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Another free software speech recognition project: CMU Sphinx

here is a free but not open source grammar checker

My manager was told 'we currently have some projects that are CMM level three!' As my manager pointed out, such ratings are for an organization, not a project!

And whereas, the endeavors of the legislature to obviate objections to the said laws by lowering the duties and by other alterations conducive to the convenience of those whom they immediately affect (though they have given satisfaction in other quarters), and the endeavors of the executive officers to conciliate a compliance with the laws by explanations, by forbearance, and even by particular accommodations founded on the suggestion of local considerations, have been disappointed of their effect by the machinations of persons whose industry to excite resistance has increased with every appearance of a disposition among the people to relax in their opposition and to acquiesce in the laws, insomuch that many persons in the said western parts of Pennsylvania have at length been hardy enough to perpetrate acts, which I am advised amount to treason, being overt acts of levying war against the United States, the said persons having on the 16th and 17th of July last past proceeded in arms (on the second day amounting to several hundreds) to the house of John Neville, inspector of the revenue for the fourth survey of the district of Pennsylvania; having repeatedly attacked the said house with the persons therein, wounding some of them; having seized David Lenox, marshal of the district of Pennsylvania, who previous thereto had been fired upon while in the execution of his duty by a party of armed men, detaining him for some time prisoner, till, for the preservation of his life and the obtaining of his liberty, he found it necessary to enter into stipulations to forbear the execution of certain official duties touching processes issuing out of a court of the United States; and having finally obliged the said inspector of the revenue and the said marshal from considerations of personal safety to fly from that part of the country, in order, by a circuitous route, to proceed to the seat of government, avowing as the motives of these outrageous proceedings an intention to prevent by force of arms the execution of the said laws, to oblige the said inspector of the revenue to renounce his said office, to withstand by open violence the lawful authority of the government of the United States, and to compel thereby an alteration in the measures of the legislature and a repeal of the laws aforesaid;

This link converts from pdf to html, and from many other formats to many others.

What I think this person is really aiming at is something that is being actively pursued in the research arena in colleges all over the US. For example, Carnegie Mellon together with Intel is pursuing a project called Internet Suspend and Resume. To quote:

...the user is able to suspend execution on a workstation in New York and resume execution on another workstation in San Francisco without carrying any hardware. This OS-independent capability is realized through the combination of virtual machine technology and distributed file systems.

You can read it here.

You can read it here.

I was a scientologist for almost eight years and worked out in LA at "Big Blue." This complex used to be the Cedars of Sinai hospital but was purchased by Hubbard and company back in the 1970's. It is where ASHO, AOLA, and the LA orgs are, as well as a good portion of OSA. They've remodeled most everything there so some things might have changed since then.

In any case I am here to tell anyone who will listen that Scientology is evil. I don't make that kind of a claim lightly. Scientology is a cult made up of people who have ceased to think for themselves and are no longer acting in their own best interest but are instead being manipulated and coerced into living for the cult, to their own detriment. There are so many things that Scientology does that are wrong that it is difficult to know where to begin in detailing them all. Scientology is to me a weird conglomeration of Nazi-esque nonsense, corporate abuse of the public trust, and organized crime.

Others whose words are far better than mine have already detailed the nature of Scintology's evil far better than I can at 7 am. The link below points to a website that has just about every significant book written that exposes the evil nature of scientology:

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/

I applaud the owner of this site for having the courage to make a stand against one of the most evil organizations of our time.

Lee Reynolds

here you will find a counter-response letter, which was penned for just this use by Dave Touretzky

Yeah, there is heaps of information and standards on the Software Process. Alot of large organisations now use PSP(personal software process) and TSP (team software process) which cover all aspects of software devlopment, from specification and documentation to testing and maintanace. Beoing and many other organisation have published there data to show the difference that these processes make.

I doubt this, since CMU deployed the first collegiate wireless network, and has had a tradition of showing $1 in both the main theatre and one of the bigger lecture halls since the fifties.

And believe me when I say that wireless + theater isn't a good thing.

Within robotics, you have CMU's Nomad (first robot with an autonomous scientific discovery... antarctica, atacama desert)

You also had a popular robotic platform known generally as Nomads (from Nomadic Technology). Those are gone now, though they live on in courses and labs.

Some here, here, here, and here to name a few, for a large listing try here.

A while ago i came across this programming language called Unlambda, which is a superset of the s-k combinatorial logic calculus thing that this turing machine is written in. (not a very big superset, mind you. they added call/cc, some input/output functions, and an operator that lets you fiddle with evaluation order.. just look at the webpage i linked. it's interesting..). Thus far, about the most complicated program written in unlambda (not counting the quines) is something that prints out the prime numbers one by one as a series of increasingly longer rows of asterisks.

Now, though, it would appear that we can run a universal turing machine in unlambda! I think! I haven't read the paper closely enough yet to work out how exactly the block of encoded binary at the end functions :)

In the meanwhile, though, i'm posting for this reason: i'm really, really wierdly interested by lambda calculus and combinatorial functions and church numerals and all these other bizarre functional-programming offshoots. I can't, however, seem to find any really good resources explaining how they work. I mean, you look around on google or whatever, and occationally you'll find something explaining the basics of what an anonymous function is, and maybe explaining how to construct a church numeral or putting the old ((lambda (x x) (x x) (lambda (x x) (x x))) infinite loop thing up. But i've yet to find something that actually, you know, goes on and explains to you how to use all of this. None of them reach the point of beginning to explain how you go from knowing what a church numeral and "successor to 1" means to expressing foreach (1..10) {} using only anonymous functions.

The site with the universal turing machine links to what claims to be an overview of how to use combinatorial functions, which makes me really happy. However, i was wondering: does anyone have any good links, examples of books, etc, that explain how to construct programs using lambdas and/or combinatorial s/k functions and all that? I hear some college courses cover this stuff (although near as i can gather, unfortunately, no courses at my current college do), so there has to be some kind of information online somewhere. I'll probably find something on my own eventually, but just as long as i have your attention: is there any reading material anyone *recommends* for someone who just finds lambda calculus and such interesting?

For now, though, i'm going to read this intro to combinators thing linked from Tromp's site. Maybe it'll teach me enough i'll be able to finally realize my crack-addled dream of porting the lambda calculus DeCSS program to Unlambda. Though more likely it'll just make me really confused :)

My experience with IBM has been that they use function point counting to determine the size of a project. that was part of their RAC process. Oddly enough it was created in 1977 by an IBM'er. More info can be found here.

As for using KLOC's; any easily quantifiable measurement will be pounced upon if it has the slightest relationship to accomplishing goals. A finite number of lines of code are needed to complete a software project, therefore the PHB conclusion is that the number of lines of code is a measurement of the project itself.

IMHO, as per

J:)

I'm in the process of wgetting down a copy of the site to here to try to mirror it, but it'll be a while until a significant chunk of the site is downloaded. You're welcome to view whatever's down so far.

Reserach Papers

I'm not sure if they've done anything really novel. I skimmed through one of the more recent papers, on sentence ordering; but that seem to only operate on the same event There's research like this going one at alot of major universities like CMU and MIT. That said, it does look impressive.

If code was apolitical, then why is there the Gallery of CSS Descramblers?

In many cases, they're written as a political statement against the DMCA and the DVD-CCA.

This is so just a mock up. He'd never ride in it.

---

I think a large part of evaluating this topic would be software fault-tolerance. Mostly, I think that the methods in this area are full of crap, and there are some papers out there to back me up. Search for papers by Leveson for the nay sayers and Avizeinis for the proponents. These are papers describing methods of developing fault tolerant software systems. I think you would like to say that a software system that will keep running in adverse conditions is better than one that won't. Hardware fault tolerance is much better in the reliability area, and N-way redudancy makes more sense there, since you're protecting against faults other than design faults. Software's problems are design faults, and so the fault is likely to be replicated N-times. A good book on this topic, extremely technical in nature is edited by M. R. Lyu "Software Fault Tolerance".

The FAA method is probably better in general. Test EVERY line, full call path, every branch etc. Its a real pain and makes software SUPER expensive. I think tools like Balista would be a big help, if people used them. But then you still have to test against a well defined spec; and I would love to see one of those for the software that I write....

I would hope that you have the leverage to increase the use and methods of tools like ballista and maybe make passing an independant test get a better discount on insurance. It appears that there some good links already, but the Software Engineering Institute at CMU does research in this area, mostly for US DoD, but I'm sure they have lots of lofty ideas, if not good practice. HP and IBM have also done some interesting work, but its been a while since I was looking into this topic.

Is Mac OS X a Threat to Linux?

In short, yes! On March 24, Apple Computer, Inc. released its next-generation operating system, Mac OS X (the "X" is pronounced as "ten," for the version number of the operating system) to Macintosh addicts around the world. While this isn't such a big deal to some, others view it as a new beginning that could squash all thoughts of a desktop Linux for the general public.

What's this, "Apple out-maneuvering Linux?" you say? Well, maybe not as a server platform for the immediate future, but just think about this for a second: Would it be possible for Apple to deflate the hopes and dreams of developers worldwide of bringing Linux to the desktop? The short answer to this is yes, but it's more complicated than that.

Aside from the fact that an apple is a fruit and a penguin is a flightless waterfowl, there used to be a big difference between the Apple Macintosh operating system and Linux. Apple had a nice GUI; Linux did not. Linux had a command line; Mac OS did not. Linux is a multitasking OS that supports multiple processors; Mac OS is not. Linux runs on just about anything these days; the Mac OS runs on, well, Apple equipment. Linux is free (well, sort of, depending on your method of install); Mac OS X will set you back $129.

So, the lines were pretty clear about the differences between Linux and Mac OS. But lately, that clarity has been blurred as Apple rolls out Mac OS X to the public. The new Mac OS now has preemptive multitasking and support for up to two processors, which is still a far cry from Linux's support for up to 16 processors, but it's a move in the right direction.

Traditionally, the only control Apple users had over their system was via the Control Panels and scripting system functions with AppleScript, MacPerl, or ResEdit. However, with Mac OS X's BSD base, Apple users were given something they've always wanted: a latch to take a peek into Apple's core.

At the core of Mac OS X is a kernel built on the Mach 3.0 kernel, BSD 4.4, and Darwin (Apple's open source kernel project), giving network and system administrators the ability to use Unix programs and add them to their Macintoshes. When combined, these components offer a rock-solid operating system that's hard to beat. (OK, I know that Mac OS X has its fair share of bugs, so no flames, please.)

One of the advantages of Mac OS X is that it now offers Macintosh users with a command line on top of a slick, stable GUI, known as Aqua. With OS X's BSD core, Macintosh users will now be able to use GNU software. This means they will be able to run tools like Emacs, vi, Apache, and even XFree86 and the GIMP (something that Adobe Systems should fear). If you're looking for a place to download ports of GNU tools that run under Mac OS X, you should visit the GNU-Darwin Project on SourceForge.

One of the downsides of OS X is that it requires you to have a native G3 or G4 processor. This means you have to be running a G3 Mac, an iMac or iBook, a PowerBook G3 or better, or any of the G4 models and above. So, if you have an older 604 PowerPC-based Mac, you can't run OS X (that is, unless upgrade manufacturers, such as Sonnet Technologies release updates to their processor software). For now, though, if you want to run OS X your best bet is to run it on native hardware.

One group that stands to lose a chunk of the market is the Mac-based Linux distributions, such as MkLinux, LinuxPPC, or Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) from Terra Soft Solutions. Up to now, these were your best options for running Linux on the Mac, with LinuxPPC and YDL leading the pack. But OS X changes this landscape significantly. The downside to running Linux on your Mac in a dual-boot configuration (as with Windows) is that if you want to access any of your Mac apps, you had to either reboot, or install and run Mac-On-Linux. Neither option is ideal, but now OS X allows you to work in the command line, and run your Mac apps right along with them--no rebooting required.

This URL: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/c ontents.html Contains a cool book on stack machines. Check it out before you slam them. Having said that, there is no good reason for the JVM to be stack- rather than register based. I think the best way to have a portable runtime were to leave the code at the stage of an AST and let every VM implementer to compile to what they want (including native) Tao 'portable assembly' thingie is way kewl and has been around for a while, too. (from since way before Java, etc.)

This URL: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/c ontents.htmlContains a cool book on stack machines. Check it out before you slam them. Having said that, there is no good reason for the JVM to be stack- rather than register based. I think the best way to have a portable runtime were to leave the code at the stage of an AST and let every VM implementer to compile to what they want (including native) Tao 'portable assembly' thingie is way kewl and has been around for a while, too. (from since way before Java, etc.)

the face of evil

I don't think it work like this. There's also an DeCSS Descrambler mp3, and playing it loud on the street would not make pedestrians criminal. Maybe you, but not who received the unsolicited material.

Why is VP3 different with respect to patents? On2 has patents, they seem doing a good thing and try to let people use their IP. But they could be bought in a heartbeat and work that you and others put into it would be gone.

What they should do is give the patent to a conservancy, like collabnet's or the Knowledge Conservancy.

Thats not the issue theyre trying to address. The SSSCA is the shotgun approach to trying to stop people from downloading what the indistry deems illegal copies of the content in question. Authorized DVDs and the like already have dongle-like built-in restrictions, its called CSS, and the downloads that the industry offers also have built-in restrictions: RealMedia format, WMA/WMV, &c.

Given your expertise Jay, I am greatly suprised that you don't get it.

You say, "Domain names are addresses, people! They're not speech!"

That is a simplistic and slightly misleading statement.

Domains names are for naming resources.

Paul Mockapetris, DNS creator, said, "The goal of domain names is to provide a mechanism for naming resources in such a way that the names are usable in different hosts, networks, protocol families, internets, and administrative organizations."

I use WIPO.org.uk because the United Nations use WIPO.org to take away domains from owners. There was no better domain for me to make protest and publish the solution to trademark problem.

ICANN and Big Business want control over words you can use on the Internet. They say to stop trademark problems - to my mind that is a lie. For one thing, they want to muffle you.

Which of these gets the message across better: WIPO.org.uk OR freespace.virgin.net/garry.anderson/WIPO?

Virtually every word is trademarked, be it Alpha to Omega or Aardvark to Zulu, most many times over. MOST share the same words or initials with MANY others in a different business and/or country. For example, the World Trade Organization (WTO) shares its initials with six trademarks - in the U.S. alone (please check). Conflict is IMPOSSIBLE to avoid.

You would think then, they would want solution to stop 'consumer confusion', 'trademark conflict' and 'passing off' on the Internet - wouldn't you?

A solution that does not make restrictions upon them or mean giving up their dot com domains?

The answer was self-evident - but they do not want it. This is even though Sunrise and UDRP abridges US citizen rights to even use dictionary words - it also gives priority of one trademark over another - with non-trademark holder standing no chance. This violates First Amendment principles and is against Unfair Competition Law.

I agree securing NFS is a hard problem in a hostile environment. Basically, NFS is wide open if you managed to root one machine. A group of my friends at university used to boot machines using linux bootdisk. Then, mimics other guys UID, IP etc to fool the NFS server. If you gain root after login, a clue-up sysadmin should be able to track you down... Boot floppy is the killer here. Well, you can say the computer guys should disable floppy booting option in BIOS. But, they cannot really do much as some student need to boot with floppy occasionally (we are in CSE).

Simple tricks no longer works when we switched to something more secure, AFS , in our case.... It is way more advanced than NFS. For example, as a normal user, I can authorise only a few trusted person to have access to one of my designated subdir.

I'm amazed at how many ways the lawyers and big corporations have found to abuse the DMCA. The list seems to grow on a weekly basis. You can read more about this at the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

That's Carnegie Mellon

david baraff's & andy witkin's notes for physical simulation:

cmu or pixar

Not really. Most of the good robotics work today involves some mapmaking and planning. Mapping and planning are less rigid than they used to be. But they're definitely in there. See, for example, the CMU automated forklift project.

Would you prefer the traditional deliberative, abstract-model forming robot design that was forwarded by Minsky in the 50s? These sort of robots would map the world and then move accordingly, but it took them *forever* to do so.
Yes, mapping and vision processing were really slow on an 0.3 MIPS DEC-10. Back then, it took minutes. When I did sonar mapping on a 6 MIPS PC/AT, it took seconds. Now that we have a few more orders of magnitude in compute power, that's not a problem.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter .html

Don't mod this up - it's just for reference.

I'm no lawyer, but this sounds like pure bullshit to me.

It's common practice for corporate lawyers to send vague threatening (but totally unfounded) e-mails to people when they don't like what they're doing, even if they have no intention to fight a losing legal battle.

Here's why I think this is stupid:

- The anti-circumvention clause deals with access to a copyrighted work. There doesn't appear to be a copyrighted work in question here.

- There is an explicit exception for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability, with a sentence like, "... to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs." Which seems to be almost precisely what they are doing.

FYI, the text of the DMCA is here: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/92chap12.html .

Even if you can't afford a lawsuit, please guys, make it expensive (in some sense) for corporations to make these kinds of threats. That can mean fighting back a little and racking up legal fees, that can mean spreading the word on fansites and such and causing an *increase* in popularity (when what they want to do of course is to stifle the project). It can mean starting up your own similar project and making them have to track you down and threaten you, too.

Personally, I've had a couple of these run-ins myself. For the first one, I got help from the FSF and the lawyers finally backed off. Most recently, I had a run in with some type foundries over my program "embed" ( http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/ ); simply letting the lawyer know that I wasn't willing to back down without a fight convinced them to give up.

In particular, the late Herbert Simon suggested computers would catch up in a mere 20 years if not fewer. That would place computer AI to match humans by about the 80's.

Unfortunately, AI has languished for the past while. The big hey-day for AI was back in the 60's and 70's.

SpeechWorks' OpenVXI, originally promoted as an open source VXML interpreter, has turned out not to be a good one. Speechworks developers maintain the code, and refuse to incorporate the patches and requests of the open source community, in favor of keeping OpenVXI tied to Speechworks products. The codebase could be forked, but it's really not worth investing the effort in such a brittle product tied to proprietary solutions.

Bayonne, the GNU telephony server, is great and getting better all the time. It currently supports a strong scripting language for DTMF applications, and Bayonne's XML plugin structure and built-in support for multiple telephony cards makes it the logical choice for open source VXML.

All that's needed at this point is to finish integrating Bayonne with an open source Text-To-Speech engine (most-likely candidates are Flite or Festival), Automatic Speech Recognition engine (in this case, Sphinx) and write the XML plugin. But there is a shortage of coders with the skill and time to do this.

I really think small business and the average Slashdotter could benefit from an open source VXML solution. Small businesses could create professional telephony apps that could make them much more competitive (from accepting credit cards securely over the phone to providing dedicated 24-hr support numbers for their products), while creative coders could use it for everything from Eliza-style chatbot answering machines to having your boxen call you up and describe a hack attempt as it's being made.

I'd love to see a VXML enabled Bayonne blow TellMe and others out of the water. If you're intrigued and you'd like to get involved, check out Bayonne's Sourceforge site and sign up for the mailing list.

SpeechWorks' OpenVXI, originally promoted as an open source VXML interpreter, has turned out not to be a good one. Speechworks developers maintain the code, and refuse to incorporate the patches and requests of the open source community, in favor of keeping OpenVXI tied to Speechworks products. The codebase could be forked, but it's really not worth investing the effort in such a brittle product tied to proprietary solutions.

Bayonne, the GNU telephony server, is great and getting better all the time. It currently supports a strong scripting language for DTMF applications, and Bayonne's XML plugin structure and built-in support for multiple telephony cards makes it the logical choice for open source VXML.

All that's needed at this point is to finish integrating Bayonne with an open source Text-To-Speech engine (most-likely candidates are Flite or Festival), Automatic Speech Recognition engine (in this case, Sphinx) and write the XML plugin. But there is a shortage of coders with the skill and time to do this.

I really think small business and the average Slashdotter could benefit from an open source VXML solution. Small businesses could create professional telephony apps that could make them much more competitive (from accepting credit cards securely over the phone to providing dedicated 24-hr support numbers for their products), while creative coders could use it for everything from Eliza-style chatbot answering machines to having your boxen call you up and describe a hack attempt as it's being made.

I'd love to see a VXML enabled Bayonne blow TellMe and others out of the water. If you're intrigued and you'd like to get involved, check out Bayonne's Sourceforge site and sign up for the mailing list.

SpeechWorks' OpenVXI, originally promoted as an open source VXML interpreter, has turned out not to be a good one. Speechworks developers maintain the code, and refuse to incorporate the patches and requests of the open source community, in favor of keeping OpenVXI tied to Speechworks products. The codebase could be forked, but it's really not worth investing the effort in such a brittle product tied to proprietary solutions.

Bayonne, the GNU telephony server, is great and getting better all the time. It currently supports a strong scripting language for DTMF applications, and Bayonne's XML plugin structure and built-in support for multiple telephony cards makes it the logical choice for open source VXML.

All that's needed at this point is to finish integrating Bayonne with an open source Text-To-Speech engine (most-likely candidates are Flite or Festival), Automatic Speech Recognition engine (in this case, Sphinx) and write the XML plugin. But there is a shortage of coders with the skill and time to do this.

I really think small business and the average Slashdotter could benefit from an open source VXML solution. Small businesses could create professional telephony apps that could make them much more competitive (from accepting credit cards securely over the phone to providing dedicated 24-hr support numbers for their products), while creative coders could use it for everything from Eliza-style chatbot answering machines to having your boxen call you up and describe a hack attempt as it's being made.

I'd love to see a VXML enabled Bayonne blow TellMe and others out of the water. If you're intrigued and you'd like to get involved, check out Bayonne's Sourceforge site and sign up for the mailing list.

A risk is an event that might or might not occur. Ask your team what the risks are. Document them. Have a contingency plan that the team and your customer understand. Better to be prepared for when shit happens than to assume it won't.

Also, the Capability Maturity Matrix is a good thing to be familiar with. The best managers I know have made it an integral part of their employees' professional development.

Corruption of data in memory can be repaired with a reboot while corruption of data on disk cannot.

This is true, but there's no guarantee that corrupted data in memory won't get written to disk, or otherwise affect the disk. This is actually less likely in Linux than in other OSes, since the Linux kernel isn't pageable (but we may see pageable page tables in the future, at least in Rik's VM). NT and Mach-derivatives, being microkernels, are mostly pageable, and bad swap would be a lot riskier there... particularly if it hits filesystem structures or buffers.

Kernels aside, any application that writes to disk may be writing out bad data.

I also consider the risk of a program executing a valid but incorrect operation to be vanishingly small.

This is also true. Corruption is very likely to cause an immediate, simple failure. I wouldn't be concerned about executing an incorrect operation as much as executing the right operation on the wrong data. Most code doesn't perform exhaustive parameter checking at every step. The best you usually find is that stuff gets verified at the external API, while internal APIs do less -- or none. Most software is much worse than that, even widely-deployed code that's considered fairly stable, like C libraries. See the Ballista project. Corruption in RAM (swap) can cause data that was correct at the external API to be wrong later on, and nothing will catch it because it's assumed to have been checked.

This, of course, doesn't even apply to opaque data that the application isn't supposed to examine in the first place. It's unlikely that cp or gzip would have its buffers swapped out and corrupted, but I'd just as soon not take that chance (small as it might be). Corruption may not bite you until long after it's happened.

--
I like canned peaches.

The CLR is based on the concepts of classes and single-dispatch, calling methods that "belong" to a class. Lisp's CLOS is built on multiple dispatch, and can cleanly support prototype object systems. It's hard to retrofit these capabilities onto a class and single-dispatch system, but it's easy to go the other way. Emulating multiple dispatch without the ability to re-compile on the fly leads to slow code.

And, socially, many Lispers see Java, .NET, etc. as shallow attempts to mimic what they've had for over a decade: A portable, reflective, dynamic environment. Java and many of the .NET languages leave out key portions of Lisp. Lisp allows programmers to control how the code is read, translated, and then compiled without leaving the language. You can build infix Lisp in Lisp, with all the tools of Lisp at your disposal. Or you can eschew many of the tools in Lisp, all from Lisp.

• Successful Lisp
• Common Lisp Hyperspec(ANSI Standard Text on CL)
• Common Lisp The Language
• Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation
• On Lisp(great book on lisp macros among other things)

• Successful Lisp
• Common Lisp Hyperspec(ANSI Standard Text on CL)
• Common Lisp The Language
• Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation
• On Lisp(great book on lisp macros among other things)

The main site is posted here. But basicly CMU is also doing this, and has gotten very far. It can track a person running around a field with a life-vest. It can also lower some object into a person's hand. This might seem easly, but this is still all autonomous. One of the big projects this is for is the Coast Guard wants these to quickly find and possibly help people in the oceans. Teams of these things can scan the ocean for people while the choper with people are just loading up. Check out the videos on the site, very cool stuff.

similie

CMU Autonomous Helicopter Project.

While browsing the page for the book, I noticed the author is working on a new lisp dialect called "Arc". I hope they manage to fix the niggling thing that keeps me from really trying Lisp: freely available MATURE cross platform libraries for threads, GUI toolkit, and networking.

Hell, I would settle for just a GUI toolkit!

The "CLIM" (the standard Lisp gui toolkit) has a free implementation, but it is unfinished.
Garnet, has been abandoned by CMU (the developers).
XIT hasn't been modified in 6 years.
Winterp is its own mini-Lisp and is Unix-specific.

Graham's book is the definitive work on Common Lisp's macro facility, itself one of the prime features that make Common Lisp (not Scheme; there's a big difference) the most powerful language on the planet.
If your only exposure to Lisp has been a one-semester course that covered Scheme, you don't know Common Lisp. Try it before you judge it. Open-source versions are CMUCL for most Unix/Linux platforms and OpenMCL for Linux/PPC and Darwin/MacOSX. The full language spec and reference is online.

Now if somebody would just write as good a book for CLOS...

One of the FBI's reported reasons for the raid was that RaisetheFist.com was publishing bomb-making information in the form of something called the "Reclaim Guide". You will not find this part of the web site at ARCHIVE.ORG. However, I have reconstructed it from the Google cache.

For your reading pleasure: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/raisethefist

It's a pretty lame document; much better information can be had from other sources. But the FBI's citing this Reclaim Guide as a violation of the USA PATRIOT Act raises serious questions about what the feds think they're doing. If they want to nail the kid for defacing web sites, fine. Why make this claim about disseminating bomb-making information being illegal?

I've mirrored the documents in question, and publicly announced the mirror to Politechbot and Cryptome, and now Slashdot. This will be an interesting experiment.