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.
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.
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!
Recently, my 20gb archos bit the dust (not from a hard drive issue; actually a cracked LCD screen), and all I have wanted since is a decent MP3 player. As far as I can tell, what I consider good is no longer produced. I have a few simple requirements:
must use a USB mass storage interface. I mean that the thing is just an external hard drive that can play music, no oddities, and no needed software. This is the simplist way on both the manufacturer’s end and the user’s (at least for people like me).
Let me view and play by folder. ID3 tags get messed up, don’t follow standards across a library, etc… I prefer to sort by file, rather than metadata, for no other reason than it is an easier way to sort, and I can add in structure that one could not extract from ID3 anyway. I spent time to sort my library this way.
use a hard drive. I want something substantial. In the past, that was 20gb, now it is 30gb; the trend now seems to be towards small things. If I ran (or really exercised at all), I would get one for just that use. Really, I think many of the problems with hard drives is blown out of proportion. I don’t think I have ever actually seen a hard drive failure on any computer of device I have ever had any control over. That is on well over 100 machines. I have seen plenty of power supply failures, liquid cooling failures (it is always sad to see a Mac cry coolant…), memory errors, etc… but never a hard drive failure. I believe the statistics, but my personal experience differs.
Not an iPod. iPod’s have and always fail the first two requirements (they loath their users–seriously), the price is high, etc…. There are only two arguments that I have ever heard that have been at all convincing to me for why an iPod is worthwhile: 1) you can return broken one’s easily, 2) stuff is made for them. I don’t care about 1) because I don’t break shit that much (the MP3 player’s I have used for normal walking around/traveling/etc use both lasted around 4-5 years), and as far as 2), those devices are nice, but headphones still work fine. Really, you should use a computer to power anything else. Style isn’t worth $200+ extra and reduced functionality; that is just stupid. I respect anyone a bit less for buying an iPod. Plus, I can’t even use it on my computer without installing rockbox or something.
For the most part, Archos has served me well on these points, but they have moved towards making any hard drive mp3 player huge with crazy video options and their portable ones small flash based things, like any other manufacturer. Ogg, etc support would also be nice, but I would be willing to live with just the first two. Battery life is also a factor, but my definition of usability takes precident. I think I have found one or tow from extensive searching. I don’t care about video; I just want music. These used to be made, so what happened? This is simple! Why can’t some weird Chinese compnay do this?
I recently bought a Playstation 3 Eye, which has been pretty fun to play around with (I recently bought a 65″ LCD TV, which I should really write about as well). There are a few games for it that are pretty similar to “do stuff with motion” exhibits at museums and fairs, and there is also a basic capture and edit feature, with a few features such as time lapse, etc… The camera itself is pretty decent considering it is about the size and price of a cheap webcam, but is much better, especially the microphone. I had some fun with the time lapse feature after I got it. I was eating my lunch at the time:
My friend Megan and I repeated the same sort of thing here, but with ribs this time:
Both are better when you can set the video the repeat, but I enjoy both still.
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