic Architecture based on data. Sounds really cool. BTW, way back in the dark ages of Ge transistors and diodes we (the good old USAF) did VERY large-scale training projects. Sure, the computers took up several buildings, but we did them.

John Laird: Now this guy was at CMU with The Forgenator in the early day of AI and Rulebased systems; a true rule guru. He still insists that people need to remember where we started and the this is, after all, AI. Dammit! (OK, he didn't say, "Dammit" but should have.) He claims to be the first person to write a rulebase (a game that he invented in college) with over 1,000 rules.

Rolando Hernandez: Rolo pretty much showed WHY we need to keep knowledge from "leaking" out of the company but some pretty fair ideas on how to to do it.

George Williamson: Something about "Forecasting performance of games." Didn't quite catch all of that but maybe I'll pick it up on the slides later. (2) He commented about taking a line-by-line translation of a C program straight to Java and the problems that they had with it. Well, Duuuhhh.. NEVER translate a program line for line. Not even C to C++. (3) "Business Users cannot understand complex coded rules." Horse hockey! I've worked with business users who did it. They did it because they wanted to do and (maybe) because their jobs were on the line. (4) "You can't test all the rules." Again, well... I did that at Lloyds Bank because we HAD to have 100% verification because it was an on-line banking problem. 800 rules had 65K+ test cases but it had 100% verification. (5) "RBS is a nightmare to maintain from an IT point of view." NO! RBS helps relieve the nightmare if the business guys are writing and testing the rules, NOT the IT guys. Once you put the monkey on their backs, they will make sure that everything works and works right! I guess that traveling around and not staying on one job more than 18 months gives you a different view. (OK, now that's just bragging and promoting traveling consultants, isn't it??) But, I have to admire a guy who stays on for 12 years at one place and puts up with the constant internal politics and wins out - that's something I could never do. :-) Finally, (6) there was a comment about "not having the same time on each device in the USA" (mostly in Texas, I think) Again, back in 65-67 we (NASA) kept everything synched up while doing satellite tracking at lunar distances using WWV out of Ft. Collins, CO, located at 5, 10, 15... MHZ. Nothing more than time hack every second of 1KHz and maybe 10 cycles that we zeroed in every shift. I don't think I'm going to get a job with Union Pacific after this but it had to be said.

James Owen: (moi) Forecasting with Rules. OK, lots of chit chat and didn't hole the putt with the first stroke and the finish was anti-climatic. (Forgot a slide showing how the C code of a forecasting rulebase done in 1992 would look in OPSJ or Drools in 2010. So sue me!) And I was really tired and missed completing the job. So, now I need to go back and put all in the stuff that I left out. Maybe Jason will give me another chance for redemption next year.

Luke Voss: Missed it. One of my favorite speakers (just me him last year) and I had to go get new keys from the front desk to change shoes. Oh, well. Maybe he'll tell me about it later and explain the slides.

Panel Discussion. Well, I deserved that since I started it at ORF 2009 last year. I was kind of hoping that Jason wouldn't do that this year but we're doing it. And the attendees seem to like it. A couple of photos later.

SDG

jco

More tomorrow! Tune in.

CAB Blogs on Rules Fest 2010

Greetings:

Carole Ann Berlioz-Matignon (CAB) has set up a video (complete with barking dogs) at http://bit.ly/bh9txo - on her own blog site. CAB was formerly a VP of all of the products at Fair Isaac (FICO) and she is the very first speaker at the conference. She is extremely well versed in both rulebased systems as well as optimization and other products in our tiny little world.

Check out the video - she a lovely French lass whose English is so much better than my French but she still has a beautiful accent. (Forget it you plonkers! She's happily married!)

SDG

jco

What to do, what to do?

Greetings:

[Warning: None of the below has anything whatsoever to do with rulebased systems nor AI.]

Right now in Texas, we have a slick-haired, pompadoured, Carpet Bagging Yankee Dixie-Dandy spending my tax dollars like it was free money and who is the incumbent Republican. The more mundane Democrat, (whom I happen to like) unfortunately, still favors abortion - something that is, or should be, an unforgivable offense to any true-believing Jew (comme moi), Christian or Moslem.

I can't vote for the Democrat. I refuse to vote for the crooked Republican. (This guy is so crooked that they are going to have to screw him into the ground when he dies.) (This guy is lower than a snake's belly in a wagon track.) (This guy would shame Elmer Gantry.) (This guy... well, you get the idea.)

So, what to do, what to do? What we need is a box that we can check that says "NONE OF THE ABOVE" and reject all of them so that we can get a new slate of candidates; maybe one that has morals and doesn't spend money like West-Texas dirt. (Can't say "water" in Texas - Water down here is WAY too precious.) All I can do is vote for neither one and go on with life. If I don't show up at the polls, then I don't get to vote in the next election unless I re-register again; a slow and arduous process that takes days to complete properly.

Somebody once said, "Every now and then a little (or big) revolution is necessary." Maybe it was Karl Marx. Or George Washington. Doesn't matter - sounds like a good idea to me.

SDG

jco

News on Education

Greetings:

Usually, I watch only two stations here in the DFW area for news: NBC Channel 5 and CBS Channel 11. On one of the local news casts today, on a story concerning the problems that educators face, those in the story and those reporting the story made the following errors (among many that I have now forgotten) in English:

"Dey wuz" [They WERE]

"... where dey wuz going to." [THEY WERE GOING. NO "to" is necessary.]

I quit listening after that and switched over to another channel. That was really embarrassing to hear supposedly educated newscasters and educators use such horrible English. After all, how can the comment on the poor education that "dem kids" are receiving when they themselves cannot properly use the language.

Perhaps ALL of them (educators and news casters alike) should return to class in another state, (say, California or Nebraska or a city like Boston or Chicago) and RE-train themselves in the English language. The way that the language is taught and spoken here in the DFW area is both alarming and depressing - at the same time.

I think that the biggest offenders here in DFW are the following:

• mis-pronouncing words (Wuz for Was, Day for They, Dem for Them)
• Ending a sentence in a verb or preposition
• split infinitives
• using an adjective for an adverb ("He done real good on the test." Even, "He did really good on the test." is not proper English. "He really did well on the test.") "He was driving bad." rather than "He was driving poorly." Adverbs are used to modify a verb and usually end in "ly". Just a guide.

I don't know which is the most common mistake - probably the pronunciation of words. Even NBC nightly news is guilty of really poor grammer and speech. Maybe that's why I listen to them; to prove to myself that even the "big boys and girls" make really common mistakes when excited or animated.

Please, at the Rules Fest, PLEASE allow an English grammarian to look over your presentation for obvious mistakes. Make the speech for them and have them correct your pronunciation of the words into what is sometimes referred to as "Nebraskan English" (if you are an American - USA) or "Posh English" (if you are European.) I doesn't matter how intelligent you are; if you don't speak properly in front of your peers they will think that you are not terribly bright.

Oh, and if I make a mistake, PLEASE correct me privately later. Remember, nobody is perfect - not even linguistic majors. (I have the evidence on file.) And, for some reason, when excited and speaking at a high rate of speed, I sometimes revert to old habits.

SDG

jco

Rete-NT Formally Announced

Greetings:

OK, it's now official. See

http://www.infoworld.com/t/business-rule-management-systems/worlds-fastest-rules-engine-822?source=rss_developer_world

http://www.infoworld.com/t/business-rule-management-systems/worlds-fastest-rules-engine-822?page=0,1&source=rss_infoworld_blogs

for the InfoWorld articles on Rete-NT, the fastest rulebase on earth. The first is the Developer World article and the second is the InfoWorld Blog article. And, here's the really cool part; it's customer driven, everyone gets the same low-ball price ($5K / cpu / year) and any vendor that uses the Rete Algorithm in any form can add it to their engine with the help of Dr. Forgy. If the vendor doesn't want to hire Dr. Forgy, then they can hire whomever they like - but since millions of dineros will be depending on this, I think that I would want the inventor himself to oversee the integration of the Rete-NT into my product. Also, Rete-NT, like all of the PST products before, comes with it's own rulebase language called OPSJ - very similar to JRules and Drools language but a bit more powerful. BTW, the engine itself takes only 100K of RAM.

Dr. Forgy will be at Rules Fest 2010 in San Jose to answer any questions you might have but Rete-NT is proprietary to Production Systems Technology (PST). You might say that this is like the Borland Turbo-C/C++ when they charged only $50 for a better product than other vendors were selling for anywhere from $1,000 (M/S) to $5,000 (IBM) or something like that. That made the C/C++ IDE available to every college student in the world.

Think about it. A corporation could buy the Rete-NT for their servers and improve performance by 100 times or more in some cases, by only 10 times in the worst cases. When you are processing millions of transactions per minute (or even per second) you need the very fastest thing that you can get; and Rete-NT is it.

SDG

jco

ORC at Rules Fest 2010

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR RULES FEST 2010 ATTENDEES

At 5:00 on Monday, Oct 11th, shortly after the final presentation for that day, The Royal and Ancient Order of the Red Cane will award Dr. Charles Forgy and Gary Riley lifetime and voting memberships in ORC (The Royal and Ancient Order of the Red Cane) for their continued contributions to rulebased systems and their refusal to believe that something can't be done - so they did it.

Gary Riley primarily will be awarded ORC membership because he is a pioneer of AI and rulebased systems (along with many others) and for his continued development of a C/C++ rulebased product (CLIPS) and up through and including version 6.3 which has been tested by independent laboratories and has an amazing performance on a par with Rete-2.

Dr. Forgy primarily will be awarded ORC membership for the development of the OPS language itself that upon which most rulebased languages were founded after that time as well as for for the development Rete (3,000 times faster than existing programs), Rete-2 (50 times faster than Rete) and Rete-NT (10 times faster than Rete-2).

Both will be lifetime memberships (both are over 40 so who knows how long that will be?) and both will be voting members on who will be future receipiants of ORF. Also, this will keep the ORF acronym alive for many years to come even though some members of myriad organizations and several vendors tried to kill it off. :-)

SDG
jco

Phinehas Ben Yaakov

Greetings:

Phinehas Ben Yaakov (http://Phinehas2.blogspot.com) has taken over the blog of Yaakov2 (of Sweetwater, Texas) on WordPress. Phinehas 2 because Phinehas 1 was a compatriot of Moshe. Phinehas is a bit of a zealot and should make for some interesting reading. Yaakov is pushing 80 now and is still a brilliant mind but he has grown weary of idiots and G-d has allowed him a bit of "Rest in the West" before he joins his fathers. Enjoy...

SDG
jco

Rules Fest 2010 Conference - Sep 11th - 14th

Greetings:

[The new organizers dropped the "October" part.] OK, if you haven't signed up yet, DO IT NOW!! http://www.rulesfest.org - and be sure and stay at the hotel so Jason doesn't lose his whatevers like yours truly.

If you live in the San Jose / San Francisco (Silly Valley) area, you have no reason NOT to come. Most of the geeks and nerds in the world live and work there so the location this year seemed like a good idea when they first came up with it. Still is. But, remember, space will be limited both at the hotel and the conference.

Great speakers, great friendships, and you get to meet all those guys and corner them with your most perplexing problems. Especially Mark Proctor and Jason Morris. :-)

SDG
jco

My Fair Lady

Greetings:

Even in Texas, when you call a government office you have to press "1" to continue in English. Not only that, it's been years since I spoke with a recruiter who was not from Bombay or New Delhi. I am NOT a bigot. I am NOT an English Teacher. But it would be nice to talk with someone for once who spoke good (USA-type preferred) English, whether in person or over the telephone.

In very first part of the movie, "My Fair Lady", taken from Pygmalian, Professor Higgins laments the fact that the English don't teach their children how to speak - meaning how to speak proper English. And he is totally correct. During my first gig in London at Lloyds TSB Bank, there were at least 15 different accents on the 2nd floor alone. Throw out the obvious Irish, Scotch and Welsh brogues of various colors and renditions, and you still have three different accents from South Africa and another one from New Zeland, another from Australia and then you have the various accents (10 or 12) from in and around London itself. There's a Midland's accent, a Birmingham accent, and... Well, the list just goes on and on and on and... On the other hand, after a year, I could tell a person's heritage and background just by his or her speech pattern.

Meanwhile, in the colonies, the good old USA, the New Orleans accent sounds remarkably like the Bronx accent, there is a group in SW VA that sound like they are from South Georgia, the Cajun accent made Justin Wilson a multi-millionaire which he then gave to five or six different wives. WHY can't we get ONE common language for the English-speaking peoples of the world. English is the national language of Canada, all of the UK including Scotland, Wales and Ireland, the USA, Australia, New Zeland, India (north and south) and, to some degree, Pakistan. If we could get everyone else to go along with this, I might even try to drop my Texas Twan... if everyone else would go along. :-)

SDG
jco