Welcome to 2014 everyone

I've been working in some many projects and languages recently I have no clue where to begin!

First lets start with all the FaTedev network projects and sites really boomed in 2013 and I'm looking to continue that trend in 2014 with the aid of my upcoming staff.. virtual staff. Taking on staff is not only a time taking task but sorting out National Insurance and TAX/BTW for employees is not worth it unless you seriously boom and can afford accountants to help you sort the paper work nightmare.

Until this happens and to prevent myself from going stir crazy I've decided to apply my skill set to basically "help myself". Someone joked that I could just "make some staff" which made me flash back to 2000-2001 when I developed A.I.S one of my first "AI" based programs. Since that time hardware has seriously improved meaning I can now run applications without killing the computer or disturbing normal tasks (within reason, 2001: 1GHZ , 500MB RAM and now 2014: 4*2.5GHZ with 8GB RAM).

Many people all over the world are creating similar systems for mobile platforms mostly but also on computer which often are very bloated. By creating my own system I have full control over how it works.

Choosing a name for this system wasn't so hard.. You have Iron Man with Jarvis,  regular A.I tends to be named like "Jeeves" or some other butler type name. I however ALWAYS loved BBC's Red Dwarf with Craig Charles, the computer in the series which starts as a women and then later is a man (lol) is called "Holly" in both instances. I always found holly to be funny as hell while apparently being quite stupid is still able to stop the ship from crashing and run tasks on board.. So Holly it is!

Although to be true virtual staff it must "do things" for me and that's exactly what Holly is set-up to do. While at its core Holly is a CLI (Command Line Interface) its translation engine to run tasks is outside the CLI meaning other input types can also trigger and use commands as CLI does.

For example voice recognition can hook into Holly and pass commands to run based on voice command, even a webcam detecting motion could "activate" Holly and run commands outside of CLI.

As it stands holly can operate via CLI, Voice input, can Speak back! (Yes holly can talk although a bit robotic at the moment), has a prototype webcam "Gesture" detection in development to activate commands based on movement patterns and more. This is the primary framework which to build upon as Holly activates child executables outside of itself to run operations meaning the OS can spread EXE loads of multiple cores and keep Holly running light for further input / usage.

But is it just a fancy CLI? No.. Even at the moment Holly is portable, can hook native hardware such as scanners and printers without special software by using the installed driver only. By opening control over certain peripherals for Holly to use it saves me doing much or very little.

Take for instance scanning, placing the paper in the scanner > launching the software > running a pre-scan > selecting a place to save > formatting the scan afterwards...   In Holly I can say or type "scandoc" followed by the filename I want the final image saved as, Holly will initiate the Scanner, get the image, move it too it's own cache, convert the image from BMP to JPG, delete the BMP for space and report where the final image location is back to me.

...

This is a long term project and will be reviewed over the course of this year. The primary objective is always the same:  Make my own life easier!

Edited last by: FaTe @ Jan-01-2014 4:01 pm