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the first little foothill
Friday, May 10 2002Today was one of those horrible days spent nursing my sick principal computer back to health. It all started with an attempt to install a flatbed scanner Twain driver. Shortly thereafter, I noticed that any major file operation undertaken within a folder window tended to crash Explorer, the desktop navigation software (equivalent to the Finder on the Macintosh). Such crashes always forced me to resort to the Task Manager. After a few hours of trying to program under this new handicap, I'd had enough. I was finding that the four or five second interruption of having to go to the Task Manager after every folder operation was enough of a distraction to keep me from accomplishing anything in the task at hand. For me, programming is impossible without a good, uncluttered short-term memory.
So I went to work trying to determine what was wrong. I scoured the Event Viewer. I looked for suspicious items in the Process List and found two instances of the OpenMe.exe virus - but they weren't my problem. Then, in desperation, I started nuking things one by one, starting with Adobe Acrobat and ending with Internet Explorer 6. But my computer seemed to be determined to crash with every folder operation. I wanted to cry.
Knowing there was no alternative, I reinstalled Windows 2000. When presented the option, I attempted a system restore instead of a fresh install (you push the R key at some point very early in the process, when the screen is still blue and looks like it belongs to an IBM PC-XT).Miraculously, this option actually worked (a miracle, considering it is not a normal option). As advertised, it restored the operating system without forcing me to reinstall and reconfigure all my applications. The only tricky part was that I had to swap out video cards for part of the process, since the Windows 2000 installer can't display anything other than a simple bright red box using the ATI Radeon video card.
By the time I was done, it was only about 9pm. Having thought that I'd be spending the weekend rebuilding my computer's software from scratch, I was understandably elated. I spent the rest of the evening working on an interesting side project related to my new artificial intelligence effort. I wrote a parsing spider that trawled through my old entries of Randomly Ever After, compiling a SQL-based dictionary of every unique word, along with a count of how many instances of that word were found. The idea is to know the most common words so I can write a "reasonably" effective sentence parser with the ability to diagram sentences and make informed guesses about subjects, predicates, adjective phrases, gerund phrases, prepositional phrases, etc. Ultimately (for this phase of the project) I want to create a general "idea model" for the world and have a program flesh out the details of this model by "reading" texts. At first this model may know that "a car" "goes fast" without knowing what a "car" or "fast" are. But later, once it also knows a "car" is "shiny" while a "cheetah" is "furry" and "fast," it can infer that a car is like a cheetah, except that it is shiny, not furry. Perhaps this goal is too ambitious; I always feel uncomfortable if my goals can't be satisfied within an hour. But for now I'm writing the tools and creating the databases to parse and hold some of the information without really knowing what I'll ultimately need. If my past efforts are any model, I'll get to the top of the first little foothill and then see the way to proceed to the next. Eventually, off in the distance, I see the Himalayas.
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