I am now writing the last method which is called a Precondition method

I am now writing the last method called a Precondition method. This is the last page of code of a seven page Java program. There is also a seeds class file that is about half a page and a main method file that is also about half a page. The seeds file I rewrote from one of the professor's files last week. Yesterday night, I wrote the main method and the professor looked at it today and said, it looked fine. I started with a file of the professor's as he suggested for the longer file and started to rewrite it last weekend and now have about one page of this longer seven page file to write. The last page has what is called a Precondition method and I will now work on that tonight.

My first school Java program is almost done.

I have studied Java a little in the middle 1990's. I today have written a Java program that does a simulation of a city garage. This is for a school assignment in modeling and simulation. I am almost done the program and have about two pages left to program in a 7 page program.

I have my Java main method for my assignment done now.

I worked last night on an assignment in simulations and modeling. I have a Java main method now completed. I now just need to write the class file which is an instance of EveSched a type of class we are using for simulations. I am now writing the various methods in this class and have I think completed all the action sequences. I still have more of the process events method to write. This morning I printed this class file for proof reading. I may be able to complete tis assignment today if I focus on it.

I cleaned up the English in our term project this morning and started section 3 of the report document.

I was up early today after some long work days this week. We are working on a paper I am a coauthor of on retirement. I will say more after we present the paper. Right now I should keep the details quiet before peer review. But it is a lot of work and all the data must all be quality checked.

Yesterday morning, I proof read our conceptual model and SUI and spotted enough English errors to plan a rewrite this morning. That is now done. I have also started the intermediate step of tabling all the Java code. I am going to spend more time with Java tonight and tomorrow. The rest of this morning and afternoon will only be reading time.

No coding all day.

I ended up completing the building of a new computer so did not do any coding today or reading books.

We had a guest lecture from Louis Berta

Louis Berta who is the former professor of this course and coauthor of our textbook gave a guest lecture last night in our simulations and modeling course. He covered continuous systems modeling. He also lectured superficially on numerical analysis and optimization.

Progress report on Java coding

I now have the entities, the constants, the parameters, the data modules and the inputs programmed. I am working on the process events method. At least, I think it is called a method. I use Excel columns to do repetitive lines of code. I then save the excel as text with tabs and copy and paste it into the code file. I have stopped programming yesterday and have class tonight. I still have more methods to write but have tomorrow off work. I did all my coding on the VIA train from Toronto to Ottawa.

The Perl Script for creating a BibTeX file: progress report

My back up files are not html or plain text but I can "view as source" each month's posts and then save these html files on my local computer. So I can create the text files needed. I searched google for Perl scripts. The Perl scripts I have viewed so far seem to have some of the required stuff but my script will need to be more complex and I may, in fact, use regular expressions mixed with Perl.

Java code writing.

I am starting to write some Java code for my present assignment at school. It is due Tuesday night. I have so far written the part required for translating from the conceptual model to Java code. I followed the course material this far. Now I must make a Java source file that works. I am not sure I have to get it to compile but I do need to actually write some code.

Term project coming along; learning conceptual modeling

I have been learning conceptual modeling. I have worked with three other students to produce a conceptual model of a restaurant simulation. I also have an assignment to write some Java code and have finished one of the steps in the process. Now I actually have to translate this work in to some Java code. I have been teaching myself Eclipse software. Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

I have a learning opportunity at work but need to read a book first.

A former director general at work in National accounts has introduced me to a history book. So far I am on the first chapter. The story is of Canadian National Accounts that are done and have been done at my workplace. This gentleman who is now retired has offered to discuss the book with me when I have read it. So far, I told him my first impression when I learned a basic definition of national accounts. I said, "That is too large a problem. How can it be done?" Now I am learning it is done as best it can be and by meticulous counting and in the end is not a real account but a giant guesstimate. At any rate this is someone I share office space with this retired director of National accounts.

Our project is moving along we had our walk through meeting yesterday.

I have been really busy with work but basically nine to five except for some library trips at night. At school I have been learning Java. I finally have a computer science professor after many years of learning code on my own. After this step in the project we begin our coding step.

Perl script to make my directed list citations into BibTeX format citations

I am going to research Perl and then write a Perl script that takes my directed list citations in McGill Law student style, that I have used all along with this blog and produce BibTeX citations for all my citations on this blog. I will use the Perl script to process my back up files for this blog and to do that I will first need to save all these back up doc files as plain text files.

Following up on Chapter three references to knowledge representation standards and a couple of common sense reasoning onology projects.

I am planning for my final 4.5 hours of pre-thesis study this long weekend to write this blog entry, using the on screen pdf's I am able to find for the following references. Only two are books and the rest are magazine, journal, or proceedings articles, so should all be accessible from the university library over the library web interface. I will post this entry then later add the citations then post it again. Finally I will repost this entry with follow up discussions after reading each paper.

The references in Chapter three are too knowledge representation or knowledge communication languages or standards including semantic web languages and include DARPA Agent Mark Up Language (DAML) for an SGML example.

The full list of standards and the authors references for these are:

Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF)

Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML)

DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML)

Ontology Inference Layer (OIL)

Web Ontology Language (OWL)

The reference to the "Semantic Web is Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. The Semantic Web Scientific American, 284(5):34-43, 2001.

There are also some references to the logic and its origins that I won't follow up on.

I will follow up on references to the project to "develop a universal ontology for common sense reasoning... the CYC project." and "smaller projects" with related ambitions... the KM project." Here are the citations for those projects that the authors have given.

CYC

KM

Chapter three was much more readable.

After chapter two covered First Order Logic (FOL) the third chapter connected this representational language with the idea of a Knowledge Base (KB) for a domain. Then entailments were shown to be provable and now chapter four will show how to use contradiction in a proof. Some of this is stuff I already know using different symbols. I did give some thought to the exercises in chapter three. I generally solve exercises in my head for a mathematics textbook and likewise this is what I did for chapter three.

I will now start chapter four. I have studied for about one hour and a half today using this pre-thesis book. So far this book is about logic.

More pre-thesis reading gets done.

Finally more progress with this book

Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).

I did get through chapter two which was dense math like symbolic logic and not everything is clear to me but the end of the chapter still made sense. I did not solve the exercises at the end of chapter two. I did start chapter three and it is moving much quicker now. I should be able to finish chapter three and start chapter four today.

I am now more than half way through the book The Making of Second Life.

This book is proving fairly entertaining with just enough history of Second Life,

Pre thesis reading continues this long weekend.

Studies continue for my thesis proposal. This is the book I have been assigned to read. It is almost 400 pages long.

Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).

I read more of chapter two while on break at a job I was doing on Saturday. Chapter two is about first order logic. I should complete this chapter two and get started on chapter three today.

Our project team got our assignment done on time and we got a great mark.

We had to write a situation under investigation (SUI) key features document as our first assignment. I was responsible as team leader to see that it got done. I gathered the whole team twice in the library and we talked out the details of our project. I drew a diagram in KDraw and then showed the other team members and one of them did a better diagram in Open Office. I then used Photoshop 6.0 to place all the data models on the diagram. After feedback from the professor we reverted to the the diagram our team mate had made. Data models are supposed to be part of the next step so we got a little ahead into the conceptual model.

Now this week we have an extra assignment of developing a conceptual model. We need to use some windows software the professor has developed to make a conceptual model documentation easier. I tried this evening to install this ABCmod software on my Vista PC but it did not work.I just booted up my XP on the Macbook and and now have to update XP to service pack 3. I installed Java 6 on both the XP and the Vista box. I am going to try to do the majority of the assignment over night now and get it really started. Then this long weekend I can perfect my assignment. We work alone on this assignment.

One of our team mates is working on the second assignment in the project. That assignment is to create the conceptual model for our project. Well I am going back to my XP computer now and posting this update on my school work.

I finished reading Generation Blend.

I completed reading Generation Blend. The author has a web site at http://generationblend.com/. I had chosen to read this to get more nuance in my thesis simulation. I did not yet take away the lesson and technical materials I need but I am now familiar with this book. I returned it to the Morissette library at my university this week before class.