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[cmannall]

Well, I'm not back at work until next Tuesday now. Normally this would be good, unfortunately though the reason that I'm not at work is that I have my Software Analysis & Design exam on Friday morning. Paul's helpful advice for the exam was to not get too drunk beforehand - which, while good advice, isn't really something that I wouldn't have

Comments

[bob_d]

Feeling Overwhelming need to post something in Mannalls Live-Journal. No Idea why.

GOOD LUCK with that Exam mate. You'll do fine since you are the most Computer Geeky person I know therefore you will be fine. You can say things like "POP3" and know what you are talking about. I mean, you are quite likely to know what "Monotropic Fuzzy Reasoning" means.

[cmannall]

POP3 is easy, it's pretty simple as protocols go. I even wrote my own basic POP3 client when I decided to learn how to do socket programming one day, and since I managed to do it without too much trouble despite my tendency to be a doofus, it can't be that complex. Besides, in this particular case all I needed to know was that the default port for POP3 is 110 and that therefore a value of 995 in the port field is likely to be an error.

I haven't even the faintest idea what "monotropic fuzzy reasoning" is, I'm afraid, and google isn't helping much. Is this something more related to AI or computer science? I'm just a plain old software-development chap, remember.

[bob_d]

Its how you use fuzzy logic. It describes the method of fuzzification (another great word), fuzzy reasoning, and Defuzzification.

It came out of AI design, but is used in virus checkers and such now as they want to allow their anti-virus to detect viruses that are close to a previous virus without having to write a whole new update.

[cmannall]

Fuzzification is indeed a good word. This kind of stuff isn't something I've ever got involved with though, since it never comes up in the kind of software I write at work and it isn't something I've ever delved into at home at all.

While I think of it, Bob, do you have (or can you recommend) any good books or websites on [a] writing parsers, and [b] writing compilers/interpreters? In the latter case I'm thinking more along the lines of a javascript runtime rather than a full-blown eat-your-brain-for-breakfast compiler that outputs assembler.

I need a project to keep me interested, and since I recently started putting together a DOM implementation it occurred to me that a web browser is a natural progression. Obviously this is a bit of a foolish project for one person, but I'd probably keep it simple and theoretical - e.g. not even bother with HTML support, just nice clean XML/XHTML. I doubt it would ever see the light of day in terms of something you could actually use, but it would encompass a lot of stuff that I just never get