Posted by Jim at March 31st, 2004
Many people have heard of the idea that you know everyone on the planet through six friendships.
I’ve been amused recently by the number of people I know that know each other. I know Kari through church. I’ve known Ed since first grade and Nate through gaming in college. Both Ed and Nate know Kari.
I’m going to assume they were all at Calvin College at the same time until it becomes painfully obvious that I’m wrong.
Posted by Jim at March 30th, 2004
Here’s what I’m thinking about as a master’s project:
The goal of the project is to allow people to find what they want more quickly than in your average search engine. This would be done by creating a distributed program that keeps track of what links the user preferred with regards to a particular topic. When another person using the same program types the same keywords, they will recieve other people’s top choices for these keywords. Theoretically, the top choice will be most useful of all.
Useful measurements for a link’s usefulness might be whether the user bookmarks it, the number of people who investigate that link, and/or possibly a voluntary user rating system.
Technologies used might include: Java, jxta (a Java based peer-to-peer system), Google’s public API’s.
Challenges would likely include:
1. Designing the page ranking algorithm
2. Sharing the information
3. Working with Google’s API’s
4. Designing an interface that captures the information without interfering with a user’s browsing.
Posted by Jim at March 29th, 2004
I’ve got my Linux box online again. Actually, it wasn’t so much offline as painful to use by anyone who doesn’t enjoy the command line. As somcone who uses command line almost exclusively at work (for system administration, anyway. Not web page design.), this doesn’t bother me too much.
That being said, I do like a gui for certain things (cd burning, for example).
Currently, I’m running Mandrake Linux. I’m not sure how long this will last, but it has been good overall. One of my pet peeves with Unix has been having to mount cd’s and floppies. Mandrake just detects them. I like that.
On the other hand, I still don’t have sound and it didn’t automatically detect my thumb drive. In that sense, it’s no better than any other flavor of Linux/BSD. And of course, it doesn’t have the same ease of upgrade as Debian (if you’re not willing to pay).
So, I guess I’ll evaluate it for a few weeks and then see if I want to switch to something else. Of course, if I put lots of master’s project related material on it, I may want to just stick with it rather than move my files around.
We’ll see.
Oh… For what it’s worth… My master’s project appears likely to be a peer to peer based search engine. I’ll explain it later.
Posted by Jim at March 25th, 2004
I’ve been using Mozilla for web browsing since I finally got computers fast enough to run it last year.
One of the great features I’ve come to enjoy is the bayesian spam filter. Basically, the mail program comes to recognize what you regard to be good mail and what you regard to be junk mail. The junk appears briefly in your inbox and then disappears almost as fast, only to be seen again if you have a morbid curiosity about what sort of pills, really cheap software, and male member enhancers you’re missing out on.
It manages to catch almost everything. I get a couple bits of spam a day–and these are easy to remove. Just click on the recycle icon and it leaves my inbox.
One thing irritates me about it though. I’ve got my mail program set to check and download regularly. This is great except that I sometimes look down, see that I’ve got a new mail message, check my inbox and find…
Nothing.
It was spam. It was removed. But I still have to open my mail program in order to learn something I didn’t want to know about.
So, if there are any Mozilla programmers reading this… Could you please make it so that spam doesn’t activate the “new mail” signal?
Posted by Jim at March 22nd, 2004
Our church does something called “Dinners for Eight.”
The core idea is that 6 or 7 people are assigned to go to someone’s house for dinner, creating a semi-organized potluck. The host organizes the categories of people’s contributions (for example: salad, side dish or dessert) and does the main dish.
We hosted and I did the main dish. In this case, the main dish turned out to be “Daube D’Avignon” or something like that. It is a lamb stew. The meat is marinated in red wine and cognac, flavored with thyme, garlic and onion, cooked for 5 hours in the oven, and served over buttered noodles.
I replaced lamb with beef, but it is still wonderful stuff.
Unfortunately, you sometimes pay for what you enjoy. The juices boiled over and baked on to the cassarole dish, making a hard brown crust on the outside of the dish and a hard black crust on the bottom of the oven.
I dealt with the dish by soaking it for almost 12 hours. The water turned brown, but ultimately the crust came off.
I am still trying to figure out the best approach toward dealing with the oven, but, soaking (alas) seems out of the question.
Posted by Jim at March 19th, 2004
I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit.
The end of the semester nears and I’m trying to finish a class project, arrange an advisor for my master’s project, and somehow handle work.
Work, at the moment, is the biggest concern. The place that I work (GRACE) runs a yearly conference called “Summit on Racism.” This results in my working days becoming longer.
Basically the idea of Summit on Racism is to bring together people in the community to work on the problem of Racism in Grand Rapids, MI not for just one day, but throughout the year. We’ve got representatives of many of the major businesses in Grand Rapids attending (and in some cases sponsoring) the Summit plus people from local government.
This year though, the registration was an online php based form.
One observation about online forms… Putting everything online is much cheaper for the organization in that you don’t end up printing and mailing 6000 booklets, but rather mail one small post card and take care of everything that follows that postcard via email or a web page.
It means that you no longer have to puzzle out some truly atrocious handwriting (not that I should complain). It also limits the people who can easily attend to those who have access to a computer.
In years past, we’ve occasionally had some interesting individuals register. One person called himself “Designer Corsair Switzerlord.” He wrote “Volunteer Lake Dweller” in as his organization.
I do not know what this was supposed to mean.
One of our staff asked him, but as I understand it, the reply was not entirely rational and involved a number of people who were forced to live in a lake (merpeople?).
Alas, we’ve had no people like that this year. Online registration makes it harder for random individuals to just come upon the conference.
In any case, I look forward both to the conference and look forward to the end of it. I need to lower my level of stress.
Posted by Jim at March 17th, 2004
So lately I’ve been using my XP box a lot due to the fact that the gui for my Linux box got utterly annihilated when I did “apt-get upgrade.”
A word to the wise: If a computer asks you whether or not you want to do something, read it first and don’t reflexively click “y.”
Bringing X back from the dead has turned out to be impossible (or at least very hard). Ed, the person who initially got it working, was unable to do it a second time.
Owing to the fact that my hardware is pretty common, it seems likely that a different installer would do a good job. Debian has one of the worst installers of a major distro. That being said, they’ve got access to Anaconda, one of the better installers. So I looked into that.
Installing it on Debian via anaconda proved to be a major pain–not due to anaconda, but because the necessary files were not available for download via apt-get install.
So, I’m installing Mandrake. Mandrake’s got a good installer. And once I get everything working the right way (via automation rather than heartbreaking frustration), I will have a config file that I can use on Debian. Or Freebsd. Or whatever Xfree86 running unix-like OS, I choose.
And I will guard it with my life.
Posted by Jim at March 16th, 2004
Our cats use the litter box approximately 99% of the time.
That anomalous 1% results from the litter boxes not meeting the cats’ standards. In short, it is my fault, due to an utter lack of interest in dealing with the nastiness found within your average litter box. I’ve sometimes thought that I ought to invest in an automated litter box, but a suspicion that it probably wouldn’t work (now justified) has always stopped me from buying one.
In the meantime, our cats have chosen new and exciting places to demonstrate their displeasure. One once urinated in my wife’s hair dryer. Another kindly removed the peaches before using a basket on the counter. A final cat (possibly more than one) will indicate its displeasure with the state of the litter box by urinating in the toaster.
I can think of few things I like less than waking in the morning, putting bread into the toaster, and smelling burnt cat pee. I cannot describe the smell, but I can assure you that it does not smell good. Worse, it lingers.
More than most things, this possibility motivates me to clean the litter box.
Well, that and one other thing. I don’t really want burnt cat urine to be a normal part of Abby and Rebecca’s lives .
Of course, I may be too late for that. I remember walking into the kitchen to find a mess completely unrelated to cats, making a disgusted noise and hearing Abby say “Daddy? Cat pee in toaster?”
Posted by Jim at March 13th, 2004
Almost everybody I gamed with in college and high school is now within driving distance.
One would think that I would be inundated with opportunities to game and nights filled with planning a campaign. Unfortunately, that’s not happening.
Two things are in the way. One of them is school. I generally take 2 graduate level courses in information systems each semester for my masters. Between attending classes (both evening classes) and working on schoolwork, this takes a lot of time.
The other reason is children. By the time I’m done with classes and homework, I can’t really leave my wife to a third night of solo child care per week.
Not with two toddlers in the house.
That doesn’t stop me from thinking about gaming. I’ve got two campaigns that I want to run. I’ve mentioned them before, but just to show that I’m still thinking about them, here they are:
1. Thousands of years ago, a small part of humanity turned a corner in human evolution, developing telepathy, telekenesis, clairvoyant, and teleportation. They managed to create a civilization and eventually leave Earth. That civilization grew into a civilization that spanned many star systems.
The players would play the soldiers, diplomats, and scientists (physical and social) that are part of the Earth’s embassy staff. Stationed in an old arcology, they watch as the civilization splinters, sending out teams to preserve what they can. Of course, some people don’t see much difference between preservation and stealing.
Ideally, I’d like this campaign to have some of the feel of Babylon 5. Earth would be new to space, but not completely inexperienced. Earth’s people would be trained in psi, but without the thousands of years of associated tradition.
2. In all honesty, the second idea originated as an “Over the Edge” ripoff.
The US government blocked off land somewhere in Iowa (or is it in Nebraska? Idaho?) during the 1950’s. Few know for sure what goes on behind the barbed wire, but it looks like a city, complete with high rises, suburbs and apartment buildings.
Observant people notice that the skyline changes unpredictably, staying close to, but not precisely consistent with the days and years before.
People on the inside know it’s some kind of anomaly of quantum mechanics. This piece of land exists in more than one universe. At any given moment, a different piece of a different version of this same city could appear. Certain streets, alleyways, and halls lead to parallel universes.
The US government uses the city in a variety of ways.
a. Technology Gathering: Devices from parallel universes can be useful
b. Product Testing: Certain companies have been allowed to rent the city to test a new product that they don’t want to risk on the general population. Of course, it might only be parallel US governments that do this.
c. Science: Researchers want to find out why the city exists and why it continues to exist.
d. Prison: It’s hard to find a better place to put someone you definitely want to get rid of, but not directly kill. Cold War spies, people with inconvenient ideas, and People-Who-Know-Too-Much live here. Some people with life sentences (or death sentences) were offered the alternative of serving the government here instead.
Players might play just about anything. Ideas I like include government reps (military, FBI, bureaucrats), visiting corporate types, scientists, or prisoners. I’m also not against the idea of people playing themselves or even characters from other campaigns–provided the campaign is not Amber or generally of the swords and sorcery genre.
Posted by Jim at March 11th, 2004
One of the hazards of Linux is that bad stuff sometimes happens when you upgrade.
For example, I’m currently typing this from Lynx due to the fact that XFree86, the gui for Linux, no longer works because my configuration file was destroyed.
This is more bearable that I’d have expected, but there’s much to be said for gui’s. For example, as I’m typing this, I can’t see the entire line I’ve typed, making it hard to tell what I’ve written.
Seriously folks, I’ve got to get a Mac one of these days…