barnoid

I recently bought a string of 50 individually addressable RGB LEDs from Embedded Adventures and so had to decide what to do with them. I decided it would be festive if they could reflect Twitter’s current feeling about Christmas. So I started Googling sentiment analysis and quickly discovered that Stanford University’s Natural Language Processing Group has released the source and data for their sentiment analyser. When fed a sentence it outputs one of “Very negative”, “Negative”, “Neutral”, “Positive” or “Very positive”. It’s pretty good but it’s trained on movie reviews so it’s not quite so accurate on tweets about Christmas. For example “Christmas time is defo the best time of the year !!” is classed as very negative.

TwitBeeb Photo by John Honniball TwitBeeb is a BBC B microcomputer (vintage 1981) from which you can Tweet. The Beeb itself was my main computer until 1994, I taught myself to program on it. A few years ago I pulled a rather scuffed up BBC out of a skip at Sussex University and took it home. Inside it had an add-on ROM board with several programs in ROM chips including a serial terminal emulator called Termulator. This allows it to connect to other computers via its serial port and for everything typed on the BBC’s keyboard to be sent to the other computer which sends responses back to be displayed on the BBC’s screen. It acts as what used to be called a “dumb terminal”, just handling the input and output while a more powerful computer does the actual work. This was quite a common way of doing things back when computers were room-sized. Several terminals would connect to a large shared computer, possibly over phone lines using modems.