Fuzzy Logic

So I went ahead and tried to re-invent the wheel and I must say it's turned out great so far. I basically stopped all work on it over the break but I've recently picked it back up and the result is pretty nice. here are some SCREENSHOTS if anyone is interested. I think the most useful feature will be when I add more users into the mix. This will allow me to show a client the task list for their project that way I don't get emails about features or bugs that I am already aware of. Also if a client can see how I am prioritizing bug fixes or features than perhaps they won't get upset when the changes they're looking for don't happen.

School is starting up again, I have some fun classes this semester so I'm actually looking forward to it. Also being in the lab again I'll be able to get back to Wordmine and work on some more interfacing stuff. I can use my new software to track the development of wordmine! It will be nice to have all of my features in one place rather than carrying notepads around and trying to keep them all in one place.

I hope everyone had a very happy holiday season and best of luck to everyone in 2012!

While writing a take home final for my Software Engineering class I was required to review a variety of project management software and become familiar with one that that would suit the needs of our case study. At first I started looking at the free; open source; web based ones as they are the solutions that would naturally appeal to a student and web developer.

I ended up using a trial version of a proprietary (closed source, usually not free) system to use in my case study and it had some nice features. On my way to the university I was considering the systems I had looked at and was able to generalize that the open source systems were too general to keep me happy, this is most likely because entire communities are contributing what they look for in a project management tool (PMT) and so we see every aspect. Although some of the paid systems may have the exact feature set I wanted, the inability to integrate it with my server its self really turns me off them.

Not everything I write here is going to be about CS or linguistics however! So don't be discouraged from reading in the future even if you find this painfully boring!

In the last year I was lucky enough to be able to work on the project WordMine2, a linguistics project which is trying to gather Orthographic (letter sizes and differences), Phonological (phonemes or sound properties) and Semantic (meanings) information  about words. Currently managed by Dr. Lori Buchanan of the University of Windsor I re-designed the UI for searching this database of about 64 thousand words and now I'm looking at more data mining.

One of the benefits of doing this work in Dr. Buchanan's lab is that I am able to sit in on meetings she has with her thesis/graduate students. This allows me to be able to see what kind of data and access to the data they require for their studies. Recently a few students have been looking into compound words and that's what sparked my interest in this topic.

So my current self-assigned task is to take our word list and try and find all of the compound words within it. I divided this into two separate operations in the code, the first being to find all of the words in the list that were parts of other words (this will make more sense later) and then take those words that i found and see if they make up the whole word.

To relax during the insanity that is my 4 finals in 5 days I've been toying with the idea of starting up a blog again. In the past I didn't used to write in it so I deleted it but I think I've got enough interesting things going on at this point to keep it current. As soon as exams are done I'll be hitting a few of my clients websites with some pretty heavy changes as well as updating some of the systems on the server. Expect to see some articles in the next few days about some of the projects I'm working on and some new areas I've started to look into.

Goals for this break:

• Create a SugarCRM
• Update iwss.ca
• Complete a major re-design of maden.ca
• Outline a major project for the new year (secret)
• Learn more about website and network point security (backtrack 5)
• Design a website for a friend's business: perfectlylegitcarriage.com (specialized carriages for animals other than horses)

It may seem like work but I'm pretty pumped to not be reading powerpoint slides!