I am impressed that Eclipse can display the extended character set

Notepad shows extended character set characters as black rectangles. In the Eclipse IDE, however, show the correct character. The ones that I have were produced by OCR on Dutch books with the Cuneiform OCR product. Java handles the characters without a problem, as that was a design requirement.

Trivia time: what was the name of Anoop Gupta's brother?

Anoop Gupta developed a Prolog implementation for the TI Explorer Lisp machine in the 1980's. I used to know his brother's name (I think of all sorts of goofy things and then try to remember or find the answer). In the latter part of the 1980's, I was doing Defense-related AI work, so I got to talk some interesting people were still involved. By 1990, all that had collapsed. The main thing that I had gotten out of it was a good library of books and papers. Many of the books were recommended to me and the rest I just bought, because I was buying every AI book in sight. I also have copies of a lot of great papers, such as David H. D. Warren's thesis about compiling Prolog and Carl Hewitt's thesis from MIT. I have some off-beat things, such as the Rosie Manual.

My first real glitch with Sprint Mobile Broadband

About 20 minutes ago, I was knocked off my connection with Sprint Mobile Broadband. I use a USB modem to connect, but when I try to reconnect, it tells me that it detects a roaming situation and cautions me against connecting. There are reasons why this is a very odd situation. I have not seen this issue before now.

I sprayed Diet Coke when I read this

Megan McArdle, at her new blog at The Atlantic, quotes a send off on "24" about "ecoterrorism". It is worth reading, as when I read it and laughed, unexpectedly, I sprayed Diet Coke (I guess that is some sort of test).

We had storms today

The "chief meteorologist" for KRLD radio, Brad Barton, had thought that storms today would be off to the east. He was almost right, but from about 3pm, we had strong storms pop up and roar through the Dallas and Fort Worth area. They were gone by about 5:30pm. Still, there was enough thunder and lightning to disrupt power. My two computers were knocked down and the clocks were reset. We needed the rain and we got a good amount. We have not gotten any rain in two weeks. The present forecast, likely to change over time, is for a chance of rain every day for the next ten days. We seem to be into the fall storm season, nationally, not just here. Where my mother lives, they had a strong enough storm that they were without power for over a day (in southwestern Michigan). You have heard about all the flooding, including in Minnesota and Ohio.

We saw a total eclipse of the moon, early this morning

It sounds like song lyrics, but we saw a total eclipse of the moon, early this morning. We are in a full moon phase, but I immediately recognized that we were seeing a lunar eclipse. I called my wife out and we watched as the last sliver of light disappeared before I hit the road. This must have been about 4:30am. Yes, I got up ridiculously early, because my two year old dog started whining about 3:30am. She had gotten me up at 2:30am, and I never got back to sleep. Since I knew that I needed to take care of my son's cats while he is gone, I got going. That is when I saw the moon. The Dallas Morning News has pictures.

I am thinking about getting back into Smalltalk programming

I started programming professionally in Smalltalk in late March of 1992. I depended on Smalltalk consulting for income for much of the 1990's. My last job that involved programming in Enfin and Object Studio Smalltalk was in Minneapolis in 2002 to 2003. I have had some natural language processing code that was in VisualWorks 5i and 7.1, but I don't think that I have a way to run the images. At some point, they started to build in knowledge of paths into images and that seemed to be a very bad thing. When I lost the paths that they images ran in, they "broke" when I tried to launch them. This morning, I sent an email to James Robinson, at Cincom, in the off chance that he will reply and can help. He is seemingly still product manager for Smalltalk at Cincom. In the meantime, I have downloaded Squeak to see if that might be the place I do new Smalltalk development. I had only a small experience with Squeak in 2003 to 2004, when I was still in Minneapolis, and at the time, Squeak underperformed in running my translation code. I don't even know if I will really do this, again, but "it might happen". I have a lot of Dutch text that was created with OCR that I would like to translate in a batch fashion. I have word and phrase dictionaries to use. I just need to get running code, again.