Advogato blog for mojotoad

31 Mar 2001

Sat, 31 Mar 2001 05:52:59 GMT

Okay, it's been entirely too long. Somewhere in one of these older entries, you might find a reference to a trip around the world I was contemplating...well, I'm currently on that trip. So far I've been to New Zealand, and many parts of Australia. I'm having a blast. Soon I will be off to many parts of SE Asia, then India and China.

Just recently I met up with Paul in Melbourne, and had a great time chatting over beers and Indian food with his partner Jacinta. Later I got to visit his domicile and personally inspect the garden I've heard so much about...well, I'm personally inclined to say it's more of an orchard, since there were many fruit trees of delicious variety. And there was indeed a garden, and they have pepper plants. People's priorities are straight when they target peppers for their garden. It was not limited to merely peppers, but these caught my eye.

Just finished reading The Mind's I by Hoffstadter and Dennett; it's a great collection of essays and thought experiments regarding the sense of self, and plays mightly into themes explored in Hoffstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. I passed the book along to Paul; hopefully he will like it.

So...mostly I've been tracking my progress on my home page, so if you're interested in my travel escapades, then inspect The Toadstool at your leisure. And if it seems like I might be in your area, feel free to let me know.

Bye for now, Mojotoad

19 Sep 2000

Tue, 19 Sep 2000 07:38:12 GMT

Hoo hoo, Raph! Great news on the ghostscript front.

And, on the off chance that you actually read all advoentries, I think the concept on song recommendations is astute. As you say, the cert system can connect what would otherwise be minor, scattered nodes of interest.

In other words, it distills trust out of the entropy of the internet.

The word "trust" has an additional meaning that is appropriate. There is a growing distrust of spam and corpratism. Certain companies, such as <cough> amazon, and other web entities, construct buyer profiles in order to give you recommendations of what you might like. This is a great concept, except for the fact that there is a growing distrust of the corporations. Well, the distrust has always been there for the naturally paranoid, but this stance has started to (thankfully) spread to the popular consciousness.

However, by bringing the cert system into the equation, the recs you receive are by choice. In addition, other participants are possibly influencing your choice without even knowing it. Is is the purest form of vote, where the vote not only counts, but counts in a direct and tangible way.

In a sense, the end user gets ultimate control over what sort of solicited responses they harvest.

I like it. I like it a lot. Great concept. Their still remains that nuggest of trust, though -- it only works if the end user feels that the data they volunteer (recs, and whose recs they prefer) are being kept confidential. If Amazon implemented this system, I wouldn't trust my privacy farther than I could throw it.

So how do you marry the advogato cert system with a distributed service?

8 Aug 2000

Tue, 8 Aug 2000 07:56:28 GMT

Hiatus maximus.

Went on vacation, recently, mountain biking in Colorado. Fun was had by all, and Susan certainly expanded her biking envelope.

My friends Than and Chris recently embarked on their globe circling year-long tour. I'm green with envy...I've been wanting to do something similar in spirit for around 10 years now, and I'm pretty sure that it was a conversation on the very topic that was the catalyst for Chris to strike up the deal with Than. I was invited, but always felt my own year-long wanderlust was best stomped alone, so I declined. They will have a great time, I'm certain.

As a small concession, I decided I'd at least start in the opposite direction. Perhaps we can say hello along the way.

I noticed some interesting commentary in Paul's diary regarding genetic engineering. Most of his concerns seem to be centered around the interaction of genetically enhanced species with the "natural" world. This is certainly a valid concern, and experimental tweakers should always keep that in mind.

However, I believe evolution is not, by definition, perfect. Evolution has blind spots. Perhaps divergent paths is a better description. Certain paths, once embarked upon by evoloution within a particular species branch, will likely not switch to a new branch after a certain degree of complexity has evolved. A great example of this is the retina. Mammals have blind spots over the optic nerve since the nerve bundle distributes on the inner surface of the retina. Squid, on the other hand, have no blind spot since their optic nerve splays on the outer surface of the orb, achieving full coverage over that portion of the retina.

Obviously, mammalian brains are great at compensating for their blind spots, but it is clear that there is a better solution that, at least in this case, has been demonstrated by another branch of evolution. The odds of any mammal leaping to that branch of occular evolution via mutation are slim to non-existant, because a) complexity has defined the bounds of the problem, and b) compensation in other areas (the mammalian visual cortex) have largely negated any evolutionary advantage such a radical mutation would produce.

Of course I realize that 'b' offers endless speculation on whether nature ever produces anything "truly superior" between isolated branches of evolution. This is of course dependent on context. Using this same example, nobody would feel the disadvantage during the day. Night, however, is an entirely different story -- probably everyone here is familiar with the superiority of peripheral vision when staring into the darkness.

This is of course expounded upon in great and wondrous detail in Godel, Escher, and Bach, where Douglas Hofstadter quite dramatically illustrates the phenomenon using natural number theory, courtesty of Godel's brilliant work.

In the Godel nutshell, your derivable truths are limited by your axioms. In a sufficiently complex truth system, there are provable truths that are underivable...by definition. And that, of course, assumes you've defined the right axioms to properly approach the problem.

Anyway, fascinating topic of conversation. My personal take is that genetic engineering should be approached with caution and wisdom. There are potentially enormous benefits to be gained. I believe the radical ones will be through this "branch hopping" type of modification; a modification that properly lives somewhere between natural evolution and contact with alien flora.

The expanded argument could benefit from the nanotech analogy: somebody will figure it out, so it would be best to figure it out first if for no other reason than to be able to properly understand the problem and defend yourself.

16 Jun 2000

Fri, 16 Jun 2000 23:09:35 GMT

Jabba the Hutt needs a home!

It's sad. We spent a lot of time building a full sized Jabba the Hutt for halloween 98, and he has been languishing in my friend's garage ever since. He did make a brief appearance for halloween 99. But my friends are selling the house, and we don't have anywhere to put him. I had been lobbying to take him to Burning Man for a send-off in a blaze of glory, but that trip never materialized.

If you are curious, you can check out his chops. And oh, if you live near Houston and would like to adopt a fat alien, by all means let me know.

We might be able to fob him off onto the Houston Art Car community for a fate more noble than the land fill, but we'll see.

Florida was a blast, very relaxing and beautiful. I ate many many baked oysters, yum.

Making progress on the new HTML::TableExtract, it's about ready for release.

24 May 2000

Wed, 24 May 2000 06:10:01 GMT

Hot Damn!

Got my kernels kickin'
Got my Zooms zoomin'
Got my masqs rading'
Got my hops in hand
Sittin' by the pool,
Posting on Guacamole
With a laptop lapping.

Of course, the mosquitoes are out and it's past midnight. This was just a range test. Zoom wireless cards rock.

Time to sync up on the CVS tree and start cranking out my next module releases. I've been neglecting them lately, mostly due to external distractions but partly due to getting the laptop kicking. I'm ready to start cranking, now, though.

I suppose I can be one of those people in the coffee houses now, face aglow from the laptop betwixt sips of joe. We'll see. Mostly I'm just glad for any change of scenery from my cluttered bedroom, where I tend to hack from a frankenstein desktop constructed from the hastily disassembled components of my mp3 box. The micro ATX form factor looks like a postage stamp in the case. Anyway, it's nice to be able to wander about with the laptop.

Off to the Redneck Riviera next week for vacation. Laguna Beach, Florida, which is between Destin and Panama City Beach. Beautiful beaches, awesome seafood (oysters...mmmm...).

Can't decide whether to take projects along with me. I should probably go analog for a while.

The car (87 Volvo 240 GL, what a trooper) is in the shop for a tune-up, so I'll be biking around town tomorrow. Unfortunately I don't think my satchel is big enough for the laptop in addition to a change of clothes, shower paraphernalia, etc. To stink or to hack, that is the question. I suppose I will have mercy on my coworkers.

12 May 2000

Fri, 12 May 2000 20:04:26 GMT

I haven't done squat for coding lately.

I did get my laptop in, however. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-F420, and is quite a nice little toy.

Unfortunately, even though it has a fully capable parallel port, I can't seem to get a PLIP connection working on it...my mothership computer has an internal modem, the laptop has a useless winmodem...so I was hoping to use PLIP for bootstrapping debian off of my main computer. All the interupts, etc., yadda yadda are set correctly, but no dice. Finally I said to hell with it, and ordered a couple of ZoomAir wireless cards. They're more fun, anyway.

Also got my new monitor in, today. XF86Setup is being a bitch, though, because the vga16 driver does not display properly on the new monitor (driven by a voodoo3), and that's the only way it allows you to run...grrr. I need to RTFM on XFree86. I wish debian used xconfigurator. I guess I'll find out whether it does anything that debian dislikes during my reading.

10 May 2000

Wed, 10 May 2000 07:22:21 GMT

metaguacamole: Regarding the mozilla image thing, I've been tracking it on the various sites (mostly kuro5hin, but it also looks like the shit finally hit the /.fan).

Anyway, it's sort of encouraging to see the course of the conversation here on guacamole. The alarmist rants hardly even registered before a discussion of the ethical issues involved in the world of producer and consumer emerged; in particular, how privacy issues survive in the crucible between the sometimes conflicting goals of the two. (give credit where credit is due, eivind probably first kicked that can with a position he must have known would be contrary to most readers; I suppose it's possible that it was a bit of a troll, but he at least makes some intelligent efforts to back up his assertions with things other than ad hoc button stomping).

It's why I keep coming back, anyway.

As for diaries...various distractions lately...this have been distracting from coding as well. sigh. These distractions have not been without merit, however; drum lessons are proceeding well. I'm pretty sure I detected faithful execution of a rhumba/bolero beat emanating from my flailings today. It could be a monkey/typewriter thing, though.

5 May 2000

Fri, 5 May 2000 11:09:13 GMT

There is something distinctly nice about a coding frenzy and a flagon of mead, so long as you keep an eye on the metric of clear thought.

I ran into some unexpectedly interesting problems whilst wrangling with the general issues surrounding context-free HTML table extraction. I need to crack open the CS books and figure out what the real name is for something I loosely refer to as "delayed conditional nodal inheritance". Hrmm.

I am a bit bummed that the Espresso PC has a less than stellar built-in sound card, leastwise according to the arstechnica review. I was hoping to use one of these puppies to reimplement the core of my home grown mp3 extravaganza box since I had to cannibalize the prior motherboard for my central computing needs recently. Ah well.

2 May 2000

Tue, 2 May 2000 19:15:40 GMT

Mmmph. <slurp>. Mmm. Triple latte good. Mmmm. <slurp>.

2 May 2000

Tue, 2 May 2000 08:52:15 GMT

It's storming outside. Sounds very nice; I have the windows cracked open so I will no doubt sleep quite soundly.

I've been retooling HTML::TableExtract in a major way. I've fixed header extractions to account for the nastiness you get from colspan and rowspan effects, so that the columns you extract are the columns you would expect when looking at the table visually. (such is the fair of those who deal with sparse trees representing grids). In more exciting realms, I've been implementing search chains which allow you to yank tables relative to other tables using lists of checkpoints, in terms headers, depths, counts, or some arbitrary chain thereof. Time permitting, the new release should be set loose within a couple of days after I've tested it to my satisfaction.

Viva data mining, HTML context free. Other than being in a table somewhere on a page, of course.