back
user profile

mark_l_watson

21,400karma·8,624submissions·August 19, 2009
about
I am an author of 20 books and a practitioner specializing in artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural language processing, and the semantic web. I have 55 US patents. I code in Common Lisp, Clojure, Swift, Python, Haskell, Java, and Scheme. My web site is https://markwatson.com

My recent books can be read for free online on my web site or optionally you can pay for them at https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson

Twitter: mark_l_watson and Mastodon: @mark_watson@mastodon.social

recent activity (8,624 total)
comment
Good for them. Heroku provides great service, and I wish them well.
16y ago·view thread
comment
I just installed it and I installed the Mac 23.2 build a few days ago. Aquamacs is nice because just about everything (e.g., latext support) is bundled in. The plain 23.2 build starts faster and seems…
16y ago·view thread
comment
Sounds like he did not make S3 snapshots of his EBS volumes. Ouch. I feel very confident about the robustness of data that I store on AWS because I can make an S3 snapshot, and recover from that snaps…
16y ago·view thread
comment
I don't use full disk encryption, but I do have an encrypted partition that has my .ssh, .pgp, password reminder file, and sensitive customer information. Each time I boot up, I mount this partition. …
16y ago·view thread
comment
Answered my own question: found what I needed here to have the speedbar in the main window frame. Nice: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/SpeedBar …
16y ago·view thread
comment
For Ruby, using datamapper can allow you to (for example) use both a relational database and MongoDB together. You could also have a migration strategy based on datamapper. That said, I would suggest …
16y ago·view thread
comment
The FB developer APIs do make a nice platform. I did a little work a year ago on a customer's Rails app to make it play nice with FB. That said, I woud hate to base my business just on one platform th…
16y ago·view thread
comment
A little off topic, but I am very sorry I entered my birthday when signing up for FB a few years ago. It does not show on my profile but the possibility of FB passing it on with other data for marketi…
16y ago·view thread
comment
I totally agree with you. It would be better to charge a flat rate, perhaps 0.5% Cuban's basic idea is good though. That said, the chances of Congress passing legislation that would limit Wall Street …
16y ago·view thread
comment
Thanks for that link. I spent some time late last night comparing this new pure Emacs release with Aquamacs . I have been a happy Aquamacs user for a long time but I will probably switch because …
16y ago·view thread
comment
BTW, my book covers the use of Sesame and AllegroGraph version 4. AG 4 is not quite out yet so you will have to use Sesame for now to play with the example programs.
16y ago·view thread
comment
That is a useful writeup. The Semantic Web as a technology has faced an uphill battle for acceptance but that is hopefully changing. BTW, here is a PDF link to my new SW book: http://www.markwatson.c…
16y ago·view thread
comment
That is useful, especially because I am spending the weekend getting even more into Clojure (I just accepted a new AI gig and the coding is to be done in Clojure). I have three Clojure books (2 are ME…
16y ago·view thread
comment
That is a great example - bookmarked for later. I have been into SW/RDF/RDFS/OWL tech for a long but Neo4j seems to be a better fit for a lot of general purpose problems.
16y ago·view thread
comment
Good for them! OmniGraffle is the main reason I will always keep a Mac around.
16y ago·view thread
comment
Dow Jones Industrial average down 3.20% S&P 500 down 3.24% So, the Dow ended down about 350 points for the entire day. This happens sometimes. The world economy could crash triggered by problems i…
16y ago·view thread
comment
I totally agree with you. I originally started (a little reluctantly) consulting 12 years ago because we moved from a large city to the mountains so telecommuting-based consulting was a necessity, but…
16y ago·view thread
comment
Thanks for your comment. I added 3 links on the first page for screen shots (2 web browser, 1 on a Droid phone).
16y ago·view thread
comment
I added 3 links to screen shots (one from an Android phone) on the front page so people can also et a quick idea of what the app does. re: when I reorder the list it would be nice if the edit wouldn't…
16y ago·view thread
comment
I just looked through the startup guides for RimuHosting, EC2, and appengine. Looks good, and it is probably a good idea to have a good exit strategy for any cloud provider.
16y ago·view thread
comment
I just added a few lines of code to migrate the database to encrypt passwords with a per user salt (not the best salt, but adds some flavor :-) Thanks again for pointing that out.
16y ago·view thread
comment
Thoughtful essay that I bet rubs some people the wrong way. I permanently delicio.us bookmarked this, but I am not sure which of my friends and family (if any) I'll send the URL to.
16y ago·view thread
comment
I second that thanks - looks very useful.
16y ago·view thread
comment
Right you are, thanks. I'll fix that. I'll probably leave the email code as-is and add a random salt for each account, run crypt and just save the salt and hash for each user.
16y ago·view thread
comment
Really nice paper. In the 1980s at SAIC, we spent a small fortune designing custom (Harvard memory architecture) hardware to do back-prop neural networks relatively fast, but fast back then was about …
16y ago·view thread
comment
I should have added in my post: this really is a simple app: uses a bit of Javascript/AJAX to basically keep everything on one page. Drag a focus to the top of the focus list and then you just see the…
16y ago·view thread
comment
That is good that they offer the service, but I prefer cron jobs that make daily backups to S3 that roll over (e.g., today's daily backup clobbers last Tuesday's backup). Doing a monthly backup that …
16y ago·view thread
comment
If you are a programmer, clone the code from github. You are right about a demo, but this is a small project that I really wrote for myself, and shared it (and the code) as an after thought. This is r…
16y ago·view thread
comment
Nice! I just experimented with it.
16y ago·view thread
comment
Fixed: that warning message just had to be removed. Creating login accounts works. If you get the source code from github, read the README for a one line change to enable email new account authenticat…
16y ago·view thread