Alex Schliker

Because you aren't petting and stroking and fondling him all the time, your dog should be learning now that it's ok to be "out of touch" for short periods. Get some good chew toys. Nylabones and Kongs are excellent.  Let your dog become distracted with a chew toy, then calmly and quietly leave the room, closing the door behind you. Within a few minutes, preferably before your dog has become distraught about your absence, come back in and resume what you were doing. Move calmly, say nothing.

Ingredients

• 2 lbs boneless skinless chicken , chopped into bite sized pieces
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• white pepper
• oil  (for frying)
• 1/2 cup cornstarch , plus
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 tablespoon gingerroot , minced
• 1 teaspoon garlic , minced
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed  hot red chili pepper
• 1/4 cup green onion , chopped
• 1 tablespoon rice wine
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

Orange Sauce for Stir Fry

• 1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 1/2 tablespoons water
• 5 tablespoons sugar
• 5 tablespoons white vinegar
• 1 orange, zest of

Michael’s talk was full of excellend pre-recorded video demos, and thus was difficult to note-take.Instead, here are links to most of the pieces of software he discussed for your perusal:

• Stemmable – implementation of Porter stemming algorithm
• rubyreuters – text categorizer using Reuters corpus
• Chronic – natural language date-time parser in pure Ruby
• Ruby-WordNet – ruby interface to WordNet lexical dictionary
• Ruby-LinkParser – binding to the Link Grammar library (from Carnegie Mellon)
• Sentence alignment and concordance tools by UTIYAMA Masao
• Ruby-Linguistics – framework for linguistic utilities for Ruby objects in any language, by Michael, sports WordNet and LinkParser integration

Tue, 4/1/08

2Apr - Wed 10:00AM-10:45AM

Weekdays 8:30am-4:30pm

Thu, 11/15/07 - Fri, 4/11/08

Every Tuesday of the month from 10:00-11:00 a.m

Sat., Apr. 05, 9:00 AM Registration/Preview, 10:00 AM Live Auction

2nd Saturday of every other month, 10:00 am-12:00 pm

Have you tried DateTime::Format::Natural::parse_datetime_duration() , or DateTime::Format::Flexible::parse_datetime ?

Python parsedatetime does some of what you’re looking for, but not all:

http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/

Every Tuesday of the month from 10:00-11:00 a.m
ok
Sat., Apr. 05, 9:00 AM Registration/Preview, 10:00 AM Live Auction ok
2nd Saturday of every other month, 10:00 am-12:00 pm ok
The API seems to provide a neat packaging of the requirement as a service which could be used in many ways. Problems that are encountered, like the example above, might eventually be dealt with by the team at Google but seem tractable through pre-processing.

You might be interested in the paper “From Dirt to Shovels: Fully Automatic Tool Generation from Ad Hoc Data”:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/papers/padslearning-0707.pdf

“The API seems to provide a neat packaging of the requirement as a service which could be used in many ways.”

Yes, Google Calendar’s recognizer does seem like a promising approach.

GATE will do that
http://gate.ac.uk/

Looks like Parand above has already mentioned my library: parsedatetime for Python.

I would be extremely interested in any feedback for items it cannot handle.

One item it already handles is adjusting to different Locale’s day/month/year order.

If you look in CPAN, you'll find that there are a number of Date and Time packages. Is Date::Manip the one you should be using? In my opinion, the answer is no most of the time. This sounds odd coming from the author of the software, but read on.

Date::Manip is written entirely in Perl. It's the most powerful of the date modules. It's also the biggest and slowest.

Since Date::Manip is written entirely in Perl, and depends on no other module not in a standard Perl distribution, Date::Manip has no dependencies to meet. Other modules have dependencies on a C compiler or other Perl modules. Since it is fairly easy to satisfy these dependencies for anyone who is reasonably familiar with Perl modules, this is not a huge advantage that Date::Manip has.

On the other hand, simpler Perl modules tend to be faster than Date::Manip, and modules written in C are significantly faster than their Perl counterparts (at least if they're done right). The TimeDate and Time-modules modules are written in Perl, but are much simpler (and hence, faster) than Date::Manip. The Date::Calc module is written in C and is a good module for doing many date calculations much faster than Date::Manip. Between these three, most of your common date operations can be done.

It should be noted that using the Memoize module in conjunction with Date::Manip can have a huge impact on its performance, depending on the types of operations you do. Your mileage may vary though.

Date::Manip is certainly the most powerful of the Date modules. To the best of my knowledge, it will do everything that any other date module will do (not just the ones I listed above), and there are a number of features that Date::Manip has that none of the other modules have. Date::Manip is the "Swiss Army Knife" of Date modules. I'm trying to build a library which can do _EVERY_ conceivable date/time manipulation that you'll run into in everyday life.

Although I am working on making Date::Manip faster, it will never be as fast as other modules. And before anyone asks, Date::Manip will never be translated to C (at least by me). I write C because I have to. I write Perl because I like to. Date::Manip is something I do because it interests me, not something I'm paid for.

Date::Manip is also big. The last time I looked, it's one of the largest CPAN modules there is. If you ignore modules like Tk, LWP, etc. which are actually packages of modules, it may be the largest. It's true that Date::Manip will do almost every date operation you could imagine... but you rarely need all that power. I'm working on reducing the footprint of Date::Manip, but even at its slimmest, it'll outweigh the other modules by a good bit.

If you are going to be using the module in cases where performance is an important factor (started up in a CGI program being run by your web server 5,000 times a second), you should check out one of the other Date or Time modules in CPAN. If you're only doing fairly simple date operations (parsing common date formats, finding the difference between two dates, etc.), the other modules will almost certainly suffice. If you're doing one operation very repetitively (parsing 10,000 dates from a database), you are probably better off writing your own functions (perhaps bypassing all date modules entirely) designed specifically for your needs.

On the other hand, if you want one solution for all your date needs, don't need peak speed, or are trying to do more exotic date operations, Date::Manip is for you. Operations on things like business dates, foreign language dates, holidays and other recurring events, etc. are available more-or-less exclusively in Date::Manip.

The above routines all check to make sure that Date_Init is called. If it hasn't been, they will call it automatically. As a result, there is usually no need to call Date_Init explicitly unless you want to change some of the config variables (described below). They also do error checking on the input.

The routines listed below are intended primarily for internal use by other Date::Manip routines. They do little or no error checking, and do not explicitly call Date_Init. Those functions are all done in the main Date::Manip routines above.

Because they are significantly faster than the full Date::Manip routines, they are available for use with a few caveats. Since little or no error checking is done, it is the responsibility of the programmer to ensure that valid data (AND valid dates) are passed to them. Passing invalid data (such as a non-numeric month) or invalid dates (Feb 31) will fail in unpredictable ways (possibly returning erroneous results). Also, since Date_Init is not called by these, it must be called explicitly by the programmer before using these routines.

In the following routines, $y may be entered as either a 2 or 4 digit year (it will be converted to a 4 digit year based on the variable YYtoYYYY described below). Month and day should be numeric in all cases. Most (if not all) of the information below can be gotten from UnixDate which is really the way I intended it to be gotten, but there are reasons to use these (these are significantly faster).