The Atavachron project is getting to be quite fun to work on. My python skills are building up nicely, and I've found new ways to utilize Hugo Liu's MontyLingua for my purposes.

It took me a while to find my most productive tool set. I tried IDLE, the free development environment that comes with python. Unfortunately, it leaves orphaned processes running when you close windows, so then I tried ActiveState's ActivePython editor, but didn't much care for it. I got rid of that entirely. I finally settled comfortably into using Edit Plus and the console window. It's hard to beat simplicity sometimes.

I've been using MontyLingua to break out verb and noun phrases and modifiers to make the program understand commands. I can do sql queries for now that tell me the memory is working. Later, I'll break those out into natural language equivalents after I get a feeling for what I want it to do.

The AIML bot, named Atoz, is the interface to Atavachron, and I'm using a specialized AIML set to accomplish that. So far PyAIML is exactly what I needed for that. I like what I'm seeing so far, and the future looks promising. (time to make a backup!)

Robby.