Older blog entries for whytheluckystiff (starting at number 49)

just want to pop a thank to Liedra for her
certification.  i submitted an entry to freshmeat for the (poignant)
guide last week or so.  she responded with a very nice message that,
though freshmeat didn't accept lit listings any longer, she had
checked out the guide and found it appealing.  something like that.

then, i see her certification on my page and i just have to say: that's
really classy.  amazing that after a full year of sorting through
(what must be) hundreds of thousands of submissions, you're still so
dedicated and good to the users.
quiet.

and here's what i'm learning from it:

- there is an enormous amount of furry art on the internet.
  either that or it receives precedence on search engines
  due to heavy link backslapping.

  it's paying its toll on my psyche and i'm suspicious of
  all of my friends, loved ones.  do they have a secret
  animal persona?  i'll be talking to someone and my
  brain does surprisingly textured real-time transformations
  of them into rodents, panthers, even shrimp.

  i literally have to slap myself.  i am not a furry!  maybe
  a crustacy, but not a furry!  i need a shell on that hot
  animal love!

- yes there are plenty of overtly funny things to see on the
  interweb.  like this.  but it is truly thrilling to find
  the subtle and the timeless.

  well, yeah, the clown's timeless, too, I guess.

- the goal is not to be funny.  i think there is a lot to
  lol over, but it seems more worthwhile to juxtapose a
  number of reactions against each other.  yet, keep a
  certain theme within a 24hr block.

  what blows my mind is that each of these images is backed
  up by a human who took the time to draw the picture, make
  the puppets, glue the cereal, effect the shot, and put it
  on the web. let that represent!

  of course, in their original context, some of these make
  sense but-- take them out of their cozy environment--
  toss them in the troff where all things are equal--
  it starts to feel like an oceanic view, built from
  these individual servings of sight.
   
- love the vintage.
 ---
 opening: >
   good things happening in YAMLand right now.  Syck has 
   received a Perl module, sewn by Ingy.  Clark has 
   worked up Revision #4 of the bytecode.  as well as a new API.

should i have the time: - add Unicode support to re2c and patch-or-fork. i'm thinking of rewriting it in ruby, as it would make a great alternative to pure regexp parsing and could be supported in ruby's core.

- add bytecode lexer. uses the same grammar as the YAML lexer.

- support clark's api within the parser. this will cause me to shortly abstract away the current node handler. in other words, the current callback system will secretly be powered by a pull parser.

- provide an API for returning a node's YPath. this will allow stream filtering with YPath. let's say you run a YPath query against a massive stream, you could return nodes as they are completed (in their own stream).

I've just finished a short howto for YAML beginners called:

  Yaml In Five Minutes

If you don't know what YAML is, check it out and send me any feedback.
YAML support in now built into the Ruby programming
language and has building roots in the Perl world as well.

I've really, really, really been enjoying Luck Wander Boy.
I have only momentarily put the book down today.  I will finish by nightfall.
It's not an outrageously funny or sad book, but it is good enjoyment.  The Pac-Man
stuff is absolutely brilliant.  Pick it up at the bookstore and read just the
first essay on Pac-Man.  It's like five pages into the book.

Or, here's excerpt from the site.
bgeiger: I'm guessing you're using Heisig's book and study cards
on remembering the hiragana and katakana?  If not, I found his strange
imagery to be quite helpful in seeing the shape and sound of the characters.

also, i covered like fifty pages of a legal pad while practicing.  and i'd
also recommend some Japanese for Busy People book that is a kana workbook.

anyways, hope it comes together for you.
Syck is now checked into Ruby CVS.  You'll see it appear in the
Ruby 1.8.0 release forthcoming.  I'd like to propose Syck for
inclusion in PHP and Python as well, since both extensions are
coming along nicely.  Once YAML finds acceptance in these
communities, open source scripting languages will have an
asset not found elsewhere.

Plus, I think we'll save a lot people from writing parsers.  And
consequently, massive regular expressions.

I feel there are great possibilities for YAML and Python, since
they share indentation for scoping.  If the YAML document separator
('---') became a Python construct, you could perform assignment with
YAML rather than Python constructs.

    pkginfo =
      ---
      Name: Syck
      Version: 0.28
      Summary: YAML Parser for Python
      Home-page: http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/syck/
      ...

So check YAML out.  The best place to start is the Cookbook.
work on Syck has been extremely speedy of late.  i have the ruby
extension up and running now and it flies, o indeed!

this is great news, as all of my yaml.rb users will benefit from
(1) having it in the Ruby 1.8 dist, and (2) having a loader that
will likely run 10-20x faster.

for non-Ruby users, this simply means that you'll be seeing yaml
loading in your local scripting language soon.  huzzah!
26 Feb 2003 (updated 26 Feb 2003 at 04:22 UTC) »
it's a trip to read raph's overview of advogato and
think about the experience of using advogato.  for him,
it's an immersive experiment with implications as to
how he sees applied mathematics.  it's a microcosm of
humanity and relationships.

i remember coming to advogato and thinking, "oh, so
people rate each others' progress and the goal is to
get to the top."  so i forage in, rating entire villages
with casual glances at their worth.

my judgements were all based on the diary entries.
one user who magnetized me was ReadMe.  i could
appreciate the verse.  i rated him/her, he/she rated me
equally.  apparently it's ReadMe's standing policy.

the problem with rating based on writing is that
your trust network builds around a loose group of
writers who can appreciate each other, but don't really
know each other or communicate at all.  nothing to build
much trust on.

then i joined the yaml project and noticed that cce
keeps a diary here.  knowing clark from yaml development,
we rated each other based on a deeper knowledge of each
other's skills.  clark's rating me as journeyer is meaningful
in a way that other ratings simply aren't.

so then i begin to see advogato through raph's eyes.
the trust metric diagrams make more sense in context.

so here's a suggestion for building trust on advogato:
(someone should write a guide)

build trust with individuals you trust in life.
bring them to advogato and rate each other,
link to each other.  your team's real trust in each
other should translate into trust metrics here.

of course, you will then need to seek trust from
the good nodes of advogato.  i don't know if receiving
trust from stragglers on recentlog (such as myself)
will pollute your value.  i'd seek other masters and
journeyers online who work on related projects and
could see the value of your work.  e-mail them?
tell them you're seeking trust on advogato and are looking
for peer review?  or pitch in on one of their projects
and prove your worth.

(it looks like alan has got this sort of idea going
on with his mother certifying him.  and as fun as it
would be to certify a first-grader, i should probably
avoid spreading my compromised status until i find a way
out. :D)

it's hard to say how much value being a master on advogato
actually holds at this time, though.  you don't accumulate
services or access beyond the rating itself.  i'm not
saying the rating doesn't hold value on its own, it's
just easier for me to rate other people high because i say
to myself, "well, it's just a rating."

i guess the beauty of the system is that advogato likely
considers me a compromised node since i've had such a 
lackadaisical approach to certifying.

good luck on the talk, raph.  twould be fun to attend.
and congrats to bytesplit for being the anomaly.
a couple of years ago i got laid off from a coding position a few
days before christmas.  no severance, get your stuff and flee, along
with 60% of the other workers in the building.

i stood outside the warehouse, quickly accumulating email addresses
from the others who were leaving.  notions of starting a new company,
going back to school.  we all had our boxes of office crap.

i looked at one of the other guys and said, "man, what are we gonna do
today?"  he was like, "geez, i dunno."  i said, "there's no way i'm going
to go looking for a new job today.  i need to get my mind off work for
today."  we joked about a couple ideas and finally decided to go
panhandle downtown.  we might pick up a few bucks.  it was christmas, so
plenty of people would be at the mall.

and so we got some of those fingerless gloves and made signs out of
cardboard: "starving haX0rs!" "overworked.. and then BAM!"  whatever.
sang some old spirituals and entertained the masses with hat tricks
and rope tricks and gutter tricks.  i saw people from some of my previous
jobs, who made a few generous contributions.  in fact, we were 
approached by an executive from the company where we had just
been laid off!  (he tried to tell us we were going about this wrong, but
the look on his face truly inspired us.)  the news camera came by, then the night
died and the other homeless guys on crutches demanded their cut of our
wages.  panhandling can certainly be lucrative.

so then i just got a call from a friend who wants me to do a commercial.  he
needs somebody to play a panhandler!  my first acting job and i'm typecast
already!
hi.  my diary is now taking place off in a special place.  i've
been keeping a leafy paper journal for awhile, but i had one
go through the wash last year and as my friend dustin says: i'd really
like to see them fit an internet in that wash.  architecting the
diary was delightful, as i will soon have everything crossreferenced
and footnoted so i can track progress on writing, art, progg'ing.
you'll be able to link my deepest thoughts and feelings about any given
star trek episode to an encounter with a man who has steel nostrils.

many thanks to Dmitry Borodaenko, who will be creating the debian
package for yaml.rb.  also, votes to bring yaml.rb into the 
Ruby Windows Installer have been swelling.  add your vote to the wiki
page.

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