What geeks do for fun
Hey All,
I was a bit bored, and decided to code a photo gallery for all the baby pictures we've collected in the last month or so. Well, once the basics were in place, I couldn't help but to start adding features. What started out as a simple list of photos has become a hacked together php/xml/ajax/java/javascript/artificial intelligence (no joke) conglomerate birthchild of my spare time. Feel free to check it out here. The gallery is pretty much what you'd expect. A bunch of pictures, with all the excitement of a neighbors vacation slide show. The interesting part is the contact us option. Originally I decided to fake a online chat program with javascript. You know, you type "hello" and it responds with one of several generic greetings, like "What?" or "Yes". I got that goin no problem, then, I decided it would be really cool to emulate the beep sound of other IM's. Unfortunately, javascript doesn't have a beep function. Mozilla will let you dynamically call java classes, but IE limits what you can and can't call in java from javascript. The solution? Write a little java applet that goes "beep". So now I got a fake chat program that beeps and spits out random responses. That wasn't good enough. I remembered hearing about all the programs written to try and pass the Turing test (the Turing test, for those who don't know is a basic test of Artificial intelligence. If a person cannot tell whether or not the thing he's talking to is a computer, then for all intensive purposes, the computer is considered sentient), and I stumbled across something called A.L.I.C.E. This is a chatterbot that can keep track of conversations, remember names, etc. Unfortunately, it was originally written in LISP. Ack. But wait! Sourceforge comes to the rescue with a PHP/mysql port! Sweet! A couple of hacked files later (hacked in the original sense of modified quickly as opposed to 'cracked') and A.L.I.C.E. lives. So, to get right to the point, I've got a pretty decent fake chat room. Take a look and tell me what ya think.
I was a bit bored, and decided to code a photo gallery for all the baby pictures we've collected in the last month or so. Well, once the basics were in place, I couldn't help but to start adding features. What started out as a simple list of photos has become a hacked together php/xml/ajax/java/javascript/artificial intelligence (no joke) conglomerate birthchild of my spare time. Feel free to check it out here. The gallery is pretty much what you'd expect. A bunch of pictures, with all the excitement of a neighbors vacation slide show. The interesting part is the contact us option. Originally I decided to fake a online chat program with javascript. You know, you type "hello" and it responds with one of several generic greetings, like "What?" or "Yes". I got that goin no problem, then, I decided it would be really cool to emulate the beep sound of other IM's. Unfortunately, javascript doesn't have a beep function. Mozilla will let you dynamically call java classes, but IE limits what you can and can't call in java from javascript. The solution? Write a little java applet that goes "beep". So now I got a fake chat program that beeps and spits out random responses. That wasn't good enough. I remembered hearing about all the programs written to try and pass the Turing test (the Turing test, for those who don't know is a basic test of Artificial intelligence. If a person cannot tell whether or not the thing he's talking to is a computer, then for all intensive purposes, the computer is considered sentient), and I stumbled across something called A.L.I.C.E. This is a chatterbot that can keep track of conversations, remember names, etc. Unfortunately, it was originally written in LISP. Ack. But wait! Sourceforge comes to the rescue with a PHP/mysql port! Sweet! A couple of hacked files later (hacked in the original sense of modified quickly as opposed to 'cracked') and A.L.I.C.E. lives. So, to get right to the point, I've got a pretty decent fake chat room. Take a look and tell me what ya think.