(This series started with Pattern matching and prediction, part 1)

For part 2, I wanted to start (and probably also end) with Cybula’s AURA (universal pattern matcher, white-paper dated 2004). AURA is said to be built around Correlation Matrix Memory (CMM). CMMs were developed (or picked up for development?) by Prof. Austin, the founder of Cybula, in 1986.

The white paper tells us that

The now ubiquitous neural network methods such as Kohonen Networks, Radial Basis Function networks and Kohnen networks all allow users develop good pattern matching systems for small problems, where they excel. However, when the problems grow to large datasets, and where very high performance is needed, they become limited. … The well known k-Nearest Neighbour methods (k-NN) is a relatively good pattern matching method that has been constantly shown to operate well on many problems, however, it suffers from slow operation on large data problems.

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The blog isn’t currently updated, as I’m quite busy with several abrupt opportunities, main of which is the Google Summer of Code 2007 (announcement here). I applied for the WordPress with “Improve the performance of WordPress” project. Currently I’m working on the detailed weekly 3-month-long plan of implementation for the project. I do feel that I should have learned about GSoC-2007 earlier than Friday, March 23rd . Well, it’s good at least that the deadline for applications was extended until the 27th of March, and I could at least register and submit the only application which I consider to be a good fit for my current activities and skills.

This year the competition doesn’t seem overly tough, with around 3000 students, over 6100 applications, and 800 stipends for successful applicants. However, among the 131 OpenSource projects, some will definitely enjoy slightly more attention and applications than others. I wonder how many applications there are for WordPress

Update: WordPress 2.5+ does not require adding rewrite rules to .htaccess, as it now redirects the browser to the correct (configured) URL itself. However, if you would like the redirection to be made by apache’s mod_rewrite rather than by PHP’s header() instruction (which I suspect to be slower than mod_rewrite), then you can still use the instructions below. (Another consideration to stick to mod_rewrite is the presence of other software installed into the root of the same domain as the WP blog; mod_rewrite solution works for all, while WP’s own redirect works only for WP.)

See important update at the end of this post!

In the early days of my acquaintance with internet, I considered it obligatory to add the “www.” part in front of every site (domain) name. As a matter of fact, without those three mysterious letters most of the websites “didn’t work”.

Now, nearly a decade later, it appears clear to me that the www part is redundant. But it was only today, that I finally switched my blog to the use of Class B no-www policy. Earlier it was Class A, the most common.
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According to one of the definitions I provided earlier in the descriptive entry-level post on what is artificial intelligence, intelligence can be described as a special pattern-matching algorithm. Evidently, universal and complicated and recurring pattern matcher, but still just a pattern matcher

I decided to find out more about pattern matchers of nowadays… definitely not focusing too much on regular expressions, which are of no interest to me in the light of possible applications.
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PodTech had an interview with Jason Calacanis published on October 3, 2006.

You can download the video from the source page, or use my local copy.

As for the “starting a company” part, which goes closer to the end of the video, Jason recommends focusing on a single thing and excel in it. That is, if you are starting a company to host user blogs – then think on what you can do better than others in the field, instead of adding ontop of your blogs some additional not-that-really-related services.

Jason also foresees great future for the internet advertising, providing as an example iTunes-like shops providing TV shows for download, and – of course – embedding some ads. The same goes for user-generated content providers, which are viewed by the producers and sellers as good platforms to promote and sell their goods.

As I earlier said, computer games are evil. After nearly half a year of not playing any computer games, I spent a few hours on “trackmania nations” racing.

Probably the only reason of writing about trackmania is the system of “distributed gameplay” in this game. As I am not a gamer, I do not know if trackmania was the first to introduce the “distributed gaming and ranking system”, but the system itself is very appealing and even akin to the computational efforts like The GRID and seti/folding@home etc.
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Why I hate frameworks? by Benji Smith. Recommended to anybody involved in web-development and familiar with the concept of web-development frameworks. (For the serious stuff, see my post on Why Zope 3 is just great.)