Is winning in Casino's a Bad Thing

Totally off my usual topics but by playing short games in the Casinos in Vegas and quitting while ahead i'm up by just over $100. It's not a lot but considering i've only been playing 1c machines and $5 - $10 blackjack I think that's quiet cool! However since I haven't lost yet does that mean i'll now want to continue... could it get addictive. Considering i'm going to Atlantic City next week is this bad news!

As for the technical note, follow the rules of blackjack on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackjack) and make sure you buy in enough for 10-12 hands at minimum bet, and never bet more unless wikipedia says you should! Also when you are up, 3-4 decks worth of rounds... get out!

This may not be the longest game in the world but you take the money off the Casino!
Thank-you Venitian/Palazzo Las Vegas!

#crigshow - Conference 2 - Worldcomp

Agents and Web Services... Why no collaboration?

Out of all the presentations at worldcomp this one struck me as one of the most obvious but not covered areas for research in computer science. Probably the most well known agent system is that used by the travel industry where they have standard ways of interfacing with each other to find details of travel and hotels available on a global scale. This is no mean feat with the number of companies there are hooking into this network.

So why doesn't the same exist for web services or if there is such a system why isn't everyone in the open community using it?

Surely the point of web services is for people to discover and use them in their own scenarios just like the agents in the travel industry do. OK so maybe the problem lies in the fact that there are so many communities that there will never be a specific use case or framework and thus hosting a generic web service network becomes infinitely hard with the number of different APIs and Implementations.

OK so if you are going to use Agents in Web Services what issues do you need to consider? Also what do you gain through doing this?

One of the key ideas which came out of a talk at worldcomp is to use Agents to be the intelligent front to a web service. This enables an agent to track of a set of web services including information about a specific web service such as availability, versions, changing cost and and offline copy if the service allows this. So the agent becomes a Rendezvous Point for a series of web services.

So why aren't we seeing more collaboration between the Agent community and the Web Services community?

#crigshow - Conference 1 - Oscelot

This open source day (#osdiii) hosted by Oscelot was an unconferene which soon became based heavily around the Blackboard platform. This was expected as the majority of people attending it were then going on to attend the BbWorld conference. With the title of the conference being Open Source and yet the main topic being that of a Closed Source product this gave an opening for the CRIG team to promote the wider Open Source community to those who are focused on Blackboard use cases.

The day was a success for the team as we promoted good practices in web development, standards, resource management and the fact that the people who manage an eLearning platform has a responsibility to the content they hold.

From our point of view, we discovered: If blackboard is the industry leader in learning management systems then the repository community is big problems when it comes to archiving these resources by the current methodologies each community practices.

More Collaboration and Awareness please!