Recent blog entries for cdent

I decided to update my profile here a bit and lo and behold I'm a master now. Maybe master means old?

Testing advosuck while moving machines.

Oi.

Long time, no diary.

Considering posting this as an article, but the website for this is not quite ready, so I suppose I ought to wait. If you see this, and you look at those, and you have some suggestions, I'd appreciate some mail.

That project along with this project has made for a very interesting semester. I need to update my personal info because it is now way out of date.

Thanks to gary for pointing people to advosuck. I was surprised to discover more than the usual number of hits in the logs today.

dyork, I'm not sure why it just sat and span for you. Do you have cookies disabled? Feel free to download the code and install it somewhere yourself. There's more info on the website.

Other folks, if you looked at advosuck and had some comments, I'd like to know about them. Please mail me.

I can't tell you how pleased I am to see ahosey busting out with some bile. I don't care what he's being bilious about. I just like to see it.

Finally getting around to testing ithought. I like the way actions work. Very slick. I was expecting, though, some kind of way of interlinking between entries but I'm not seeing that.

Curious. I'll have to play with this more.

I've spent the last couple of weeks working on a project for my info science class in school. Although it wasn't supposed to be this, it has turned into a discussion of knowledge evolution through the use hypertext as envisoned by folks like Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart and Eric Drexler (and not Tim Berners-Lee) along with a sort of demonstration. It may be of interest to some folks here:

http:// www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/sliswarp/

If you check it out and have some comment I'd like to hear them. It's not quite done but it is about as far as it is going to get for a while. I need to work on my funky scheme homework.

[ Teach me to sleep ]

Been messing around with reimplementing various aspects of McFeely over the past few days. It's an incredibly effective learning tool: figure out what something does and write some code that does that without looking at the original code.

I ought to be spending time working on school stuff, but I can't seem to get motivated.

schoen said:

What I'd like to hear more about in economics is the concept of "normal profits" or "normal return" and what's necessary to attract investment. For example, an employee-owned company wouldn't go out of business just because the company as a whole has expenses equal to its revenues! As long as the employees' salaries are being paid (which accounting would consider an expense), the employees have an incentive to keep the company operating. And as long as expenses don't exceed revenues, the company will remain solvent. But that company would not be very attractive to potential investors. Still, why does this matter?

Is there any reason that any company needs to be for-profit? (As a practical matter, for the efficient and effective function of the company? -- Not arguing that for-profit companies are bad.)

Hear Hear! There is a huge amount of emphasis placed on growth and I've never quite understood it. Much of the time that emphasis has an incredibly damaging effect on reaching a balance between expenses and revenues. I'd like to see the whole concept of growth in society questioned a bit more. Growth has somehow become (in many instances) equated with improvement. It's not always true.

Elsewhere: When I sit down at my computer to code all I want to do is play xpat2. I finally have my old sparc20 operational again (both the motherboard and the processor were wacked out) but for the time being it boots to an ancient installation of Solaris that I can't get access to (and I have no other bootable media at the moment). I reckon I'll install Linux on it, network it with my other computer and sit around and decide which I like best. The Sun monitor is bigger but the internal drive makes sounds somewhere between hotrod and airplane.

The sparc20 has a SunVideo SBUS card with a camera. Some lightweight searching indicates drivers for this do not exist under Linux. Anyone know different? My future as a webcam pornster is at stake.

I want to buy a cheap laptop for sitting in coffeeshops and writing papers and coding. It would need to support a modem, ethernet, some very simple X, either have a floppy in it or attachable. In my list of priorities cheap and small come before fast. I'm used to a P166 as my primary computer. Advice?

There's some sun out in the big room so I'm going to go out there.

[ RSVP ]

Tuned up my cdent page a bit.

Computer Science instructors are as bad as people out in the real world at being specific in their design requirements, reliable in their communication, and straightforward in their responses. My scheme class thus far has only frustrated me because I create what appear to be working solutions to the given problems but they do not have what I would consider the proper elements of defensive programming. Input checking and the like.

[ Can't decide if I hate it or love it ]

jbowman says:

Hmmm. An interesting thought just popped into my head: Combining ithought with cdent's advogato sucker. Read your favorite people's diary entries while writing your own. Hmmm....

Yeah. I reckon that would be a pretty slick thing. Putting what advosuck does into a modified ithought/reader sort of thing wouldn't be too terribly hard. The secret is in the cookie handling, and that's not very complicated. The source (linked from the howto at the URL above) is only 322 lines of perl code.

Had my first week of going back to school this past week and it was rough getting back into the right habits. The programming (Scheme) class should be pretty good: getting me to think in ways I haven't before. The French is going to be an amusing pain. The info science course could go either way.

On the to do list sorting that I mentioned in my previous diary entry, the latest version of the SQL query that seems to be working pretty well goes like this:

order by      (if(duedate = 0,
            priority,
            ((unix_timestamp(now()) / 86400) -
             (unix_timestamp(duedate) / 86400) +
             ((priority + 1) * 1.0))))
desc

That sort of casts the priority value into a number of days. Still not perfect but getting me what I want for the time being. The program that uses it is designed to be multi-user, so if you need a web-based to do list, you might try it.

[ Feed the Monkey on My Back ]