wingolog

you may refer to me as the perceptron

Outside the wind is crisp. The quantum weather device is now more frequently observed in the autumn state. Indeed, my favorite time of year.

The only thing that could make this better would be walking in the mountains with leaves of orange and red. So I bought a ticket back to North Carolina, to enjoy Lake Lure for a weekend, and perhaps sip some coffee back at Cup a Joe in Raleigh. On Hillsborough street of course; the other branches lack the luster of the original. October 5 to the 17th.

aikido

August's paucity of aikido classitude made my schedule more rigid, revolving around the few classes that I could attend. Now that they are offered again, I should get back into the habit of going to the 7 AM class and have my evenings free.

Time is in short supply in my days. If anyone's got a few hours to spare can you please email them to me. It is appreciated.

digging for maggie

Work's going OK. Just finished a six-month-long project to construct a cluster of machines to stream live video. It's basically a distributed fork bomb. Currently it is failing to kill the machines, but succeeding in streaming TV and radio. Perhaps I need to tweak some of the parameters for better effectiveness.

oshi li nawa

A buddy of mine that worked with me in Namibia just finished up his contract and dropped by Barcelona in his travels. We tooled around a bit in Figueres and Sant Celoni, inland towns north of Barcelona. Figueres is famous for its Dalí museum, which was indeed nice. His surreality is a bit overplayed though; it's as if they're trying to beat it into you.

More surreal by far was the "castle" up the hill, castell san ferran. It's an enormous structure, built to hold thousands of people. There were only a handful of other visitors, so the emptiness of the place was manifest.

The decaying arches, the bricked up doors, the stairs descending into water: all silent bellicose artifacts. How absurd to build such a structure, on such a scale, in the 18th century. Engineering meets libros de caballería. Bizarre.

original

The software I use to manage my photos is the most excellent F-Spot from Larry Ewing. Inspired by F-Spot's tag support, the aesthetics of Jakub Steiner's Original, and the tag clouds used by flickr, I wrote a pair of scripts to synchronize my photos from f-spot to the web and show them in their taggy goodness.

Well, I finally imported that code into a bzr branch. To fetch it, just run:

bzr get http://wingolog.org/bzr/original

When that's done, you'll have your own private branch of original to play around with. There's a README in there and such. If you have any patches, either publish your branch to the web via bzr push or send me a bundle via bzr bundle, and I'll see about applying them.

advogato

Advogato is playing with our hearts, "I'm gone", "I'm back", etc. I think the site has a lot of value. It's a place of outsiders, of unaffiliates; no project ties the people there together, only a love of hacking. It sidesteps a lot of the inside-outside problems that plague other aggregators, partially because the software that runs it is so unmaintained that nobody identifies with it. I hope that it stays alive -- it's fresh, and there's no barrier to entry in order to be read.

Advo can lose the articles though, in my opinion. The recentlog is what it's about. Providing a place for pontification isn't so interesting.

Also, regarding http://advogato.ev-en.org: I don't think a simple aggregator is sufficient. You do need a way to filter out the crap, which is the trust metric. A trust metric + an aggregator would be much better.