Trust me…

Easter Weekend

With four days off work for the Easter weekend we tried to do some exciting things, on Friday a trip to Bury St. Edmunds was on the cards, Saturday was the Easter Bonnet competition, Sunday was Roast Duck and Monday was Hedingham castle for a medieval battle.

No pictures for Monday as our camera wasn’t working but my Parents go some so I’ll have to wait until I see them again!

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Is the scourge of developers finally on the way out?

Google announced over the weekend that it’s going to stop supporting IE6 in some of it’s web applications. I bet many developers are hoping that this message will finally get through to those *still* using it that there is better technology out there and the should upgrade.

I know that the majority of these users are probably corperate users where they don’t have a choice but if the figures of 20% are still true that is a lot of ancient browsers out there that cause almighty headaches for anyone developing websites now days. Personally as most of the people who visit this site use firefox >46% and I’ve only had 2 visits with IE6 I don’t do anything special but I know that it’s important for proper sites to keep supporting it while people keep visiting them with it.

Imagine the amount of development effort and money that could have been saved if everyone had upgraded two years ago… Come on people give it up!

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Tony Blair faces the music

So today Tony Blair must face the Chilcot inquiry about his involvement in taking Britain to war with Iraq. It seems that Tony Blair has faced most of the questions he’s going to be asked before so I’m not sure that it’s going to as explosive as the media seem to be building it up to.

There was talk that his statement the other day on TV that he’d still have gone to war even if he’d know that there were no (I’m not sure I can bring myself to use the abbreviation…) Weapons of Mass Destruction was a bit of a mistake and that he’s not as sharp as he used to be. I’m sure that he’ll just reiterate what he’s said before - I can’t see that there is going to be any real fallout from this as it all happened over five years ago.

It seems that the more important day will be when Gordon Brown steps up and has to answer questions about his involvement - it’s going to be important for no other reason (to most people) than the fact that there is an election around the corner. With the Tories already out in front it could be bad for Labour.

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Saturday the 9th of January

So Libby was meant to have her party on Saturday, but the weather seemed to conspire against us with a large proportion of the guests unable to make it (some had more elaborate excuses than others :)) we postponed it. But Libby wanted to make it a special day all the same…

Libby decided that she’d take her first steps instead! She had three little steps all by herself and now we can’t stop her! She’s trying to run before she can walk. I am trying to add a video of it but the Video camera has other ideas. It now works!

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

What is the time?

Who is Rob Stacey?

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!

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