Posted by knorby on June 9, 2009 under Android, Python, doit, fortune, google, humor | 
I downloaded the Android Scripting Engine (ASE) on my G1 last night (oh yeah, I got a G1), which adds in Python and Lua functionality in a basic way. Along with the Text-To-Speach library, I hacked up a quick script to playback random DOITs. The slow, dull computerized British voice inspired me to make a fortune library off of Walter’s My Secret Life, the secret sex diary of a British Victorian gentleman. Though I first found of this book’s existance in actual book form, it is online. Anyway, I hacked up a quick script to scrape that site into a fortune library, which you can find here. For copyright reasons, the script is the only thing I am putting up. The script is written in python with lxml (you may need BeutifulSoup as well). It is horribly documented, but you should just need to run the script. To make it a library you can use with fortune, you need to run strfile on it, which the script should do if it is in the path. The book is 12 volumes, and almost every paragraph is lurid. The script is hacked together, so there might be some problems, but I haven’t found any glaring ones yet. By the way, the playback is fantastic.
Posted by knorby on March 15, 2009 under internet, twitter |
I read an interview with Stephen Fry on the BBC, which seemed to respond nicely to a few of my problems with twitter that I posted about, at least for some. He points out that, on the whole, media really don’t like twitter that much. If he wants to make an announcement, he just does it, and people find it; he doesn’t have to go through a swarm of interviews, which is why the media hates it. I have to admit, I am a lot more interested in public figures as a result of twitter than I ever was before, and if I did care, I probably would stick to twitter rather than the more traditional infotainment channels.
I suppose if I cared more about spoken langauge, writing, etc… I could appreciate how 140 or so characters was an interesting change to language. I guess my problem is really understanding why it matters in the first place. Much bothers me about SMS (more to do with price gouging than anything else), so it might just be my distrust of anything based off of SMS.
Posted by knorby on March 3, 2009 under media, twitter |
Recently, I have noticed quickly accelerate its rise into the mainstream, which I have mostly found annoying. It is a simple idea; the main achievement of twitter is to gain a rather large user base and make and maintain a fair number of contracts for sms; too much credit is given to it. Here are my thoughts on it:
- The media needs to shut the hell up about it. Facebook too. I have seen/heard far too many stories where some reporter is just utterly fascinated by it (really, there is nothing there) or they just spout gibberish, highlighting their ignorance. Just shut up! This isn’t news. If you want to use it, use it. Otherwise don’t.
- Twitter is 140 characters so you can fit in both a username and message in an SMS message. There isn’t much difference between writing tweets and an SMS message. So shut up about it.
- Please, set up a twitter account if you have a business or are someone famous and awesome, but I care more about what my friends are saying than your tweets, so keep the traffic low. If you hired an intern to do nothing but tweet, they should focus on replies, or you will lose followers. Seriously.
- If you want to livetweet, get a separate account for it, for the reason I named above. Maybe your twitter client can filter, but most can’t, and it is just really annoying to have to go too far back in my friend’s timeline to see anything of worth.
- Don’t use twitters for polls, media. You get like 30 responses and publish the results anyway. That is a sure sign that no one cares. I haven’t seen these in anything worthwhile (the chicago red eye for example), so I guess I can’t be too surprised.
- Twitter seriously needs to get its shit together. I don’t understand why they are so content to get VC and make no attempts to make money, since it would be so simple to just put google ads up. I don’t think anyone would care.
- Spend some time on the damn website. I don’t think there is any twitter software now that doesn’t beat the website, which is just stupid. Even something like the twitter gadget (google widget, so you can use it in gmail) has plenty more features than the standard site now. Hash tags have been around for a while, but there isn’t any clear support for them, beyond the standard search. I don’t think twitter even bothers to convert links to tinyurl or similar services anymore, which should have always been better anyway. Filtering should be added in, etc… If twitter wanted to add in ads down the line, they would have a hard time getting people to use the web interface. When I started using it, the service was much more feature rich, and those have been removed over time (fucking fail whale). Just get your damn act together.
I might write up some more in the future.
Posted by knorby on December 26, 2008 under blogs, wordpress |
I decided to use a new theme. I am not very happy with the new one, but it fixes a few bugs that were in the last one, and creates a whole bunch of new ones. The sidebar RSS feeds aren’t displaying for one. There are some links placed at the bottom of the page. The color scheme is different, which I don’t mind terribly; I generally prefer black(ish) backgrounds, but a lot of partial html content sets the font color to black, which has been a problem a couple of times. I will look into the RSS feed problem at some point and fix up the easy stuff, but I don’t like spending a lot of time on themes; CSS is annoying, but php software themes are a crime against nature (not tied to the medium, just the coders who make them). I really wanted to add in gravatars (should set up an account if you haven’t already) to the comments, which was added in wordpress 2.6 or something, and there wasn’t an update to the the theme I was using. It is a simple fix to the comment template, but I was thinking of switching because of other problems anyway, and, as I said, I hate working on the wordpress themes. So, the appearance might change a bit some in the future, but don’t count on it.
Posted by knorby on December 1, 2008 under Python, internet |
I was in need of a break from work, so I finally got around to implementing DOIT of the Day on twitter! For those not familiar with DOIT jokes, they are a set of jokes from USENET, or even before that. A while ago, I started maintaining a fortune database, which I wrote about here. I haven’t gotten around to packaging it up for various Linux distros yet, but I will eventually. So, you can now get your daily fill of DOIT jokes from twitter. Non-twitters can DOIT with RSS.
I wrote a couple of python script/libraries to auto-follow followers (CPAN was having some problems, so I didn’t use a perl script someone else had already written) and a fortune->twitter script. I will clean those up at some point soon and put them up somewhere.
Posted by knorby on November 29, 2008 under IT, Linux, Python, Solaris, coding, shell scripting |
I am mostly jotting this down so I can work on this later and to see if anyone has any suggestions.
I was thinking last night that I need to setup my own personal environment on new systems quite a bit, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. I do not want to work off of something too centralized, as I really don’t have that option. I need to be able to maintain a setup on my home machines, various UChicago machines, and various other machines. In some cases, I just need a work environment for a short term period, such as on maclab machines (although I usually just ssh into one of the linux cluster machines and use X11 forwarding to load up XEmacs GUI goodness). sshfs isn’t an option, as it sucks, and FUSE isn’t always installed everywhere (for good reason). Subversion might serve nicely, but I can’t assume that it is installed, as it often isn’t; I tend to think Subversion or other repository systems shouldn’t be used for much beyond software development. I also need to worry about various differences in systems. I can always install software to the system or to my home directory, and various UNIX flavors have their own quirks, especially Solaris. So what I want is an initializing setup script that downloads and extracts a basic environment from some central server. Everything in this set of scripts should be sectionalized. There should be some decent metadata format (probably some XML format) to store information about these sections and on the sections installed. There should be some update system on top of that. In the case that a package management system is available, the system should be able to use it, and as fall back, download and install a few specific packages into my home directory. Things like python would use already existing systems for setting this sort of thing up. Given that the system would assume almost nothing, most of the initial system would probably need to do processing on the server side. Other than that, the only software that the system would assume would be ssh, bash, and tar (maybe). This thing will take time, but I think it would be useful for a long time to come.
Posted by knorby on November 26, 2008 under Python, google, internet |
After reading the comments on a story on reddit on IQs, I became curious about how IQs are reported on the internet. A few people were saying that when they see someone mention their IQ on the internet, it is usually above 130. The explanations given were along the lines of people lying, biased online tests, and segmentation in where people browse. I was curious what sort of frequencies the different IQs are mentioned, so I wrote up a little python to get the google search results for IQs 50-199 (I would have included lower values after seeing the result, but I choose to go the scraping route rather than gdata, which ends up getting you blocked by google, something I didn’t know). I ran the number with the word “iq”; I think there may be better queries, but simple seemed good enough. Here are the results, plotted with matplotlib:
I found these kind of surprising. Most of the result counts were around 6 million, but there were a few sharp drops. I was especially surprised by 100 and 130, since, if memory serves, 100 is the 50th-percentile for IQs and 130 is the 99th; I would expect a greater count on these two, since more sites would include those numbers while explaining the scale; instead, there are large drops. Weird. I don’t think there is any connection between these results and anything proposed on reddit either.
Posted by knorby on under internet, personal |
I had the great privilege of being the first buyer of today’s woot shirt (called the “first sucker” on woot). It took me all from the time they posted it for me to see it and then buy it. It is just that awesome. You can see the honer on the shirt’s discussion page. Woot!
