Prolific Programmer on the Internets!

Jameel and TQ mentioned that they want so many new expert systems in prsnl (currency support, € to US$ conversion, company identification, street addresses, phone numbers, etc.) that I've decided to give up on writing all the expert systems myself. I've written an interface and will port the existing expert systems to the new platform. In doing so, I'll release the two existing source systems as tutorials on how to use the interface to implement your own expert systems for whatever you'd dream of having prsnl match automatically. I'll have a new drop up Monday and look forward to putting up a repository for user-submitted expert systems over the next week, complete with digg-like ranking.

Lifehack, Seth, have both written techniques for reading a book. I'll add my own thoughts. As expected, I write my outline using on paper, using a mindmap, and then crystallise it in prsnl. The advantage being that I can use the lightning-fast search of prsnl and its nearly limitless storage -- it is a memory dump after all.

I was just adding freeform text to prsnl (you should be too!) and hit a few bugs that have since been exterminated. Jameel deserves the credit, for uncovering a particularly nasty bug, having to do with how jetty processes URL redirects.

Lifehacker perennial favourite VPN tool, Hamachi, just updated its Mac version to add Leopard support. Could this be how to network-enable prsnl?

I just added PDF support to prsnl and updated the drop. The impetus for this was a commenter on lifehacker who suggested scanning receipts in to PDFs and storing them for easy location. One caveat (which I will fix soon), is that you need to give the file an RFC-compliant URL. The distribution is now about 16 megabytes. *sigh*

I found 3 bugs in the tree. Fixed 2 of them. Firstly, there was an off-by-one error when displaying results. Second, I fixed a path error on submit. The third is that the artificial intelligence engine only reacts to the first matching element. This is a temporary situation, which will require a larger set of changes. I've put a new release at the usual location.

New drop posted. This one moving everything over to the servlet, other than the main page. Cosmetic changes other than that. Should be a lot faster. Get it now and leave your comments!

Did some more cleanup of the code and uploaded a new build. It's moving in the direction of becoming a web-based sbook at the moment. While I'm fine with this, if you're not, pipe up in the comments.

prsnl has had artificial intelligence support added to it. It will recognise email addresses and web urls, for now. I'd like to add address and phone number support as well. Try it out and let me know what you think.

I figured out that I often make errors when entering stuff into prsnl. At first, I was satisfied with simply adding new entries to the database for corrections. I soon realised that this really isn't the best solution, so I added luke to the archive as a temporary measure. Research into a permanent solution raises a need to be able to uniquely identify an individual document. Lucene indeed maintains an internal, unique document identifier, so we need only expose it. However, it isn't obvious where in the source tree this identifier is devised or calculated. So, I've submitted a patch to expose the attribute, assigned in IndexWriter. If the patch is rejected, I guess I'll have to fork lucene. I don't want to do that, but if it has to happen, it has to happen.