Submission
I’ve finally done it!
I do feel that there should have been some kind of fanfare! …but alas there was not 
Good Hunting
True Knowledge goes live with its API
True Knowledge unveiled its API last week to anyone who wants to try it out. This means that anybody out there wanting to ask general questions of the web and get direct answers is in luck. The release got a reasonable amount of coverage in the so called ‘blogosphere’ with articles on GigaOm, webworker, ZDNet and Venture Beat which was good for us as almost all the coverage was positive. Recently with the speculation surrounding wolfram alpha we’ve been getting a bit more interest in the area that we’re working in which is also good news for us.
I’ve been working at True Knowledge for 15 months now and we’ve moved the product forward in many different ways but this is quite a milestone as it means we’re open to the public and we’re starting to get real usage through our public API. We still have a lot of work before us but we’re getting there! We’re all hard at work still on the system amongst other things we’re trying to make it faster and improve the APIs capabilities at the same time. True Knowledge is also still one of the few companies out there in the UK still hiring at the moment so if you’re interested get over to the jobs page. At True Knowledge I work on the C++ backend which actually does the knowledge processing, this is the heart of the technology and our team is working hard on parallelisation and scaling at the moment to make the system even faster. We’ve got loads of ideas of how to make the technology better and we’re trying to find the time to get them all done - if you’ve got any ideas of ways to make the system better then get in touch with the True Knowledge community, there’s the forums on the main site at www.trueknowledge.com along with blogs and a facebook group, there’s even a twitter feed if you’re into that so there’s no excuse.
As an example of the types of questions that you can ask of True Knowledge - try these out
Who was prime minister when Micheal Schumacher was a teenager?
Is Fernando Alonso older than Rob Stacey?
To help people out I’ve written a wordpress widget that can be added to any wordpress blog (the current version can be seen on this page) it lets your users ask true knowledge questions. It’s only at version 0.2 at the moment but hopefully I can improve it over the next few weeks, comments welcome!
Good Hunting
Sun and Oracle
It was announced the other day that Oracle were to aquire Sun Microsystems. This seems to make sense for both companies given the economic situation and the relative technologies that they both develop but it does beg the question - What does this mean for MySQL?
Sun bought MySQL last year and promised continued development of the worlds most loved open source database server but will the new owners who develop perhaps the biggest database engine in world feel the same way. Or will MySQL benefit from some Oracle development and code? It’s not like it couldn’t do with it! Replication for a start. Only the future will tell, might we see MySQL getting sold on?
To be fair they do solve different problems and so we might see that the migration path from MySQL to Oracle is made simpler for companies that want to move that way. Almost at the same time MySQL/Sun made the announcement that MySQL 5.4 is on its way and it looks on the face of it that serious development of the MySQL engine has been taking place since Sun took control.
Good Hunting
Libby
Vastly more important than anything to do with F1 is Libby, our little daughter born at the start of the year! After four months of silence on the matter here are some pictures of her for those who aren’t friends with Charlotte on facebook.
She’s such a gorgeous little girl and we’re enjoying her so much, quite the little family we make now! We even trusted her godfather to hold her for a bit…
For the record little Elizabeth Sophia Stacey weighed in at 7lb 1oz.
Good Hunting
F1 Coverage on the BBC
This season in F1 has been hotly awaited since Lewis Hamilton prised the title from Felipe Massa in the last round, in fact the last corner last year. We have also been keenly awaiting F1s return to the Beeb and the ensuing lack of advertising breaks as well as superior coverage as F1 returns “home”.
I’m not sure that I’ve been convinced by the BBCs commitment to the F1 cause, the coverage seems to be a back to basics approach and a general dumbing down of the sport. Each week we are treated to Jake Humphrey talking above the more seasoned and frankly more interesting guests. In Sundays Chinese GP coverage he even cut Mike Gascoyne short to cut to a montage of the drivers, I’m not sure that this is the type of presentation that F1 needs. He constantly reigns in David Coulthard and anybody else talking about anything interesting and brings them back to an inane point that *he* made.
Martin Brundle’s new co-commentator doesn’t fair much better in my opinion, he seems to offer little extra to the commentary and can actually be very annoying, lets relive the last lap of a great drive by Sebastian Vettel - I’m pretty sure that it was every corner he repeated, “Just keep it on the road”.
Now I know that I’m probably more technically interested in F1 than most and that I might actually understand the diffuser row. And that I’ve been following it for a good few years and therefore know quite a lot about the teams/drivers/personalities plus I understand the difference between understeer and oversteer but it just feels that all of the coverage is simplified. Some of the ITV crowd seem positively downhearted when they are asked to explain things.
The website doesn’t break the trend either, it’s badly organised, filled with superfluous content and hides all of interesting information, case and point; before the first GP I could find information on who each of the drivers fancied but I could not find the practice times anywhere. Not to mention the poor pre season testing coverage.
I’m sure that most of these gripes are part of the teething process and that the coverage will improve but I’m not impressed so far. At least advertisement break gave you the opportunity to make a cup of tea rather than running the gauntlet of missing something you could have seen (We won’t mention Imola). Given that the BBC have spent a lot of money of F1 I must admit I had expected more, but then the pre-season hype didn’t fill me with confidence, “The greatest car chase”, not how I would describe F1.
Good Hunting