Recent blog entries for eivind

I'll just note that in addition to the Apache projects (as mentioned by gstein), FreeBSD is also free of Lead Developers.

Sad point of the day: Seeing a bunch of interesting concept papers (lilo's diary entries) disappear off Advogato. I hope they come back. I'm not sure I agree with everything that was in them, but they have been tought-provoking and interesting. (Those that have been flaming him away: Shame on you!)

Personally dangerous point of the day (or rather, last night): Got partially hooked on Everything 2. Starting to write up nodes there is a recursive loop - you always find something you want to link to, and thus have to create ever more nodes.

The Everything experience, combined with previous inspections of WikiWikiWeb, has led me to conlude that Ted Nelson (the original inventor of hypertext and initator the Xanadu project, started 1960) was right: You do need some way of hooking together multiple nodes of text (he calls them 'berts' or somesuch) to form a coherent text stream, but still be able to connect different sets of them for form different streams. Neither linear text nor traditional node/page based hypertext is enough, and thus all of the web, Everything, and WikiWikiWeb fail to live up to the original promise of hypertext. Everything and Wiki comes closer than the overall web, though.

Found another use for Advogato - replacement for looking at at coworkers. Even coworkers that I share office and desk with. Maybe I should start trying to pay more attention.

[Updated with reasons why you most likely would want to use the Compaq's data sets over Advogato's. This update came as a result of pvg's diary entry implying there was little reason to use Compaq's data sets.]

Ankh mentions using the correlation between evaluation from various people to find out what to present.

This is a field that has seen some study; it is known as "Collaborative Filtering" (or just "Personalization" when the marketeers have been there), have implementations available from Firefly (now purchased by Microsoft, IIRC - their website is down, so I can't check), Net Perceptions (the commericalized aspect of Grouplens, and probably a couple of other companies.

If you are going to experiment with this, picking up a book on multi-variate analysis is probably not a bad idea. You can get free datasets from Compaq for research use. These measure how well a bunch of people have liked films (from EachMovie, while that still ran). They are probably better to use than the Master/Journeyer/Apprentice ratings from Advogato, as I expect "How well did you like that film?" to be more likely to evaluate the same criterion in each person than the various Advogato ratings. Apart from that, I expect the data sets to be much larger - EachMovie was mass-targeted and seemed quite popular.

Not that this is terribly relevant as a form of diary for me, but given the restrictions of the communications medium... *grin*

Just saw another smart person release something under the GPL. I really, really need to get my act together and write up a single, coherent paper on how this hurt free software. I've started a couple of times (mostly in e-mail discussions), but never completed it.

Overall conclusion: The GPL only makes sense if you hate commerical software so much that you are willing to hurt free software to hurt commercial software, if you love gratifying your own ego more than you love free software, or if the building blocks you are using force you to use the GPL. There is a long buildup of economics to show this, something I was surprised at when I first discovered it.

Word to the wise: Do not pick up "The Turing Option" (Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky, 1992) intending to read just the first 50 pages or so. I read the entire 500 pages in a stretch, procastinating the things I'd planned to do during those seven hours. That's almost a standard workday (if any such thing exists.)

Oh, well, I enjoyed the book.

No new free software stuff today.

I've spent the day doing a bunch of 'environment maintenance' (asking customers to stop having their system automatically bug me when the customer doesn't handle their own problems, fixing minor bugs, etc) and working on the design of two new frameworks: One to do distributed transaction & message handling, and one to do customizable user interfaces (including ability to plug new functionality into a user interface, and having multiple versions of a user interface that still use the same backend.)

Hairy, but fun. Now: Take the weekend.

Adding deltas on branches in CVSFile didn't work after all. I've fixed it, and added code to let it manipulate branches and symbols. This is enough that it should be possible to start doing fun stuff with it - I'm going to try to produce a merged FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD CVS repository the next time I get some time to hack.

Still no docs beyond the source code, though.

On a more personal level, a new piano miracolously showed up here without the need of going through the go-out-and-blow-a-lot-of-money routine I'd originally expected to go through to get one (my grandmother suddenly called and wanted to buy me one.)

This is cool, though the timing is lousy, as I'm moving in a few days. Can't have it all, I guess.

Finally got around to fixing up my perl module to manipulate RCS/CVS files enough that it might actually be useful for manipulation.

It is now able to read and write RCS/CVS files, to retrieve the text for any version in the file, and to add new versions on an already existing branch. It is robust enough on the read/write that I couldn't find any errors in a full pass through the FreeBSD repository (reading in every single file, writing it out, and looking through the diffs between the original and the new copy.)

Forward steps:

1. Check that adding deltas on a branch work correctly
2. Extend the Invariant check to be closer to a complete check of the invariants for the object
3. Add support for adding new branches
4. Add more useful accessor methods
5. Add documentation
6. Declare project complete, upload it to CPAN, and go for SCCSFile.pm

Preliminary code is at http://www.freebsd.org/~eivind/CVSFile-0.1.tar.gz.