My recent disappointment is that the 43 Folders Wiki is evidently down for extended extended maintenance. They had claimed it was down for a couple days, to be back July 6th; the "return date" seems to have gotten more nebulous :-(.

They had been suffering quite a bit from "spam," as it were; people logging in (possibly as scripts) to deface the site by adding links to link farms (e.g. - for viagra and the likes). Perhaps the intent is to do a more substantial upgrade to the MediaWiki instance, as there is rumour that modern versions can be set up to be pretty resistant to such attacks.

Regrettably, it means I don't get my "fix" of links to productivity changes for a while yet...

The self-important "we invented everything" blog people finally irritated me enough to comment on this with this "Official Google" entry that claims the nonsense that Star Trek predicted blogs

Which is a clear twisting of things, on about the level of saying that Google invented writing letters when they set up GMail.

All blogging is doing is to publicize the notion of writing a journal. Commanders of ships have been required to log ship activities for centuries. More recently, pilots of aircraft similarly have formal requirements to log flight activity. Falling square between that are the Expeditionary Records of Raymond Byrd , noted naval pilot, and explorer of the polar regions. Of Earth, that is...

The notion that Star Trek "invented" any of this when Byrd was writing such stuff in the 1920s is just so much codswallop.

Yay! There is now pl/scheme, a PostgreSQL procedural language handler for the Scheme programming language, specifically GNU Guile .

This allows implementing database stored procedures in Scheme.

It's a bit underdocumented at this point; it is not clearly documented how database parameters are passed into the Scheme level. The examples don't use Scheme functions; they instead use let structures, which is definitely more interesting...

What is also unclear is what the interaction between the database engine and the Guile interpreter is; open questions would include:

• Does it spawn a separate instance for each backend?
• Where does shared code reside, if anywhere?

It points me to wanting to get a PL/CLISP going...

I have been starting to learn Tai chi. Arguably the "least martial" of the martial arts... I'm not looking quickly to start beating people up :-).

It is a particular challenge in that there are so many little movements involved; I have never been a dancer, so coordinating hands, feet, legs, and body is something new to me.

While the art may appear langorous, that does not imply it is easy, either in terms of coordination, or, for that matter, use of strength. It is by no means an aerobic activity, but correctly moving slowly requires a pretty hefty degree of effort.

There are definitely places where the movements are counterintuitive; it's kind of neat that over time, I start recognizing a new intuition (which really is practice) that tells me both when I'm doing things right and when I'm doing things wrong.

What is kind of interesting is the impact on ordinary "walking around." The excruciating attention I need to pay to my movements during Tai Chi movements does map onwards. I'm becoming a bit more exacting about my steps when doing things completely unrelated to the martial art...

I am gradually moving towards the point where I will be able to, unattended, perform the Basic 24 Form Yang Form. That has the considerable merit that it is a not-very-long workout that provides some nominal health benefits, some stretching, some nominal exercise of strength, and a not-inconsiderable exercise of physical coordination. I could do way worse than to have this as a 5 minute morning exercise to get the blood flowing. And this has the merit of not requiring any special equipment, neither mats nor apparatus...

The question will be what to do once I can claim to have "mastered" the 24 forms of the "basic Yang form." It probably makes sense to start looking at the Zheng 37 form, which is supposedly a bit more martial. I'm not overly after the Ed Gruberman-esque "beating people up" , but having some means of self-defense seems no bad thing. The "martial" use of Tai Chi does seem to be strongly biased towards defense in its early application; the "offensive" parts would be way far down the road...

The Too Cool Thing that I discovered today is that there is now, many years later, a free software alternative to AMPL, namely ZIMPL .

What is that? It is a Little Language for transforming descriptions of mathematical problems into Integer Programming/Linear Programming formulations that may then be solved using an LP/MIP solver.

Why? Because the quasi-standard format for these problems, MPS, will make your ears bleed if you try to write up a complex model directly. If you're trying to describe a problem of interesting size (thousands of variables and constraints), you really do need to write a program to generate an MPS file.

AMPL, and now ZIMPL, allow you to describe your problem using reasonably nice looking equations, with two particularly pointed additions:

• You can define model variables and parameters that draw their values from formatted data in external files, allowing you to use any sort of database / import scheme to define large portions of the problem and parameters

• You can define sets of model variables with descriptive "subscripts," and have equation descriptions that generate gobs of model equations that are identically shaped by merely describing one of them

It's not difficult for 30 lines of AMPL/ZIMPL model description to combine with a data file with 50-100 parameter values to then expand to generate a planning model with tens of thousands of variables and constraints.

Of course, it would be bad news if this was insoluble; modern LP solvers on modern hardware can solve problems with hundreds of thousands if not millions of variables/constraints.

The one annoyance is that the default solver is anything but free; it's still all too common for Operations Research tools to be "free for purely academic use" but exceedingly proprietary anywhere else...