Twitterfeed got me thinking. How long could I get a twitter-twitterfeed infinite recursion loop to go for? I created the infinatwit to put that question to the test by setting twitterfeed to follow infinatwit and post to infinatwit. I think the next step will be to see how many web 2.0 services I can combine to produce this effect. I think feedburner is next…

Any UChicago student has certainly seen, and probably used, one of the many recycling bins on campus. As any Maclab tutor could tell you, the Maclab recycling bins are emptied into the same container with all the other trash. Just from that observation, I think it would be fair to assume that the rest of the Reg’s recycling containers are treated the same way, but surely other buildings recycle, right? Apparently not so… Apparently the bins in the Reynolds Club are treated the same way. We only have paper bins (ignore the sticker that says aluminum cans only), but the Reynolds Club has full on different bins for different types of recyclables. I think it is safe to assume that the same is true for the rest of campus. I realize that recycling in Chicago sucks, but surely the university could find some way of recycling. I think this whole mess is really offensive on so many different levels, besides the fact UChicago is not recycling. Is this thing some sort of ruse on someone’s part so that students and staff can feel better about the university and feel good for thinking we are recycling. I go out of my way to recycle when I can, dammit. The university could at least show the same respect for its community.

I was in MrKay’s today, the used bookstore where I have purchased so many of the DVDs I own (I am back in Oak Ridge until the weekend). Anyway, I overheard a pretty awesome conversation between two high school-aged girls, who were looking at some CDs. I should note that my taste in music differs greatly from the average high school-aged girl, so please forgive anything I miss. Also, this whole thing is heavily paraphrased, but nothing important is taken away.

• Girl 1: Looking at some CD. God! Maria Carry is so dumb! Look at her album, she put “E=MC²” on it. I start listening closer. I bet she doesn’t even know what that means!
• They blabber for a bit. I assure you it wasn’t worthwhile.
• Girl 2: Yeah, it’s like Maria Carry times two or something!

Her Friend corrected her, but the damage had been done. I headed over to the cash register pretty quick, so I wouldn’t laugh at them. I should really get better at storytelling….

It’s true! Borja wrote up a summary of the GSoC lightening talk event, including pictures. If you don’t know what I look like, I am in both the GSoC student one and the ACM officer one. I really wish I got a haircut before this thing….

Borja linked to our website, which hopefully won’t get too much traffic. It is currently at 359 days of uptime, and I have shooting for a year of uptime before upgrading to the latest and greatest version of OpenBSD.

As one of the administrators for the ACM mailing list, I am used to dealing with a lot of spam at this point. Even with spam filtering, it used to be pretty terrible, until we made it more aggressive. Of course, none was going out to the list; it was really a difference between spam to review and spam that is auto-deleted. Mailman sucks, so my inbox gets filled with a lot of the bounces, which gmail spam filtering can handle nicely, but a select few can still get through. Spam is one of the most pointless things I can imagine, but at the very least, it usually includes a link, or some sort of ad. I got the same spam message a couple of times that didn’t quit follow that convention:

Subject: best
your life is crap

There were at two different from addresses and names, so it was pretty clear it was spam. The only purpose I could see to something like this spam is to reply back, desperate for answers. Maybe they were writing some huge long spam and hit send by accident a little too early, or there spam creation software sucks. What a strange piece of spam….

The ACM (just Borja really) organized a trip to Google Chicago, where all of the Google Summer of Code students who were accepted from UChicago (and in the US) gave lightening talks on our projects, which included me. The other GSoC students were Marcus Westin, Jordon Lewis, and Nick Edds. I put up my talk, as well as a more general page for my project on my CS site. Marcus and I both have projects with the Globus Alliance, so I was quite happy that he went before me, as I didn’t have to explain what Globus is. My project is fairly straight foreword to explain and I still don’t know the Globus Toolkit (GT) that well, so I couldn’t answer too many questions, and I ended up going under in time. Everyone seemed most interested in Nick’s project, since it is on the 2to3 tool in python, and a decent amount of the audience used Python, some with a great deal of dedication (it was at Google after all). I am pretty excited to see how Nick’s project turns out; we both went to the talk that his mentor, Collin Winter, gave at PyCon on the tool and the issues that Nick is working to fix.
The Chicago office’s engineering crew is dominated by subversion developers (in the small selection of software I like), but most of the presentations were about most unrelated projects. Ben Collins-Sussman discussed a VM for interactive fiction games like zork (I’ll still play my zork on the SDF TWENEX Machine; the version of zork installed is from 1981!). Karl Fogel, not a current Google developer, but subversion developer and good friend of the other googlers, gave a talk on script he wrote to help track patches from non-core developers based on logs. He put up some stats on the differences between subversion and GNU Emacs as projects; it further straightened my reasoning for using XEmacs. I went to a Russian choir concert the night before, as I had to go to a concert from a genre I don’t have any familiarity with, which he apparently was in; what a small world I live in. Brian Fitzpatrick gave a shortened version of the keynote he have at PyCon on balancing functional complexity with usability in software. Like all the other talks I have heard him give, it was an excellent talk; he has one of the best uses of slide shows I have seen, and I always end up thinking about the talks much later. There was also a talk from a developer for Blogger (he said he was now on feedburner); I would give his name, but I can’t remember it at the moment. I talked to him for a bit; I think my social awkwardness was in full swing at the time. I asked him about something I read on Valleywag about Google adding some preference search rankings with Blogger (I can’t find the post at the moment; I will link to it if I do); as I am sure is the case, he said that Google does no such evil. He also mentioned that Google crawls its own site with the same bot, which makes sense, but I hadn’t thought about it before. I wish I knew Blogger better, as I used it once for something else and had a couple thoughts about its workings.
It was a fairly awesome evening. I was very sleep deprived after one of my harder weeks here, so I was defintely in a strange state for the entirity of the thing. My thanks and appretiation go out to Borja and Google for this event. Apparently, my glorious face might end up on the GSoC blog or the Google open source blog.

I wrote this “eulogy” for two computers that apparently got fried (as in electrical surge or something) recently in the Maclab. I intended it for fellow tutors, but I was fairly fond of it. It would probably help to know that these computers were named “python” and “ada.”

We are gathered here today to mourn the deaths of Python and Ada. They lived good, long lives as G5s. Tragically, Brian discovered their charred remains yesterday, which was confirmed today.

Ada always dreamed of being a missile guidance system, but as a G5, it was never able to fulfill its dream. It forgot its dream, and instead spent its life running word, with the occasional bit of matlab and powerpoint here and there. As it felt its final death blow surge, it visualized tracking a laser point until meeting a glorious, explosive end, it quietly whispered “I’m going home!”

Python suffered a far more tragic death. Realizing it was at its final moments, it began to question the meaning of it all:

>>> raw_input(”So this is it? Was it good? Why do I have to die? Where
I am going?”)
So this is it? Was it good? Why do I have to die? Where I am
going?Traceback (most recent call last):
File ““, line 1, in ?
EOFError

Unfortunately, its questions were left unanswered:

>>> raise UnboundLocalError, “Oh Noes!!!!”
Traceback (most recent call last):
File ““, line 1, in ?
UnboundLocalError: Oh Noes!!!!
>>> raise SystemExit
$

Unfortunately, no one was there to catch its exception.

I was randomly browsing last night, when I came across some eBay sniping service. I was recently sniped in the last 5 seconds on a VAX I was bidding on, so I viewed the site with a mild degree of interest. I started to read through the user testimonial page when I noticed a little gem on the page. Each one seemed to be fine on its own; I never really trust these pages, but I could believe that these were real, until I noticed these two:

Not your Daddy’s Sniping Service!!!

March 27, 2007, by lambykins

Hello, I have used a few sniping services and none of them really did it for me. I found BidSlammer and it was just totally different. Very intuitive. I can move fast. Good job guys. Slam-It is awesome, BTW. Wm. Howard, citro_cell

This is the best one

March 24, 2007, by lobster_soss

Hello, I have used a few sniping services and none of them really did it for me. I found BidSlammer and it was just totally different. Very intuitive. I can move fast. Good job guys. Slam-It is awesome, BTW. Thanks, Jeff

It seems that the only things they bothered to change in these two were the title, month, “username,” and end line. The worst part is that they put these two right next to each other. I guess it just goes to show how much you can trust advertising.