Blog Shift www.shishirmk.com

Hi guys i am gonna blog from now on.. On my new personal website www.shishirmk.com
Hope to see you guys there.

Installing and running the "hello world" example on drools the rule engine using eclipse

In connection with writing a paper on software agents, I had to experiment a bit with rule engines. I started out googling and found some rule engines for java like jess, drools, open rules etc. jess was a trial version so i settled with drools. Getting it up, using different plugins on eclipse wasnt so easy for me as there were many dependencies and version conflicts. So i thought i will post a easy step by step guide on how to do it.

To continue you will need Windows XP ( might work on linux also havent tried) , eclipse 3.4.1 ganymede ( i tried with this version it worked ).

Procedure is as follows

1. Unzip eclipse and start eclipse.
2. Go to help>software updates>add software.
3. Click on add site
4. It works like repos and here you need links of one or two repos.

5. To solve dependencies you need the Jboss tools repo which can be got from
http://www.jboss.org/tools/download
example repo := http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/



6. Install the repos which have drool in their name. There should be at least 3 of them.

7. Install drool workbench from http://www.jboss.org/drools/downloads.html by manually downloading or using repos.( sometimes repos dont work)

8. Restart eclipse and follow the link below to create a sample project.

9. I used eclipse 3.4.1 ganymede and installed 3.2 workbench manually that is by downloading and extracting it in the plugins folder of eclipse installation. The installation was done on windows xp machine.

10. http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/JBoss_Developer_Studio/en/drools_tools_ref_guide/html_single/index.html it's a nice link with all tuts having screen shots.

11. When u get the "helloworld" project go to the java file and run it. Then u will see the output.

Seminar on Software agents by me

I did a seminar as a course requirement on a topic "Software Agents an introduction to smart software" My guide liked it. And all my friends liked it. I spoke mainly about definition, kinds and some concepts of software agents. The ppt was very simple and handy mainly to me. That is what you see above. I took three examples of different projects my friends are doing to tell about agents. And at the end i showed the sitepal video as an example for intelligent agents. And i tried to show demo of a web traffic generator which i wasnt quite successful in because of the lack of internet. Over all it was a good presentation is what i felt.

finally it seems that i have something which looks like a "basic ruby parser"

LPG parser generator is quite good, or it seems to be good now! From what i have realized and what prasanna ( my team lead ) rightly pointed out, the LPG lacks a documentation of its design & API. i think the assumption is, using eclipse will make it unnecessary to have API documentation. Wish there was a flow as to how the parsing is actually done what methods call what. To find out the flow as a workaround i had to make StringArrayOutOfBound exception and print the stack trace to see whats going on. ( as i see code is not easily understandable in case OOPs languages i mean without documentation ). Wish to make a design of the lpg library atleast so that i dont have to rediscover stuff! There are many public functions in the library or in the jar that comes with lpg distribution, but its not easy to figure out what each one of them does. And sometimes the errors especially parsing errors dont even give a remote hint as to what is wrong!! Man i am feeling like Amerigo Vespucci now after finishing the first phase of the parser. :)

My name In the Wall Street Journal

I was bored and just googled my name then i remembered sometime in 2007 my name had come in the wall street journal because i saw a video of sergey brin published by UCB and commented on it. The WSJ reporter had called me from US and took my telephonic interview and asked me my opinion about the videos.. I dont know why he chose me ( may be impressed with my comment ) which just said " i wish there was more computer science " Thats because at that time there were only a few comp sci videos mainly on Search Engines.. And one was a guest lecture by sergey brin ( one of very few men who really impressed and inspired me ). Anyway here is the article so go have a look.. :)
My name is on the third column first line..

<-- Click on the pic to see the article -->