The Neverending Footnotes

Wednesday, July 18, 2001

Exit Strategy is a collaborative story where the main fiction has been written by Douglas Rushkoff, but footnotes are added by people going to the website. The story itself is set a few years in the future, but the footnotes are to be written as if it's 200 years further on and a bunch of archeologists and historians are annotating the book.

I'll skip the ethics of Douglas Rushkoff, who is expected to take the best footnotes and publish the result, giving the contributors a signed copy of the book (not all of which he wrote), but I find it neat that any portion of the book can be marked for connotation. You can even add footnotes to the footnotes and possibly even engage on a conversation with fellow anthropologists/historians.

The Peeing Car Part V—It Leaks Again!

Looks like I'll have to take the car back in for more A/C work. It's peeing again all over the passenger compartment.

Sigh.

Thursday, July 18, 2002

A blogger's HTML

An article about the Dublin Core at CONTENU.nu got me thinking about the problem of indexing weblogs. The major problem is that there is no semantic markup to include meta-information in the body of a webpage. Sure, you can include meta-information in the <HEAD> section, using both <META> and <LINK> tags, and that's fine when the page in question is about a single topic.

But a weblog has several, mostly unrelated entries on a single page, with the rare weblog having several nearly article-length entries on the main page (and by extension, the archive pages). Google indexes these pages as if it were on a single topic and as a result, you get fodder the Disturbing Search Requests.

There are heuristics that can be used to index a weblog page, but it would be nice to have some defined way to mark individual entries, with the ability to include meta-information for each entry. I had intended for my software here to build up the <META> tags (since I do include keywords/classification for each entry I write) and while that may be viable for up to a weeks worth of entries on a page, it starts getting silly for a month, and for a whole year? It's just not practical.

But from the Dublin Core article, I ended up at the W3C site and came across XHTML 1.1, which is still being worked on, but (and this is the exciting part here) this version of XHTML can be extended! (unlike XHTML 1.0, even though the name says it's extensible) It's completely modular so new variants of XHTML (for example, it can be extended to MathML) can be constructed from bits and pieces of existing XHTML modules.

So in the future, it may be possible to extend XHTML to include meta-information in the middle of a page, instead of just in the <HEAD> section (sorry, <head> section—XHTML uses lower case for tags). So instead of having to parse code like:


<h3><a class="local" id="2002/07/16.1" href="/2002/07/16.1">The Ins
and Outs of Calculating Browser Usage</a></h3>

<!-- programming, statistics, web browsers, web log files -->

<p>

I spent the past few ...

<h2><a class="local" id="2002/07/14" href="/2002/07/14">Sunday, July
14, 2002</a></h2>

<h3><a class="local" id="2002/07/14.1" href="/2002/07/14.1">Probability</a></h3>

<p>

...

It can, instead, have an eaiser time with:


<entry>
<head>
<meta name="keywords" content="programming, statistics, 
              web browsers, web log files">
<link rel="permalink" href="/2002/07/16.1">
<link rel="next"      href="/2002/07/17.1">
<link rel="previous"  href="/2002/07/14.1">
</head>
<body>

<p>

I spent the past few ...

</body>
</entry>

<entry>
<head>
<meta name="keywords" content="daily life, web pages, home pages, 
              six degress of separation, Tom Hoylrod">
<link rel="permalink" href="/2002/07/14.1">
<link rel="next"      href="/2002/07/16.1">
<link rel="previous"  href="/2002/07/13.1">
</head>
<body>

...

</body>
</entry>

Friday, July 18, 2003

Photo Friday (Last weeks, alas … )

Symmetry

Normally, I don't add commentary about the images, but for this I feel I must for three reasons—one, it's last week's challenge that I didn't bother posting in time; two, the small image makes it hard to see the rather amusing symmetry going on and three, the full sized image is quite large (too see the detail that's lost on the smaller version). This was taken at the local Publix and on the left is your health food section and on the right is the the candy section.

Yes, that is a rather warped form of symmetry there and I can only conclude it's intentional on the part of Publix.

Photo Friday (On time this time)

Identity

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Snippits from Lost Wages

Still have yet to get the write up started, so yet another snippit from notes I took:

Road [US-93 in Nevada —Editor] actually has more
traffic than I expected.

Stuck in traffic just outside
Alamo—doing a slow 30mph
A wide load spanning both
lanes is slowing us down

Bumper to bumper traffic
outside Alamo—400 population.
Rush hour 8:30am

Alamo has a motel
with showers and telephone.

Notes from page 36 of “Viva Lost Wages” notebook

Yup, we hit rush hour traffic in a town of 400 along US-93 with only two towns between Las Vegas and the turn to Rachel.

Rush hour traffic just outside Alamo, Nevada

But once we hit the Extraterrestrial Highway the traffic cleared up and it was smooth sailing to Rachel, Nevada.

[Yup, the road just kind of vanishes like that]

The road to ~~nowhere~~ Rachel, Nevada.

Along the way, we passed one of the access roads to the mysterious Area 51, which in this case, is a one lane dirt road heading off into nowhere (in the photo below, it's the white line on the right side of the picture).

Area 51 is just beyond the mountains in the distance, at the end of the dirt road.

We nearly missed Rachel as it's a small cluster of trailers on the south side of State 375 (aka “The Extraterrestrial Highway”) with only three permanent buildings, one being the Little A'Le'Inn, one being the gas station/super market (who's proprietor drives into Las Vegas each week and buys supplies from Wal★Mart) and the third being a thrift store/community center.

The infamous Little A'Le'Inn.

The Gas Station/Supermarket

[Dig the old style gas pump, back when gas was below $1/gallon]

The old style gas pump. So old it doesn't have display dollars, hence the handwritten “2.” Gas was $2.89/gallon (this was last year—it's probably higher this year).

For me, this was probably the highlight of the trip, even though we only spent about an hour, hour and a half in Rachel. The next time I'm in Nevada, I would definitely like to spend more time out here.

Wil “Not William Shatner” Wheaton

[Take two. First time through, the keyboard got stuck in uppercase that some how survived a reboot. It took a powercycle to get the keyboard unstuck. Go figure. —Editor]

It's funny.

Wil Wheaton is currently in Las Vegas, one year after I was there. Hoade and I had just missed World Series of Poker when we went, which probably explains this entry on page 22 of the “Viva Lost Wages” notebook: “I don't think we'll be running into Wil Wheaton anytime soon.” It would have been quite funny to go up to him and mistake him for William XXXXXXX Shatner.

Postfix, Dovecot and Ravencore! Oh my!

I think I've finally calmed down.

Rough day at “The Office” (even if it was from home). SMTP authentication problems, control panels and horrible documentation.

Let's see … can't uninstall the control panel probably because I modified it so that it would actually work with the Apache installation, which means I couldn't reinstall it with the updated versions of Postfix and Dovecot since the system installed versions do not support SMTP authentication (with Postfix providing the SMTP part, and Dovecot providing the authentication portion). Finally had to upgrade to the latest version, uninstall that, upgrade Postfix and Dovecot, reinstall Ravencore and still have it fail (although I figured out the immensely bizarre method Ravencore uses to store the Postfix configuaration file, and the cached copy of the Dovecot configuration file so at least using Ravencore won't break SMTP authentication).

Then there was getting Dovecot to authenticate not against /etc/passwd but another password file. Turns out you need to specify the file twice under different options:

auth default {
  
  passdb passwd-file {
	args = /etc/dovecot-passwd
  }

  userdb passwd-file {
	args = /etc/dovecot-passwd
  }
}

Yeah, I don't understand it either.

Postfix wasn't a problem—good documentation there. The only problem with it was Ravencore overwriting the configuration file with its own copy without the proper SMTP authentication settings. It was just a matter of tetting the proper settings into the bizarre format Ravencore uses to store the Postfix configuration (each line gets its own file—sigh).

Hours! (You paying attention, Smirk? Hours!)

Update on Wednesday, July 19^th, 2006

Smirk just called to remind me that I was the one that picked Ravencore. So there you have it.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

“Energy problem? What energy problem?”

The state of Georgia just granted Range Fuels a permit to create the first cellulosic ethanol plant in America. HECK YES! This is very exciting … why?

…

Cellulosic ethanol can contain up to 16 times more energy than is required to create it! If that doesn't sound ridiculously impressive, consider that gasoline contains only 5 times more energy than was required to create it and corn ethanol is totally lame, containing only 1.3 times the energy required to create it.

Via Instapundit, Our First Cellulosic Ethanol Plant!!!

It's discoveries and work like this that makes me worry less about “Peak Oil” than most. We're a clever species, we'll work around this problem.

Stupid Twitter Tricks

An off-site meeting was canceled, although I didn't find out about it until I got off-site. Afterwards, I slacked off a bit.

Okay, quite a bit.

I came across this post on one of the blogs I follow, and I was mesmerized. Not by the the actual post but by the often times totally irrellevent picture John Wiseman adds to his posts. And in this case, it's a portion of a screen capture of a Twitter-based site, and John's comment about said picture: “Jenny Holzer is the only person who should be allowed to use Twitter.” Jenny's site reads like surreal fortune cookies, much like the monster quote file I have (over 2,600 quotes).

I've seen Twitter once or twice; enough to get the point of it—it's LiveJournal on crank, but something about Jenny's site reminding me of my own monster quote file inspired me to do a “Stupid Twitter Trick™”—sending out my quote file via Twitter.

Two aspects of this little hack (and that's what it is, a gross hack if you ask me) were time consuming. First, cleaning up my monster quote file. Twitter limits you to 160-character messages (with a preference of 140 characters). Three custom programs for this—one to pull out quotes 160 characters or less (and to mark the 140^th character). The second one to trim unwanted spaces. And the third to go through converting the quote character from the unappealing " to the much more typographically nice “” pair. Extensive use of sed to make some other typographical substitutions (such as converting “--” (two dashes) into “—” (a proper em-dash)) and a visual once-over to make sure I didn't muck things up, and an hour or so later, I have almost 2,000 quotes ready for Twitter.

The second time-consuming bit was writing this bit of code, which took about an hour:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Net::Twitter;

my $later   = `./later`;
my $message = `./quote -n`;
my $twit    = Net::Twitter->new(
	username => 'siwisdom' , 
	password => 'XXXXXXXXXXXX');
my $result  = $twit->update($message);

`at -f ./at-jobs $later`;

exit 0;

And no, it didn't take an hour because I'm a slow typist. It took an hour because to install Net::Twitter I needed to install JSON::Any, and in the process of installing that I apparently activated the CPAN module that wanted to install and update itself, and that took an hour (I swear, it seemed to download the entire CPAN archive—sigh).

The later program picks a random amount of time between three and nine hours, which is given to the at command. at is like cron, in that you can schedule a program to run at a particular time, but unlike cron, which runs the program on a set schedule, at is a one-shot deal. I use at because I don't want a set schedule to post quotes to Twitter—I want it randomized a bit. quote is a program I wrote ages ago to pull quotes out of a quote file sequentially.

Like I said, a quick hack for a stupid Twitter trick.

Oh, and the name? “siwisdom”?

It's short for “silicon wisdom,” as a pun on Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom, if you will.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Electric Clarinets

Back in middle school I played the clarinet. The first year, I rented an all-plastic clarinet and had trouble understanding why the other students had trouble getting a nice clear sound out of the instrument. It was the following year when my Mom got me a real clarinet that I found out just how difficult they could be. I ended up faking my way through the rest of the that year and never bothered to continue playing the instrument. Of course, that didn't prevent me from playing the electric clarinet during college (it's a joke—some friends and I formed a joke band called the Blender Children (also known as “The World's Most Dangerous Peer Group”) and threatened many times to go on tour).

So I'm amazed that what looks like high school students actually made an electric clarinet. Or rather, a robot that can play the clarinet (link via kisrael.com).

Wow.

So I'm watching this video on a mouse/scanner combo thing when at the very end, Cathode Ray Dude goes on a rant about the companies that make modern consumer electronics that I found amusing. I also think it's a sad state of affairs that I agree with his sentiment that most consumer electronic companies exist just to get bought out and not to sell a viable product.

The Boston Diaries

Wednesday, July 18, 2001