Futurama: The Arraignment

I dreamed an entire episode of Futurama last night, it wasn't a real episode but you could've fooled me... I don't know how much I can remember, but by the ending an entire stadium full of people are convinced that Fry is a gay molester (and boy do they find it amusing) -- he has been transformed into some kind of an eagle beast creature who can fly away for dramatic effect, and the whole crew of the ship is transported into outer space where the show terminates.

"Arraignment: The Human Condition, if ever there was one."

It's fading fast. but I want to get it down... there could be money in writing episodes, right?

There is a murder, a bag of evidence that is traced back to him, now I'm remembering another dream where I had to kill a person and chop them up, dump their body somewhere... stay focused, one script at a time! How did Fry become an eagle beast? And where did they get the idea that it was a case of molestation? (From the asian girl... that's where...)

Wouldn't it make more sense to prosecute the murder? No, not if it was all one big lie.

The abductor aliens, they made sure to supply those folks with enough toothpaste and plenty of comfortable beds. The last scene in my head, Fry is explaining what just happened with a crooked half-smile on his face, and a mouthful of toothpaste which he spits into the toilet. He is super wasteful. That is way too much toothpaste.

Use a dab no larger than the size of a pearl! That was two or three large oysters, no mother of pearl toothpaste servings on Decapod 11 please...

"It's called Arraignment: The Human Condition, if ever there was one"

What's that supposed to mean? If there was ever a human? If there was ever a human condition? Who knows where dreams come from?

I hope they do continue to come, after I put down those Marlboro brand I-CHING bones... a busy mind is a happy mind! OK Folks, illumination - improved focus +5, I'm graduating real soon now and there are plenty of jobs in Rochester for people who know how to look for them.

Blogger Stylee

Experimenting with my own blog that I can take offline quickly (USB Stick) in case of some reason why I would want to work offline. Like, I've got a client who I want to bill for something really juicy, and I don't want someone else to steal my thunder.

Normally, I like to work openly... there is perhaps no reason to make this an absolute policy, sometimes working transparently can actually affect your bottom line. Today, I believe there is good reason to work in the open, where others can benefit from your example.

Filesaqs and Development

So there are a couple of different kinds of files out there... source, binary, document, and as a scientist I'm sure I'll need to be prepared to deal with all of them. Network file-systems are expensive to maintain and deploy, in particular when visiting friends you really can't expect them to let you install your drivers on their boxes unless you're about to establish a serious relationship.

Sharing files and disk (sharing with yourself counts here also, for people who are multi-homed or multi-boxed to manage their instances across the various computers), you can make filesystems on disks and use networks to fill them up, transparently with DAVfs2, but more on that later...

liveusb-creator from Luke for some help with that development environment, the system is a static Fedora Core 9 live image, with a transparent overlay filesystem that can be used to keep all of your work on a USB stick. When it dies or is lost (inevitably this will happen) your changes will be preserved as long as you can maintain a backup of this overlay, which means storage requirements are pretty low, really people throw 2GB around like toilet paper these days, and the overlay can't get any bigger than that.

Ontology Management

I meant to look this up today: SWOOP

but, I found myself sitting in front of a computer with no java, and a cell phone with some. uncomfortable installing Java on random peoples' computers, I will take a look at this when I get home.

this one looks good too:
Differential Ontology Editor

Why is this important? The best verse is terse.

Vigorous writing is concise. An ontology can help you to manage the coherency and breadth of your thoughts, or so the story goes... I hope my writing doesn't wind up looking like those awful spam monkeys I still hear from every now and again!

Sadly, Facebook and Delicious still seem to be not supporting Chinese or Korean. Maybe it is just my input method that is at fault. I can't believe it doesn't work.

The Sixth Layer: A Business Blog

Building an example of how to build a churning queue for blog posting bandits on the internet... this Blogger blog on blogspot.com is a good example of a content channel, the basic "news output," the first step to recognition in any sort of publishing company. The most you can ask for in the realm of consumable content (here we're talking newspaper articles, not video games) is a content author who provides content in text, audio, video, and URL formats.

Visit the Posts (Atom) feed link on the bottom of the front page and find the FeedBurner RSS frontend which shows the content in this blog: I am generally not posting MP3 or Video content, but the capability is there between Blogger and FeedBurner to add media files for a rich feed viewer such as iTunes to recognize and retrieve. You can include podcast content in your blog postings!

Text articles with embedded content can be viewed in a web browser and podcasts can be scanned in a podcast aggregator. Now, what about those URL-based posts with titles, text summaries and tag data: they're all coming from a particular account on the del.icio.us service, and if you have the account name you can request the set of tags by URL. But, what if you want to edit these tags?

What if you want to collect a group of posts, and tag them all a certain way? What if you want to drill down inside a large set of already tagged posts, and update the tags for a subset? The interface to handle this behavior has already been developed with tagging for gmail, but the feature described here is not available on this database... yet.

I'm on a mission to build this feature into my workflow. Anybody want to stop me? Please, I'm begging you, tell me this feature already exists before I write it myself!

NOHO-NYC Adventures

We're on a trip to The Moon, says Remy D... with a mild diversion on the way, a stop in Pluto. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center and Columbia University Law History department, has asked for a meeting with the founding members of The Causemaker Foundation, and it's just a little out of the way: we came out this way to see the show for Umphrees McGee in Northampton Massachusetts, and that was a bust for me. We went to a nice restaurant (The Dirty Truty) instead of that, Mike said that the concert was a rockin good time!

Have been enjoying Northeastern hospitality and the beautiful weather and scenery of New York and Mass, we're taking a train into NYC and I have yet to contact anyone for lodging or more serious scoping out of the area. We've got enough friends in NYC, and Remy has made some links, that I'm not worried about it. I could come out of this trip with an incredible story or even an internship with one of the great heads of the Free Software movement, with doors leading to Law school and worse: real political activism.

Wish me luck! My phone is out of service, if you need me call Amy Gavin at 585.781.4145, we're in Northampton for a day more, after that you can try my number or Jeremy DeCausemaker at 315.945.1601 -- he's got a Cingular phone, my Cricket has been out of service since near Syracuse. I hope it works in NYC!

ST101 - Software Testing 101

Professional Queue Managers/ and Product Reviewers, take Heed!

The latest post on my delicious:

images/red-kashmiri.png at master from kingdon's tues-crep — GitHub, can you tell without a password, that I think this soda tastes like crap?
... just posted

You are reading this page and you probably can't see it from here. I can't even remember if I included a portal into that bucket on this page. That's not good! Worse, I'm not sure from where I sit, with my saved passwords, if you can even view the product review in question...

Still, the important thing you should get out of my message is this: do not drink Red Kashmiri soda. The Red Kashmiri soda tastes like the ocean. It is made of salt and mixed spices, as well as a token quantity of sugar. Only a fool will drink the Red Kashmiri soda after that!

http://del.icio.us/yebyen/ post#3464

The second most important thing you should get out of this message, if you are a delicious user this will come as no surprise, there is no easy or reliable way to find post #3464! That is not a permanent link, and the facilities for permanent linking are reserved exclusively for permanent records, which could not usually be deleted or absconded with. A delicious feed is more like a queue than a base or a permanent record, and as I learned from MSDN article about immutable data structures (reference still not handy) ahem there are some immutable queues, but this is not a property of queues that you can count on finding every single day! Queues are sometimes immutable, sometimes indexed, in this case not either. Not exactly, the URL is an index or key.

In Delicious world, you can tell if a post is unique or not because it has a URL that distinctly identifies it from other posts; it is assumed here that the value is not in the 255 character summary and unlimited vocabulary of tags, and this is perhaps a foolhardy assumption. The URL is the meat of your HTTP request, and unless there are some special POST variables or unless the referenced website has a special dynamic nature like what is often found on news portal websites (and Delicious pages) you should have no trouble retrieving the same content with the same request URL.

Delicious posts can arrive in a queue many posts all at once, or a handful at a time, and fortunately it is possible to aggregate a day's posts in digest format. What does this mean? If I am posting many times in a day, or many times in a week, with multiple trains of thought, then after that you don't check your mail incoming from what I am sending every day, we are going to have a disconnect: that means either you are going to have a lot of catching up to do, or I'm going to have a lot of explaining to do, either way we will be taxed (my brain and yours) to get a meaningful report of what I've been doing.

I'm in a different office every week.

What does this mean to you? You've probably never been in touch with me on a daily basis. Probably only person who has been in direct contact with me every day for the last year is me. Does this mean that I can't tell you what I've been doing for a year running? Lord I hope not!

You shouldn't spend time on links that you have already reviewed, unless there is some expectation that there will be something to gain from revisiting that URL. How do you guarantee that behavior on a consistent, repeatable basis? I'll start with PlanetPlanet Feed Reader — currently evaluating output formats — and ReiserFS v4 — this one might be over the top.