Very impressed with Solr and the development community behind it. http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

1.5 days of research, submitted bug and resulting immediate patch and I have a fully functional search engine for a project at work.

If you’ve ever thought it would be nice to have your very own google type appliance, I highly recommend you check out solr and the underlying IR engine: lucene.

One of the books I am currently reading is “An Introduction to Neural Networks“. The introductory chapter covered the Turing Test and the fact that no computer has ever come close to passing it. The context of the chapter was about the limitations of the computer to house and efficiently access a db of human knowledge in order to answer the questions as a human would.

A thought occurred to me. Are humans becoming more computer-like in the way we interact with each other? In this day and age, many of us interact with computers more than we do with humans. I’m doing it write now as I write this. We gain a great deal of our knowledge as a result of direct contact with computer systems and much of our ‘human to human’ interaction are proxied through computer systems (twitter, IM, email, etc) and we adapt our language on those systems accordingly.

For instance, a human could ask another human:
“Hey Sam, are you attending OSCON this year?”

The equivilent tweet might be:
“@samkeen are you attending #oscon2009″

And some line of computer code might be:
if(samkeen.attending(‘oscon2009′)) {
#take some action;
}

From this you could conclude that the Tweet syntax is bridging the gap between programming code and human dialogue.

If it is true that the way we attain, and share knowledge is becoming more computer-like, will that not someday allow a computer system to pass the Turing Test. Or in that case would it be the human passing the Turing Test?

Adding some message body to see where it ends up.

Very happy with my Kindle2 so far as a book reader. I enjoy reading tech books and my wife uses it for novels.
I’ve started playing with the experimental web browser and have found it to be very useful. As expecting it has trouble with graphics but for mobile oriented sites it has proved quite handy, especially since I have access through 3G.
Shown here is m.twitter.com