Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

Hey all!

I’m sorry I haven’t been very active with my packages recently. I all-of-a-sudden started grad school and have been swamped with studying. I also started a contract and have been busy trying to learn a new codebase while contributing something other than snark.

I promise I’ll get back to packaging IronRuby and IronPython on Mono for Debian as soon as things start settling down. Getting an A in the class is higher priority, though, sorry…

Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten about you ;)

Cheers,

C.J.

PS, I am implementing a Perl library to exercise my understanding of the class. You can follow along at the search.cpan.org page for Lingua::HPSG or by cloning the git repo:

$ git clone git://karma.colliertech.org/colliertech/langparser

Tags: c.j. insider, debian, free software, git, ironpython, ironruby, language, mono, perl, software

Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

*whew* I did a bunch of things yesterday. We took our kindergärtner to her first Friday at her new school (and were about 10 minutes tardy. oops). We then took our toddler to a nearby playground with swings and slides and let her expend some energy. After she had been sufficiently exercised, we walked back home, stopping at a coffee shop on the way. The baristo (you call male baristas “baristos,” right? :) ) recognized my MC Frontalot shirt and asked whether I had caught him the previous weekend at PAX. Unfortunately, I have not attended PAX since 2006, but I *did* purchase the tee directly from The Front himself ;)

When we got home, I worked a bit on an English Language parser implementation and then went to the University of Washington to meet with Emily Bender about getting in to the Professional Master’s program in Computational Linguistics. It all looks good, and I even got the good news that the GRE is no longer required!

After the meeting, I headed home and poked at the parser for a little while longer. I then picked Scarlet up from after-school care and brought her home. I then hopped in the car and drove toward Bellevue to meet up with Monty while he’s in town. I over-estimated the amount of time traffic would steal on my way to Bellevue, and had an extra hour to blow. So I dropped by building 41 and shot the IronPython bull with Dino. It turns out he’s got an android phone, too. I told him it was possible to put a debian chroot on it and that he should even be able to ‘apt-get install ironpython’ to his phone soon ;) We talked briefly about the CodePlex Foundation and Sam Ramji’s departure from The Evil Empire. Dino seems skeptical about the project. I don’t have enough information to have much of an opinion. However, it sounds like some folks I trust are involved, so I’m hopeful.

I left MS just in time to make it to the wrong address at the specified time. My phone had just enough juice to call Monty to get the right address and then use the navigation system to find my way there. I wasn’t able to make reservations at the place we intended to go for dinner until 8:15, so we went to the Barnes & Noble for a bit. They only had one NLP book in stock and the examples are all in Python. I should learn that language one of these days… As we were leaving the Pacific Place, Monty mentioned to me that he is on the advisory board for the CodePlex Foundation, and that they have been responsive enough to his input that they changed the Mission statement, at his recommendation, just one day before the Foundation was publicized. He feels that this is a very good direction for Microsoft to be heading.

My brother Chris was kind enough to watch the kids while we went out to dinner. Quick note: he recently graduated from UW with a BA in Electrical Engineering and is looking for work using his acquired knowledge, in case anyone needs one of those ;)

We met up with my wife, Hannah and our friends, Mike & Cynthia at our place. Monty graciously avoided mentioning the terrible state in which our apartment has recently found itself. The kids were super cute and polite and said hi/bye.

Over dinner we discussed building an android app (Monty has one, too ;) ) to automate the process of creating bounties for apps and getting folks to implement them. We also talked about MySQL and MariaDB, of course. Hannah and I recalled my time working for MySQL, Inc. on the MaxDB project and some subtle cultural differences we noticed while traveling. It was interesting getting the inside scoop about the Sun acquisition and some of the recent goings-on in the MySQL/Sun/Oracle world. I wasn’t aware, for instance, that the EU is balking on the merger because of monopoly concerns.

Tags: android, autotools, c.j. insider, dlr, family, free software, friends, frontalot, git, ironpython, language, mariadb, maxdb, microsoft, mono, mysql, politics, python, social networking, sun, telephony

Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

http://cjcollier.livejournal.com/2716.html
http://cjcollier.livejournal.com/7191.html
http://cjcollier.livejournal.com/8730.html
http://cjcollier.livejournal.com/113549.html

Tags: language

Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

I sent an email to the Fedora Legal list asking whether they will accept software released under the MS-PL license. My friend and former colleague, Brett Lentz mentioned that he was concerned that the Fedora folks might not accept software released under the MS-PL. So I asked. I also bcc’d a certain troll on said mail so as to get lots of flame mail. I’m practicing to become a master twitterbaiter.

14:43 < cj> wakko666: so… we are building ironruby/ironpython debian packages over on OFTC/#debian-cli
14:43 < wakko666> k
14:43 < cj> meebey just packaged up mono 2.4.2.3 in .deb
14:44 < cj> with some backported patches required to get the DLR language engines running correctly
14:44 < wakko666> k
14:44 < cj> we’re using xbuild to perform the build, thanks to ankit’s recent patches.
14:44 < cj> alarm went off. need to address food.
14:44 < wakko666> i know that mono is already in Fedora.
14:45 < cj> great. any idea what version?
14:45 < wakko666> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=30
14:45 < cj> we’ll need 2.4.2.3 + some patches. This is pretty bleeding edge, but I expect the fedora packagers are as ‘on it’ as the debian folks
14:46 < wakko666> fedora tends to be a bit further ahead of the curve than the debian folks
14:46 < cj> we can supply them the patches required. they are also being merged into the 2.4 branch, so should be in the next official release
14:46 < wakko666> k.. shouldn’t be a problem.
14:47 < cj> here is the tarball we’re using to build the .deb
14:47 < cj> http://github.com/mletterle/ironruby/tarball/20090805+git.e6b28d27
14:49 < cj> most of the stuff you’ll need as far as build commands go are in debian/rules:
http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-cli-libs/packages/dlr-languages.git;a=tree;f=debian;h=8e4c0abc01ba2db27fe66d508317cef3b574fd3a;hb=f3c10b84cf5f12cb670d14232263ac81662ff714
14:49 < cj> I’ve got to finish making lunch for kids ;)
14:49 < cj> back shortly.
14:55 < wakko666> cj: my main concern about packaging ironruby is licensing. Fedora will accept packages under the MS-Shared-Source license [ed: this is not at all true.], but the MS-PL isn’t on their list of acceptable license. [ed: it is now.]
14:58 < cj> wakko666: alrighty. jschementi is the guy to talk with about licensing issues. He’ll be back some time soon, I’m sure
14:58 < wakko666> of course, i can always write the spec file and you guys can host your own rpms, but it would be nice to actually get it into Fedora proper.
14:59 < cj> also, MS-PL is dfsg compliant and OSL-approved. Is it a decision to deny MS-PL or that it just hasn’t been reviewed yet?
14:59 < wakko666> not sure. we’d need to ask on the fedora-legal-list mailing list
14:59 < wakko666> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#SoftwareLicenses
15:00 < cj> alright. at another time. it’s nap time for scarlet and zelda. ;)
15:01 < wakko666> sure thing. if you ping the fedora-legal list, let me know what they have to say.
19:49 < cj> wakko666: firestorm initiated.

Tags: c#, cli, colliertech, dlr, feds, free software, freenode, friends, git, humor, irc, ironpython, ironruby, language, linux, microsoft, mono, security, social networking, software, xbuild

Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

Ivan has updated the build script to produce IronPython binaries as well as IronRuby. Get your fresh DLR-powered, mono-friendly, dynamic language implementations here:

http://dlrci.colliertech.org/

There are now links to source and binary tarballs as well as source zips on each of the build result status messages:

http://ironruby.colliertech.org/integrity/ironruby

I’ve been putting some effort in to getting the .deb of ironruby put together, as well. Here are the current problems :)

* xbuild in sid is not new enough to successfully build IronRuby
* rake requires a gem called pathname2, which is not otherwise packaged, and debian policy strictly disallows using ‘gem install foo’ during build
* mono 2.4.2 does not include mono-api-diff, which is keeping us from making a .deb of xbuild and friends

Tags: c#, colliertech, compiler, debian, dlr, free software, freenode, irc, ironpython, ironruby, language, linux, mono, software, xbuild

So... I've been trying to parse english language (text) for a while. I haven't quite done it yet. My new idea involves IRC bots. We have lots and lots of conversations happen in public IRC channels every day. The conversations usually involve transmission of ideas in textual format. These transmissions are quite often (but not always) understood by the receiving party. The transmissions are expected to have been intercepted by the general public, so having a bot intercept and attempt to interpret should not offend anybody :) It will anyway, of course, but we'll pretend that this 0.00001% minority doesn't mind being marginalized for the time being.

So the idea is this: split the words on the standard word boundaries and do a dictionary lookup on each of them. Cache the results locally so a network hit isn't incurred for each word we look up. The info we will take from the dictionary lookup is the "part of speech" that the word falls into. In the english language, this is not often a scalar value. Computers are getting fast, so I think that this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

So now we have a list of words and the parts of speech for each of these words. These words are assumed to combine in such a way that they form a coherent idea.

At this point, we can create an XML document from these word elements, for instance:

<sentence>
<article>the</article>
<noun plurality="plural">cats</noun>
<verb>are</verb>
<adjective>cute</adjective>
</sentence>

There would need to be an XSD or DTD against which to test this document in order to determine whether these parts of speech can be combined in this way to make a valid, gramatically correct, sentence.

Tags: irc, language, linguistics, perl, xml