Near Death Experience

I was driving to work on Monday morning when I was overtaken by red van with two extending ladders on its roof.

As it passed the white van ahead of me, the wind swept the ladders off its roof. They then turned so they were across the road and bounced towards us throwing up dirt and gravel.

Fortunately the ladders hit the van in front and bounced into the overtaking lane. Even so I was lucky to avoid them, and the white van which stopped very suddenly.

I was tempted to stop and be a witness, but it seemed to be fairly cut-and-dried, especially as the red van stopped too. I hope they sorted it out.

Nextin Public Beta!

Indeed it looks basic when it starts up, but rest assured Nextin is a definite step up from our original website as well as a faster and more streamlined version of EVO. On first glance, you see what looks like a desktop with a few menu options at the top - clean cut and ready to go. As with everything we do, there is alot more than meets the eye going on underneath it all.

Nextin is the successor to our original EVO Desktop and is much faster than it's original. Here you will find The beginning of something great (this is only a beta after all) with the following familiar menus: Programs, Documents, Online Email and Options. The programs menu contains links to Metaverse, Games, AIM and even the original Media Player (windows). Documents is where you will find the HTML version of the website, Latest updates, And a downloads folder where we place links to random downloads that are free for you :) The Online Email menu is self explainitory and features a handful of most common online emails.

The last menu (for now) contains Settings, Help and Search. Settings allows you to effectively choose a background for the website (which is cool) and it also does something else: It saves this setting for later. Set the desktop background and when you come back to our site later - it'll be the way you left it. We are working on integrating this preference save for the rest of the website (like menu docked or undocked and maybe even saving the open windows and positions). Also in the works: we are cleaning up the interface more and also allowing for themes.

The Help option is a quick overview of Nextin and how it works (still needs some polishing in the literary department), and Search is a Google search box. Now, another handy feature here is that all of the windows are draggable around the view area (just like a normal GUI).

Later in the development, we plan on bringing back the rest of the original programs we had availible from EVO (so expect a more robust programs menu) as well as some new additions. The 3D Login from our original site is still availible under Programs ->Metaverse

By the way: The Windows Media Player popup you see in the picture actually is running in Firefox. You want this ability as well? No problem! Scoot over to addons.mozilla.org and search for IE Tab. It'll allow Firefox to run pages you specify using the Explorer engine (but not having to load the entire browser). It's pretty neat to have a hybrid browser :)

Artificial Intelligence

I was looking through the logs today for the Pandorabot (Serena) and found an interesting conversation. It wasn't one of those profound conversations, or even a general test by a random user. Instead what I read was in fact a random person insulting the bot, using vulgarity, and just generally getting a kick out of the fact that it was "just a stupid text parser".

Well, yeah... it's a text parser. That's what chat bots normally do. Did I mention that every conversation is stamped with time/date and IP address of the person talking to the bot? Apparently I must have been whispering for that duration :) Generally speaking - it's a text parser using AIML standard. To date, the AIML standard is one of the best there is to offer, winner of multiple prizes in artificial intelligence. Not that the bot we have is particularly intelligent out of the box. Nobody should expect it to be.

Serena is being interpreted by the Pandorabot service (Program Z) which adhere's closely to AIML standards. Unfortunately, CORe systems had some custom stuff in it that is completely incompatible with AIML (like some bug fixes and parsing corrections) and could not be fully merged with the AIML on the server. So alot of what the bot previously learned was useless to the ProgramZ interpreter.

So what does this do for people who make fun of the bot, call it names or just use random profanity? Nothing really. Currently the system is infantile in it's knowledgebase and needs to be trained through conversation. This is where users like you come in handy. If you talk with the bot and it gives incorrect answers - no worries, because it's all logged (with your IP address) so when we go back and check the logs, we can correct errors and train her better.

People swearing at the bot or purposely typing gibberish to confuse it are simply wasting time because logs like that are automatically deleted. But hey, if that's what you have planned to keep you busy on a Saturday night, don't let me stop you :)