Emma goes mobile

My apologies for not blogging in such a long time. Lots and lots going on at MPL (if you haven't already heard, Katie Spotz is coming to visit in October!) and lots going on with our humble bot. Michele McNeal and I will hit the road again this month to present at LITA in St. Louis, Pandorabots and I have been spending long hours putting Emma's code on Google so other libraries can use it, we're rewriting large portions of the code, and, just for fun, Michele helped me make a mobile version of our Catbot. Michele wrote the code, I just plonked Emma into it. Scan the QR code with your phone, then favorite or bookmark it. Flash and text to speech don't work with the mobile version (yet) but it does everything the web based bot can do. Remember to turn off your pop up blocker.

Adeena Mignogna - AIML Content Management

Adeena Mignogna surveys, compares and contrasts AIML editors.


Part 1:




Part 2:

Jeff Remy - improving virtual agent performance

Jeff Remy of VirtuOz at Chatbots 3.1.


Part 1:



Part 2:

Stanford University offers free online AI class

"Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" will be offered free and online to students worldwide during the fall of 2011. The course will include feedback on progress and a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, the curriculum draws from that used in Stanford's introductory Artificial Intelligence course. Follow this link to sign up.

Less is more...

I'm feeling unusually relaxed. I've rewritten Emma's brain and removed a whole step in passing searches. I had to, since some of the code still used search formulations that would result in an error in any browser besides IE. Removing part of Emma's brain sounds bad, but I think it's going to be good. One less step to see what's in our catalog. Less is more. Simpler is better. Insert the tired cliche of your choice here. Besides, her brain is growing pretty fast; a hundred categories here or there won't make much difference.

Tracking down that "proxy error" bug.

If you read this blog, you might remember that we've been on the trail of a
particularly irritating bug. Talk with Emma and you'll quickly discover that she can pass searches to our catalog and display the results in a new window. Wow! Very nice, very cool! The problem has been that while this worked just fine in IE, it refused to behave in Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari. In those browsers a new window would open with an error message. Well, I'm very pleased to tell you that this has been fixed for the majority of the searches passed. The problem is with the "&" we use to formulate our search, for example an author search or a title search, etc. These have to be rewritten in the html as what's called an "escape sequence." For some reason Firefox and Chrome and Safari didn't like them. Anyway, it's fixed and I would be remiss not to give special thanks to the sharp eyes and sharp mind of Bob Duncan, Systems Librarian at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. Bob is well known as "THE Innovative guru" (Innovative is our catalog software). He's also a very kind and helpful guy. He helped pinpoint the problem and also came up with the solution we're using. Emma and I definitely owe him a favor.

Cow Cow Boogie

In honor of our recent kid's program, a little Ella Mae Morse:



A little background, Ella Mae Morse and the Freddie Slack Orchestra made the first recording of "Cow Cow Boogie" in 1942. It was Capitol Records first million seller.