Older blog entries for titus (starting at number 59)

OK, I lied, I didn't enjoy it that much ;). insom points out that Market Forces wasn't really very good. The memory has dimmed, but I do recall thinking about 50 pages into it that I shouldn't continue. (Rare, for me.) I finished the book anyway. Things perked up a bit towards the end, but I did feel pretty icky about most of the book. I think I was averaging over my memories of the Takeshi Kovacs books & Market Forces when I said I enjoyed it...

Any other British authors you can recommend, insom? We only get the pretty decent ones over here, and (as you can tell) I'm not really that discriminating in my reading ;).

But back to programming...

Patching wwwsearch/ClientForm to do my bidding: clear(). One more old task from December bites the dust.

ClientForm is pretty nifty, in a functionally hacky kind of way that I find typical of code that has to deal with the Web (prolly due to Postel's Law). It'd be nice to be able to do a round-trip, tho, where you can parse a form into an object and then spit the form back out. That gives you a pretty easy way to test the code, too...

I think I need to make this a "law":

a parsing library isn't complete unless the parse function f and the write function g can be chained indefinitely with no loss of information, e.g. g(f(A)) = g(f(g(f(A))))

Or, more broadly,

a marshalling library isn't complete unless A = load(marshal(A))

Not very pithy, but then I'm not a pithy kind of guy, unfortunately.

--titus

avrietta, I love Richard Morgan's books... Market Forces, the latest (due out in the US sometime soon) is not as good as the Takeshi Kovacs books, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. You might also be interested in Marc Matz's "Nocturne for a Dangerous Man", or at least the free association part of my brain thinks so.

I picked up the Market Forces book in Canada on a trip up to Vancouver. Vancouver is one of my favorite places to visit, because of the fantastic scenery, the great cuisine -- I've eaten at a number of places in the city area, and have always had a great meal -- and the British publishing scene. Everytime I go I come back with about $100 (CAN ;) of books by people like Jon Courtney Grimwood, Iain Banks, and Richard Morgan. I usually can't get these books in the US for at least a year after their publication in England, presumably for publisher-related reasons. The swine. Now that I've added three new Brit/Can fantasy authors to my "buy on sight" list -- R. Scott Bakker, Steve Erikson, and China Mieville -- I'm pretty upset about this situation. Hey, any Brit/Can people want to get involved in a book exchange program?

--titus

(This diary entry courtesy of synchronicity between avrietta's post on Richard Morgan, Ted Leung's post about the Guu restaurant in Vancouver, and my own late-night completion of "The Warrior-Prophet", R. Scott Bakker's latest.)

p.s. There's a pretty darn good Native American restaurant in Vancouver that my then-girlfriend/now-wife and I visited when we were up in the area for ALIFE 8. Anyone know the name? The ambience was fantastic!

Using decorators to make Python free-threading through bypassing the global interpreter lock doesn't require static typing, so why does Guido like the '@' notation?

Net, the game

Ohayou points out Net, a moderately addictive Flash game. It seems like there are a set of simple heuristics you can use to guarantee a minimum-move solution, though. This is because the map is constructed so that the correct solution is parsimonious. Not sure what to make of Ohayou's "best - 1" solution, although I guess I can imagine one way that might happen.

--titus

Hunter S. Thompson, the original Gonzo Journalist -- 1937 - 2005.

RIP.

I respected his writing immensely & thought he was one of the few people capable of making sense of the crazy politics of the late 20th century. His masterwork is "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72", and two other highly recommended books are "Hell's Angels" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". His collected letters are also very much worth reading.

Inveterate Doonesbury readers may know that "Duke" is modeled on HST.

I was planning on holding a projector party to show "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Breakfast with Hunter" next weekend; looks like it'll have to be a memorial party instead. Sigh.

--titus

p.s. The Wikipedia is really on the ball, I have to say!

p.p.s. Wonder if Doonesbury will do a memorial cartoon?

"""
Dude. It is possible to get some [sic] laid by creating a really really really really really really useful software product. Take single sign-on for example.
"""
(ref)

Being married, this is less of an incentive for me, but I can see how it could work. ;)

That jwz article is full of good quotes. I also like:

"""

Then the next thing you want is an invitation manager like Evite but that doesn't suck. Evite sucks because they're spammers, and because it's more important to them to put advertising in front of your eyeballs than to be useful, so the mail they send out doesn't actually include any information, in a lame-assed attempt to drive hits to their web site. So what you want next is a free replacement for Evite -- but more to the point, one that doesn't require any kind of server running anywhere.
"""

I'm not smart enough to figure out how to do this, but it does nicely sum up my feelings about Evite.

Reputation systems, certs, etc.

A few days ago I begged for links and comments on certification and reputation systems. I only got one reply, from Steven Rainwater. He mentioned robots.net as a more up-to-date site running mod_virgule. He also said that he thought the user interface for cert systems that he's seen is a large part of the problem, and that users frequently don't seem to understand what the certs are or what they mean.

Here's a handy link to his Web page on mod_virgule.

I also found this O'Reilly Network article called "Annotating Everything", which reports on Marc Smith's work on Aura.

Finally, on the subject of annotating everything -- CleverCS had a cute article on acquiring linguistic/world knowledge from volunteers. Looks interesting, although clearly I'm not smart enuff to understand their prototype app. But maybe you are...

Again, if you have links to effective annotation/reputation/certification/contribution systems, please send them to me! Thanks!

Shotgun Golf

In response to no hockey season, HST introduces Shotgun Golf:

"""

The game consists of one golfer, one shooter and a field judge. The purpose of the game is to shoot your opponent's high-flying golf ball out of the air with a finely-tuned 12-gauge shotgun, thus preventing him (your opponent) from lofting a 9-iron approach shot onto a distant "green" and making a "hole in one." Points are scored by blasting your opponent's shiny new Titleist out of the air and causing his shot to fail miserably. That earns you two points.
"""

(ref)

--titus

[ sorry, dup entry ]

My wife found this RISKS digest with a post from me in 1995. Well, I still agree with the old me that having a command-line interface is a good thing ;).

socal-piggies

Grig is organizing a Southern California Python Interest Group, and, as usual, I'm sticking my nose into it. We've set up a mailman list.

Artificial Life

The Discover article I mentioned is online at the author's Web site. (It was also on /.) I do believe that they're working on a scripting interface for Python, partly due to my proselytizing, but I can't find any mention of it on the Web sites; I'll ask.

Interview with Hunter

This one is from before Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas came out.

zdnet has an article about how beta software "releases" are becoming increasingly prevalent. Google, of course, would be the case in point. Of course, this is part of google's release strategy: "underpromise and overdeliver". Web apps really can get away with this, because it requires no user installation to upgrade to the latest version.

More WSGI

Implemented wsgiMemcached and wsgiPullAdvogato. So, you can now do this:

app = wsgiPullAdvogato.wsgiPullAdvogato()
app = wsgiMemcached.wsgiMemcached(app)

and you'll have a Web app that pulls down posts from Advogato via XML-RPC and caches the results via memcached.

The advogato pull is simple and error-prone, but functions; the memcache middleware works fine, but I'm unhappy with its implementation as middleware. As is, it requires that downstream apps be able to report if a given URL is stale; otherwise the caching system doesn't know when to recache an entry. While I don't think there's any way around changing the app to support caching, right now the system breaks if the downstream app doesn't have this function. After sleeping on it, I think I'll try implementing it as a service passed in via the environ dictionary. Maybe that will be cleaner...

Hmm, then I can write another piece of middleware that looks at the If-Modified-Since headers, groks the cache, and decides whether or not to send. Hmm. (Here is a simple article on HTTP Conditional Get.)

This pipelining ability of WSGI is really nice; I'm constantly thinking of new uses for it. The ability to deploy a Web app in multiple environments by changing only a few lines of code is also very nice -- I did some benchmarking last night, and I switched between CGI and SCGI serving in about 30 seconds.

--titus

I'm on the hunt for reputation/certification systems, a la advogato/mod_virgule, slashdot, and kuro5hin. I found a simple alternet story, too. And someone somewhere mentioned Aura, which I have yet to read about.

I'm particularly interested in hearing about persistent rep/cert systems that (in your opinion) tend to accurately reflect people's rep. In other words I'd like to find out about ones you find effective ;). I'm most interested in hearing about communities with a small core, not too much turnover in that core, but a lot of "fringe participators".

E-mail me, please! I'll summarise and acknowledge, yada yada. TIA!

PostgreSQL and IBM's patent application for ARC

Haven't seen this show up anywhere else yet; it's a GeneralBits discussion of the patent issues surrounding the "Adaptive Replacement Cache". The ARC algorithm is in PostgreSQL 8.0, but IBM has applied for a patent. What to do? Read on...

HunterFest

Three HST items: writing a Taschen book, surprised he's still alive, and Breakfast with Hunter. The movie looks fantastic...

Old Software

dominion. Didn't know this was still lying around! That's my first collaborative code project... And hey, here's my first publicly posted software project, 'ring'. Sheesh, June 1991...

--titus

In an almost completely off-topic response to Graham Fawcett on the quixote-users mailing list, I suggested using memcached to store per-session information in memory. Then I got curious, and wrote a quicky example of using this as a persistence store for Quixote user/session information. The result is under my projects page as qx-memcache-example. Kinda neat -- sessions are "persistent" as long as memcached is running ;).

I heard about memcached, incidentally, through reading advogato. I think one of the maintainers is on here. Can't find it, though, because my google-fu has failed me.

On Ayn Rand

Via Educated Guesswork, Nora Ephron on Ayn Rand:

Like most of my contemporaries, I first read The Fountainhead when I was 18 years old. I loved it. I too missed the point. I thought it was a book about a strong-willed architect...and his love life.I deliberately skipped over all the passages about egoism and altruism. And I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect. I am certain that The Fountainhead did a great deal more for architects than Architectural Forum ever dreamed. Nora Ephron, The New York Times Book Review (1968)

--titus