MichaelZ's blog

Cracking the Classical Composer Code

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:06:16 -0500

I credit my enjoyment of of classical music to cartoons. I'm not just talking about the wonderful "What's Opera Doc" Bugs Bunny episode, but more so the extensive use of classical music in the Saturday Morning cartoons of my youth.

Ewe For Sale!

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 18:02:43 -0400

When I say "Ewe for sale" I'm not talking about sheep... I'm talking Eeewwww! as in the creepy type of sale. Before you jump to judgment about where I found this ad, it comes (pardon the pun) from a legit electronics company.

Intellivision Revisited

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 19:27:35 -0400

On my "About Me" post I talked about how Intellivision influenced my career in software. I recently came across some pictures of "my life with Intellivision" and thought I'd post them.

Spam Bots... SUCK!

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 12:16:42 -0400

There are few things I hate more than spam. This site has fallen victim to spam bots which add comments to posts. As a result I've added a quick and dirty "validation" field when posting comments. It's not fool proof but I needed something quick to prevent spammers.

Old Skool Software

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 17:52:06 -0400

I was reading through the most recent issue of "Embedded Systems Design" magazine when an old DOS based compiler picutred in an article caught my eye. It reminded me of the first compiler I owned: Power C by Mix Software. What a great piece of software! For about $40 you got a well written book that included documentation, tutorials and sample code. AND you got a compiler with a very good debugger. That compiler serverd me well in college and when experimenting with C on my own.

Worst ALife Ever!

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 19:31:14 -0400

I'm a sucker for ALife games. With my life long interest in AI and ALife, I just can't pass up a game that promises "real life interaction" with a game character. I've tried most of them: Fin-Fin, Creatures, Catz, Dogz, Black & White, Max the Parrot, etc.

Picture This

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 18:53:24 -0400

I attended LinuxWorld in Boston this week. There were many great products to see and many free t-shirts to get. I talked to the people at QT, they make cross-platform development tools. They pointed me to a user of their product that created "web browsing for people who have difficulty reading text". I'm not sure if this is for non-english speaking, dyslexic or otherwise challenged web surfers.

April Fools

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 12:49:28 -0400

April Fools Day... you either love it, dread it, or are oblivious to it. I've been both the pranker and the prankee. You can find the latest on line april fools jokes here.

Holographic Memory

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:46:18 -0500

More memory... that's all our software demands. What happened to the days when an application could run on 32K? While memory is relatively inexpensive, we dream of the day of almost infinite memory... well at least the big software developers do. For my money Microsoft Office 97 is just fine - quick to load and not a resource hog... but you can't buy it now. You have to get the "upgraded" version which for 90% of us DOES THE SAME THING. Except, the newer version have the added feature of lightening our wallet, hogging memory, and slowing our computers. I'll stop ranting before I go off on the MS Office Paper clip.

Geeks of the world... Set your Tivo to PBS

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:15:22 -0500

Anyone with even a passing interest in AI or robotics is aware of the DARPA Grand Challenge - the military sponsored autonomus vehicle challenge. Tomorrow night (March 28th at 8 p.m.) the PBS show Nova will focus on this race in "The Great Robot Race". This is true "must see TV" for the geek in all of us. It's amazing the progress that has been made in the 2 short years that this challenge has existed.

Spore - From single cells to Galactic terraforming

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 17:57:39 -0500

Will Wright is putting the finishing touches on his next masterpiece: Spore. From what I've read this is far more of a "god game" than the Lionhead games. You can design your own creatures... want to put their butt on the top of their head - no problem! I'm just assuming you can do that from what I've read. Check out Will Wright's presentation at this years Game Developers Conference (GDC).

News Feeds

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 17:39:32 -0500

I've added "live" (well, updated every hour or so) news feeds to the site. You can find AI related news on the right sidebar of the main page. Other news feed can be found under the "Headlines" in the menu on the left.

Free Software Tools

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:23:12 -0500

I installed Subversion on my development machine today... I had been using a CVS type system but became a convert when I implemented Subversion at work. Now I can manage all my own project and work projects using the same interface and they don't conflict.

Stacked Poker AI

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 10:49:04 -0500

In my day job at All inPlay I've written AI poker bots for their single player 5-card draw game and we're currently putting the finishing touches on our accessable version of Hold 'Em. While surfing the net... just as I'm about to head out to a Texas Hold 'Em tournament I run across a news item about the long awaited Stacked with Daniel Negreanu.

Grand Re-Opening

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 15:55:30 -0500

Welcome to the new and improved aiGuru.com! I'm in the process of migrating the info from the old site to this fancy-dancy new site... check back often!