Using the new ChatGPT GPT-4o Image Generation to incrementally generate a photo of Hoda! (A "Chipin" is a 50-50 Chuhuahua and Mini-Pincer. Hoda is 70-20, so is a ChuhuaPin!)
Previously if you asked ChatGPT to generate you an image it would switch over to DALL-E, a separate image generation model. Each time it generated a new image it would more or less start from the beginning, maybe, and it was a challenge to get small incremental changes to an image.
Agency (a more useful concept of Free Will), has two important ingredients -- the ability to predict outcomes and the ability to influence outcomes -- both of which come in a spectrum of possible degrees. We can lay these out into a visualization that breaks down naturally into a four-square grid.
The Two Ingredients
My friend Brad asked about what I've been reading lately in the AI/LLM space to keep up. Here's my link roundup! Things that have been on my rotation lately.
- AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models: Great January-2025 catch up on consuming LLM/AI usage in real world applications; enough background to Get It without being distracted by details
- Simon Willison Website: Follow for great links and chasing the dragon of new releases and thoughts
- LLM CLI (Datasette): From Simon Willison, a very handy CLI tool for interfacing with LLMs. Once set up, I use this as a unixy native tool. Like ...
cat some_file.txt | llm -s 'Turn this into a CSV of street, city, state, zip' > data.csv - /r/LocalLLaMA: Reddit community all about running local LLMs; even if you only ever run things on other people's computer (API) it is interesting to know what might be happening on the other side
- /r/ClaudeAI: Latest and Greatest with Claude Stuff
- Groq: Hardware accelerated LLM (also see Cerebras)
- Aider: Open source CLI coding assistant. They've been building up an Aider LLM Leaderboard which is interesting, especially the highlighted polyglot board (one model for architecture plan, another for low-level coding)
- Sourcegraph Cody: There are several VSCode-embedded code assistants in this space, Cody is one to keep an eye on. Recently Copilot Edits has stepped up to a similar cross-file assistant too. There are a bunch of others; I'm not really psyched about switching from vim to vscode, and I certainly don't want to switch to a proprietary editor, so I haven't spent much time with things like Cursor (yet)
- Matthew Berman (YouTube): He does videos with some demos and commentary that is pretty fun; I may not always agree, but even knowing what the latest topics are is very helpful!
- Practical AI Podcast: I listen to podcasts when I commute or go for longer drives, which isn't often but often enough that I've listened to some good episodes both here and on other ChangeLogs.
- Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast: I've only listened to a few of these, but it is on top of my feed list in AntennaPod currently
Figured out how to make opening a CSV in firefox pop open a terminal running VisiData (vd)
VisiData!
I like VisiData! If you are working with tabular data, like a CSV file, it is a lovely slicer and dicer. It's a pretty terminal-keyboard-heavy program, like a vim family thing. Like many of these power tools, I find that you can get into it best by finding ONE use-case and then gradually introducing new tricks from there. So the simple use-case for VisiData is simply viewing CSV files.
Drawing Xes in Boxes is harder than you might think! Teaching Ghostwriter a bit about space by pre-segmenting the input image gets us closer.
The Problem
You may recall from TLT - 2024.11.23 - A Ghostly Game that Ghostwriter is ... not good with spatial awareness. For example, we can ask it to draw an X in a box and see how close it gets...
Working on Ghostwriter, making some incremental progress on playing tic-tac-toe.
It Was Worse Before
I've been trying to play tic-tac-toe with Ghostwriter, but it is quite bad. Reading the LLM transcript, it sees that we are playing, has a good idea of what it wants to do, but can't aim its output very well at all.
In-Hub, LLM + Sonic Pi, dash of docker-compose
- General Status:
- Went into the Hub
- Worked in the morning on Human Essentials a bit, but quickly switched to chatting with folks locally
- Paired with SL to set up some docker-compose fun
- Paired with SW on trying to mash up LLM (datasette) with Sonic PI! We ... didn't get it to work. But SW says they got something going via a CLI interface to Sonic!
- Nerd Snipe:
- When I was chatting with SL yesterday I realized that my Unison Powered Backups can error out without me knowing
- Well I've always KNOWN this, but I ignore it because it works pretty much all the time. Still ... it had failed the night before...
- So I made a wrapper that will do a system notification when it fails
- Now I've got it running hourly. When it works it pops up a "backup complete" notification that goes away after a few seconds, and when it fails it pops up a "BACKUP FAILED" that won't go away until I click
- Now I have to decide what I want it to tell me about no-internet situations. hm.
- I just noticed that my original writeup of this backup structure was written in 2006!!!! That's pretty good sustainability on a backup solution :)
- Alloy+LLM+Rails Project:
- RC has a tiny "community cluster", which has to machines with small GPUs!
- I got access to that yesterday, so I played with that a bit on the token-tree, got it working! Def faster than the local CPU. I wouldn't be surprised if a mac Mx processor was similar
In-Hub, LLM Club, Mediapipe, Coffee Project, docker-compose
- General Status:
- Went into the hub! So great to see and interact IRL
- Applied LLM Club we played with a large JSON dataset; works pretty easy to use the ChatGPT UI and upload the whole file, but we didn't find an obvious way to do the same thing on the API. Maybe something with their
Assistantsconcept - I went over to Coffee Project, pretty delicious
- Played with Mediapipe, android AI/media lib from Google, with JH. But the bleeding edge software was ... not working
- Showed SL some of how I set up thelackthereof.org with docker-compose, including nginx running in docker with the rest of it
- I worked on some Human Essentials, really need to wrap that :)
- Nerd Snipe:
- TIL: I am using Alacritty, and you can apparently hit ctrl+shift+b to search backwards up through your scrollback!
- I upgraded Nuxt to the latest for my static site ... and it now (correctly) gets mad about some internal broken links. But I couldn't find/fix them all so I turned that safety feature off hah
- Alloy+LLM+Rails Project:
- Nice video -- "Finding bugs without running or even looking at code" by Jay Parlar, though it is focused on the structural modeling not the state modeling
- Got some communications from the Alloy maintainers; not quite satisfied that we've connected as deeply as I like, but I think I'll be able to get the CLI-JSON output I want in any case
Website updates to break insulation, bit of Human Essentials
- General Status:
- I think I'll go Virtual today and go into the Hub tomorrow (though I keep going back and forth)
- Decided to beak my own insulation a bit, cross-posted all of these checkins to my own website
- We went to a few bookstores over the weekend! I got Adrian Tchaikovsky, Eyes of the Void, Book II of The Final Architects Series. Betsy told me years and years ago to check out Tchaikovsky and boy was she right! I'm chewing through the catalog. Beth isn't into him as much, so YMMV
- I know I'm feeling better because I'm feeling very wordy today haha
- Also picked up Patrick house, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness and Daniel C. Dennett, I've Been Thinking
- Both are interesting. Thinking about consciousness, Agency, all that is a thing I enjoy. Dennett is often too aggressive, but I'm strongly aligned with his core ideas
- Today I need to do a bit more on Human Essentials too. Had a good meeting with the team yesterday and there are only a few small things to get done on Dashboard for it to be mergeable
- Nerd Snipe:
- Backdating blog entries and adding tags wasn't easy. So I updated my new-blog command wrapper with a few new options :)
- I'm using the Commander CLI helper along with ts-node for this. So my script starts with
#!/usr/bin/env ts-nodeand contains Typescript - I can never remember where my
blogcommand really lives, butvim $(which blog)works great :) - At some point recently I upgraded to Taskwarrior 3.0 which includes having to do an export of tasks from the old version BEFORE you install the new version. I got that taken care of before my OS does it for me
- I started to help the Taskwarrior peeps out by making a perl script that translates their legacy
.dataformat directly into JSON so you could do the extract even after the upgrade .... but my data is migrated now and works fine so I lost momentum - On my blog, I might make a few more formatting tweaks. I will at some point use NuxtImage to render the thumbnails for things .... right now it is actually the full sized image downloaded and then scaled by the browser. People have a lot of bandwidth now, right? They're not that big anyway
- Alloy+LLM+Rails Project:
- Still no direct reply from the maintainers, but I'm going to keep jamming
A week spent coughing, writing Java, and watching Andor. First World Problems hah. Not bad in the scheme of things! :)
- General Status:
- I was Virtual all week -- fighting a cough and feeling intermittently icky :( . MUCH BETTER NOW!!! Beautiful day.
- Watched the eclipse from here in NYC. Was OK. Maybe I'll do totality next time :)
- FEELINGS -- Because of that it was a pretty tough week, really feeling both not getting the value of all the human connections I'd like and also feeling the reality of being at the half-way point for the 6-week batch
- Watched a few more episodes of Andor. I haven't watched any of the other Star Wars series shows, but got recommended this one by a random YouTube video and I like it. I only have a few more episodes left for the season
- It was Beth's Birthday on Tuesday; I had dinner reservations and desert lined up ... but we called it off since I was feeling icky. BUT! We rescheduled to Saturday and had a lovely time! We are the same age yet again!
- Here it is Sunday 2024-04-14 and I am feeling much much better. Skipping our weekly weight-training workout though to not push myself backwards
- During the week I did attend a few things, and loved them all! I think y'all are great
- Really one of my rare complaints is the double-edge sword of a curated community -- the insulation is dividing people in my life; like even these posts to zulip feel better to write than the public blog, and I'm not going to link to individuals on the public blog. In another week one of my bestest friends is visiting from Portland OR, and without special permission I can't bring them over to the hub. Heck I can't bring my spouse by when we happen to be nearby later today. I get it, I like it, I agree with it, and yet ... I feel that separation of insiders and outsiders. Eh.
- I was Virtual all week -- fighting a cough and feeling intermittently icky :( . MUCH BETTER NOW!!! Beautiful day.
- Nerd Snipe:
- I was upset that on Tuesday at a zoom meeting I had a coughing fit while screen sharing and that my desktop zoom ... wouldn't let me mute myself or stop sharing! GARRR
- So. I think I got it. The solution: stop using the desktop zoom client. Turns out you can use the browser just like I do all the time with google meet. BYE BYE DESKTOP ZOOM
- It seems to work better now. I still have my internet drop now and then, which has something to do with where I am physically when remote here (switching wifi APs or something), but I can tether and then all is good
- Still doing some mild tweaks to Sway, the latest is that I got swaymonad running, which controls some initial window-placement settings to make them more like xmonad. Looks like I'll probably fork/tweak it to my liking
- And THAT thing uses Nix! So...
- I got Nix running (on top of my existing Ubuntu, not as a whole install)
- Just now I was listening to a podcast (Ship It! Episode 99: From Kubernetes to Nix) and ... now am going to try to do MORE NIX, maybe inflict it upon my work people eventually. MUAHAHAHA
- Alloy+LLM+Rails Project:
- Well. I learned some more Alloy!
- I also was trying to play with different ways of interfacing with Alloy, knowing that the CLI is very limited
- BUT they are prepping for a v6.1 which actually has some good CLI tooling! Like you can use it without the GUI, export JSON, even get an interactive console mode!
- Very cool
- But it doesn't work
- As in the current dev branch is in need of some bug-fixes and QA for release. Also I think this is both a "soon" release and one that has been in progress for a year. Maybe I can help!
- So ... I'm now up to 8 open PRs against various branches and have reached out to the maintainers to do some coordination :)
- Quiets more CLI output when requested
- Remove deprecation warning for DefaultSymbolFactory
- Allow not-quite-regular files
- Print the 0th table; label the repeat number
- Prevent overriding ctrl+A and ctrl+E
- Remove long-deprecated menu entry
- Make the parser match the syntax highlighter
- Fix expectation of toDTO, avoid NPE
- As I mentioned in my message to the developers ... as another open-source maintainer, I know that contributors can be well-intentioned but often come around, talk up some ideas, and disappear. Or worse, submit an un-mergeable PR and disappear. So I'm trying very hard to not do that. Each one of those is very small, like one or a few lines, easy to verify, and I think immediately mergeable
- I have noticed there are, unsurprisingly some gaps in the unit tests, so I'm going to make some CLI-specific tests next week
- Also this is Java! It's interesting how my position here has shifted over years ... at one point I was so frustrated with all-things-java that I swore it off. But I've matured or something and also realized that I LOVE ALL PROGRAMMING!!
- I should note that I've also sworn off mmmmmm Databases and Javascript, but here I am 20 years later and both are close to my heart :)
- Anyway. When it comes to the usual project-existential issues during my batch, this is clearly a good foundation; if I can help get this tool itself to be updated and integratable then I'll feel pretty pretty good
Lunch table with Humans!
- General Status:
- Morning
- I find updating the
weekindicator on this checkin is already upsetting - I'm heading into The Hub today!
- Going to see if I can do some IRL pairing
- I need to work on some Human Essentials today, Wednesday is a stakeholder meeting
- I find updating the
- Evening
- I had a delightful time sitting at the lunch table and chat chat chatting with peeps
- HCI session was very interesting, with lots of discussion on Agency (which of course I'm very into)
- Failed to do any IRL pairing, will try harder tomorrow!
- Morning
- Nerd Snipe:
- Played with sov a bit, might use it to visualize virtual desktops. But maybe not
- Alloy+LLM+Rails Project:
- I might want to actually really look at LangChain
- I have all the tools for a tree-of-tokens working (albeit slowly), so now working on traversing that to turn it into some visualizations
Llamas, Pythons, Coffee, and Sway
Part I - Morning
- Morning Status:
- I feel pretty great today, but going to be Virtual anyway. Got some errands to run
- I've got llama-cpp-python up and running, so I'm going to work on a back-end for it
- I'll likely solicit pairing once I get it a bit further, especially for some visuals
Fuzzy brained, but starting to figure this thing out.
- Morning Status:
- Feeling a bit fuzzy brained ... I had a cold like 2 weeks ago and hope it's not coming back or getting a new one. I don't think I have allergies. Still. I was face-to-face with a LOT of people yesterday. So while I'm feeling only very slight off, I'm going Virtual today to see how it progresses.
- General Status:
- Felt much better as the day went! Maybe I'm fine?
- Did my first coffee-chat, it was lovely
- I might start doing some Pomodoros tomorrow
- The presentations were delightful!
- I also went to a manager-roundtable which was helpful for some work-stuff
- Alloy+LLM+Rails Project:
- Worked on some Alloy fundamentals and resources
- Watched and made notes on an inspirational video, wrote a blog post on it
- Slight tangent, but started poking at low-level local LLM setup to work on my next-token visualization exploration
- I'm trying out python with llama-cpp-python as an easy and capable approach
- I have it working enough to do some completions
- Next I am going to work on doing token level interactive tokens, and then I'll find someone to help me visualize with d3 or something to give a hands-on feel for next-token generation
- That is (a) fun, and (b) might lead to some insights in some of my other studies here
- Nerd Snipes:
- While watching an inspirational video on Alloy and practicalizing Formal Methods, I was grabbing a few screenshots and YET AGAIN realized that my vim-based markdown edit workflow doesn't mesh with ad hoc image insertion. I set up clipboard-image.nvim and now I can paste like magic!
Pairing, Merging
- General Status:
- Attended the Pairing Workshop! Paired in RubyLand
- Spent some time merging PRs for Human Essentials
- Attended ML-applied and then AI/ML safety and interpretability meetings
- Definite overlap with my interests/projects, though some of the plan there is to go intensely and deeply on some curriculum; I think I'll track but not directly participate
- On-site tomorrow, I'm psyched :)
- Nerd Snipes:
- Spent some more time in sway. Messing with keybindings and multi-monitor setup. Alllll coming together now! I think I'm switched over. Except for some weird things in Zoom. hmmmmm.
- My fonts are small, esp in firefox. Annoying. So I googled and learned that I can try setting
layout.css.devPixelsPerPxto something bigger. I go in there... and it is set to0.75!!! I changed it to the default and everything is already much better haha
First day of RC!
- General Status:
- First day of RC! Virtual today (everyone)
- Participated in the two onboarding meetings, starting to get a feel for my new friends. TONS of inspirational people and ideas, lots of things to share and explore :)
- I'm looking to getting IRL on Wednesday
- Also looking forward to Creative Coding exercises and .... just doing some whimsical things!
- Nerd Snipe: Every 6 months or so I try to switch from xmonad to wayland+sway. Yesterday I tried again and actually made a ton of progress and I think crossed over the usability line. The biggest thing that I kept having issues with was screen-sharing, but I think I found the right incantation at last. So .... now the tricky bit where I have like 15 years of xmonad gradual adaptations that I've done and I have to decide which to keep, which to abandon .... and also how nerd-sniped I am willing to be for working on those adaptations :)
- Alloy+LLM+Rails Project: I have been pre-gaming a bit, so have a large zotero backlog of interesting papers to read through and take some notes on. I also am going to work through a few Alloy experiments to both get my fingers remembering how it works and also learn the new temporal logic stuff they added recently. Next up I want to manually extract some alloy models from code-bases to think out the different types of models (DB Schema, API, Rails Models, etc) and maybe use that to build up some examples for The Machine (LLMs).
- Good: For the Human Essentials project, I have several open tickets. I'm going to spend the last hour of the day (now) working on that!
- Ideas/Other:
- Formal Methods interest group?
- LLM interest group?
- Several people were interested in doing some Good; Once I'm settled in I'll declare open invite for pairing on Human Essentials and see what I can join others on. I really want to get Github Codespaces set up for easier onboarding, hmmm
Blooming trees and forking path in Kalorama Park
Robot opening a jar
A robot making lists
A robot intern delivering coffee. Image by DALL·E.
A robot version of the scarecrow from the wizard of oz, oil painting style. Image by Bing Image Creator.
Robot reading a script, oil painting style. Image by Bing Image creator.
Pixelated snake, possibly in the desert, somewhat two-dimensional. Image by Bing Image Creator.
Notes from the Changelog interview with Cory Doctorow on Chokepoint Capitalism
Lemonade stand operated (or perhaps supervised?) by a robot. Image by Bing Image Creator.
While driving to and waiting for Millie (the car) to get maintenanced, I listened to Examining capitalism's chokepoints, an interview with Cory Doctorow discussing his book Chokepoint Capitalism. This touched on all sorts of things, but right up at the front was an off-topic question - How is Cory so prolific?
I'm trying to solidify my understanding of the schema organization for Human Essentials. The goal is to build up some documentation to make contribution even easier for new folks. Also I like to play with PlantUML and GraphViz.
Schema Exploration
First I ran rails erd filetype=dot attributes=false and got a beast of a diagram. This includes all of the models and some indirect relationships.
I had ChatGPT write me a poem .... but first some somewhat irrelevant background information!
Snake Lights
I've purchased and chained a few Neopixel-like LED fairy-light strands (these ones on Amazon) as a fun winter/Christmasy project. I have them hooked up to an Arduino-like, right now this M4 Feather Express, but I'm planning on switching to an ESP32-S2 TFT Feather. Each LED is individually controllable using Arduino/C++. The idea is to make some holiday light displays with different colors and twinkling and all that. While learning how to use it I made a few toy animations, such as this simple snake:
In today's sugary exploration, let's take a look at a shorthand for object key expansion in Javascript (ECMAScript 2015+, es6+). For an overview of the TON of delicious sugar that was added to Javascript at around es6, check out es6-features.org.
Most of the "scripting" languages (Python, Ruby) have "dictionaries" or "hashes", a datastructure of key-value pairs. In JS these are called "objects", and they do a lot of other things beyond this basic data-storage behavior. In JSON -- JavaScript Object Notation -- you can see the basic literal declaration syntax. Let's build an addressbook, keyed (indexed) by name.
let addressBook = {
"alice": {
"street": "123 Elsewhere Lane",
"zip": "32341"
},
"bob": {
"street": "221 Baker Street",
"zip": "00234"
},
"clarence": {
"street": "P.O. Box 17",
"zip": "88877"
}
};
console.log("Bob's info", addressBook["bob"]);
We're using Firebase as the hosting service for https://covidcanidoit.com and the experience has been kinda weird, coming from a more traditional server-database world.
First, I didn't even realize that Firebase was more than a cloud-JSON-blob! Our initial use of it was only for static asset hosting. This is a VueJS application that so far mostly lives in the browser, so static hosting is perfect. I generally use Github Pages for this purpose, but another team member had already set up Firebase for us.
Once I learned that it was even a thing, all was good. I wrapped the CLI that Firebase provides into yarn land, and now you can do yarn deploy and it'll build up the local assets and push them up. Works quite well! The auth is stored somewhere else on my computer. If a new dev wants to deploy, you add their google account to the Firebase project and presto!
I got a Pocket Operator PO-33 a while back, and find it super fun -- it is minimalist and usable. It inspires me to play around with beats and tunes ... and it also inspires me to work on my own samplers, sequencers, and synths.
Let's see what we can do with Web Audio these days! Starting with a basic VueJS app, I googled lots of stuff. Somewhat randomly, I wanted a Wicki-Hayden hexagon style keyboard, so had to find some CSS that makes hex-buttons. I'll probably switch to this Hexi-Flexi-Grid at some point, to make dynamically sized hexagons easier, but these work.
Combine that with a simple synth, and now we have a playable thing. I had to make some tweaks to get it to work tolerably on my phone -- fix the layout size, use touch events. Unfortunately it isn't very usable at this point due to a sizeable delay between pushing a button and the sound. I'm going to write a pure-JS snippet to eliminate any overhead from VueJS, and if that is also slow then I'm not sure what I'll do. It's kinda cool that I can use Web Audio ... and I'd sure like to keep using it. We'll see!
I've been doing a spot of accounting at work over the last few months. This is clearly a failure of delegation and management on my part, but it has led to at least one deep observation that I mightn't have had otherwise.
Accountants are secretly time travelers.
Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration. They don't ACTUALLY travel through time. But if you hang out with them a bit and observe their twisted time and verb conjugation ... well it's obvious that they would be right at home hopping around a branching multiverse.
- Is Google Making Us Stupid?
- I have a big stack of books that I've made ... fairly little progress on
- Maybe the internet is eating my brain!
- So now I will post links and bullets
- Base-4 fractions in Telugu
- Interesting explanation of the traditional Telugu fraction numbering. Also draws comparison to the traditional English measures
- Git remote branches and Git's missing terminology
- Presents a better understanding of git remote branches, highlighting that to really comprehend what's going on you must acknowledge the implicit local branch that is your cache of the upstream (such as origin/master)
- I'm a little worried that I'm going to end up linking half of MJD's blog posts. Oh well, they are great. Example, /dev/null Follies has a hilarious nerdy punchline.
I Dockerized this website yesterday! I had already built a cpanfile that declares the Perl5 dependencies of OddMuse, which made it easy. I'm also going to run this with the data directory directly bind-mounted.
First the Dockerfile:
FROM perl:latest
# Set up the deploy user
ARG uid=1000
ARG gid=1000
RUN echo groupadd -g $gid deploy
RUN groupadd -g $gid deploy
RUN useradd --create-home -u $uid -g $gid -ms /bin/bash deploy
WORKDIR /app
COPY cpanfile .
RUN cpanm -qn --installdeps .
USER deploy
I've been having lots of fun with https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki lately! I've mixed in a bit of encryptfs to have a private directory of notes. Sometime during boot, I set it up with:
sudo mount -t ecryptfs \
-o key=passphrase,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_passthrough=no,ecryptfs_enable_filename_crypto=yes,ecryptfs_fnek_sig=1a9380706fdf5bce \
~/docs/private/vimwiki ~/notes
I haven't done much customization yet. But one thing I'm playing with now is making it easy to post notes from VimWiki directly onto my website.
Last night at the DC Perl Mongers meetup we collaboratively built a proof-of-concept for storing key/value pairs as messages in a slack channel, https://github.com/plicease/globalhash. This was made straightforward by great Slack API docs and cpan:WebService::Slack::WebApi. Example usage:
# writes "hello=world" into the #globalhash channel
$ globalhash set hello world
# reads the #globalhash channel for the most
# recent value of hello and prints it
$ globalhash get hello
world
There are of course a TON of things you could do from here. Some ideas:
A fun thing to do is to explore things using introspection/reflection. In Ruby and Perl6, for example, we can get a list of methods for a given object instance pretty easily:
# Ruby
"hello good people!".methods.each { |method| puts method.to_s }
# Perl6
for "hello good people!".^methods -> $method { say $method }
On the REPL (irb/pry or perl6) this is even shorter since it prints out lists of things by default, so you can do:
One of the codebases I work on regularly has a large and slow test suite. So slow that it typically only runs in totality in a continuous-integration (ci) environment, and there it uses the parallel_tests gem to slice it into pieces and run in parallel. This gets it to run in like 30 minutes instead of 2.5 hours.
But I want to run the whole thing linearly sometimes, especially so I can make sure tests aren't conflicting with each other. So I created a new ci job that runs it linearly ... and got a fail that I didn't get otherwise. Took forever to figure it out!
This was about a worker that I call a "sweeper" -- it's job is to run once a day and make sure nothing was missed by other realtime jobs during the day. Here is a simplified version.
Today I attended http://retroruby.org, a great un-conference in Arlington. I got my toehold in the local Ruby community at the Arlington meetup, and was happy to visit with lots of familiar people. I didn't meet any new people, though that was mostly because it was easy to spend time catching up.
Next time I want to jump in a bit stronger on the new-dev track, maybe walk through some hands-on exercises or do a group activity (Randori).
My favorite, besides talking to people, was the lightning talks. These have a bit more technical depth and include some code getting projected, which I love. I gave a quick this-thing-exists talk on http://reactrb.org.
Tags: Clojure, Overtone, Music
Today I'm playing with Open Sound Control (OSC), which is more general-purpose than midi but kinda similar idea. I have an android app on my phone named Control which has a few existing UIs, in my case I'm playing with the multi-touch. I set it to have two touch inputs.
In my Overtone REPL, I first set it up to listen for OSC events, and dump out whatever events it sees:
Tags: Clojure, Overtone, Music
Good progress today -- I made a hack to get around that BUNCHES of midi issue. Needed that because when I would hit a single note on my jack-keyboard (virtual midi keyboard), I got a whole bunch of events. I'm guessing I was getting 64 of them.
I also got Overtone Vim Integration working. Well technically I already had it working (had fireplace.vim installed, etc), I just didn't know it. Now I can start up the REPL in one terminal and start up vim in another. In vim do ":Require" and it finds the running REPL and hooks into it. I also added "nnoremap
Tags: Clojure, Overtone, Music
Today I'm watching Overtone and ClojureScript which is a coding session of someone setting up an web UI to play Overtone stuff. Building a UI like this reminds me of the one-string guitar that I got at an art festival the other day. Clearly home-made, including an energy drink as the echo chamber. And very awesome. Also fun to see someone iterate through their development. Lots of interesting things in there, most of them I can read more or less but doesn't mean I could write them. One thing I noticed was ( ...) to pull in instrument libs. I'll try that.
The Cheat Sheet is interesting, but I don't know enough to actually use a lot of the things on there. Current mission is to get the instruments working.
Tags: Clojure, Overtone, Music
So I've gone through Overtone Getting Started a few times, and am up and running. Only trick at all is that I already have my own jackd wrapper script to get jack started. Just like the other times that I went through this tutorial, I get to this point and say "now what?"
There are two different directions to explore. I have the REPL working, but it would be nice to be able to execute from a file and also do some interactive editing via Vim (or Emacs I suppose). The other path is to ... you know ... make some music (er... noise).
Tags: Vacation, Flood, Rental Car, Rain
For Labor Day weekend (last week), Beth and I took off from work on Friday, rented a car, and headed out to Berkeley Springs, WV - aka "Bath". Nice drive up there, only a few hours away from DC. We've been around there before, and this time we decided to stay in-town so we could park our car and walk around more than we have in the past. We stayed on the top floor of a Bed & Breakfast downtown.
Saturday was a rainy day. We wandered about, looked at some junk shops, had lunch, took a long nap. I kept waking up to booming rolling thunder, but felt safe and cozy. Once we were up and about there was this weird siren that kept going off (sounded like an air raid) -- the inn keeper told me that it was their fire department and all-purpose alarm, and that it's not a big deal.
I'm watching the first video for the CSU CS440 Intro to AI class, taught by Chuck Anderson. Man... so far this looks great. In addition to delicious shout outs to Turing and Hume and so on, tossed out a reference to the XKCD take on some AI concepts. Did I mention that we are using a wiki rather than WebCT as our primary interaction point? hmm!
I haven't seen the video for the CSU CS414 Object-Oriented Programming course.
Tags: Perl, PPW, Conference
This weekend I attended PPW2011 - I think this is my 3rd PPW, and my fourth perl conference in Pittsburgh (YAPC::NA 2009 was there).
The theme this year was "DevOps", and I think maybe that was not quite to my taste (though does seem practical). I like talks that push my understanding and stretch my mind, whereas the talks tended toward solid best practices for corporate environments. I gave a talk on debugging, and I even feel that my own talk went that way a bit :)
Tags: Perl, DCPM, Programming
Last Tuesday was our monthly DC Perl Mongers meeting.
We dove right in, talking about how perl caches various values for a variable to be used in different contexts. So, for example, let's say you start off with a number, but then use it in string context, perl will cache both the string and the number. This can be shown using cpan:Devel::Peek like this:
Tags: Perl6, Rakudo, Programming
A while back I wrote about TLT - 2006.03.03 - Funky Function Filters. Let me refresh your memory - we have a Python and a Ruby snippet and we translate it into Perl5. The code is a toy to show some fancy shmancy lambda (unnamed functions) usage. The idea is to take a list of functions, filter them, and then with the remaining ones show what happens with parameters from -10 to 10.
Python example:
Tags: Coffee, Music
On my way to Safeway, I stopped in at Filter Coffee to see how they are doing. The nearby Safeway (The Secret Safeway) is closed, but this is still roughly on the way to The Soviet Safeway anyhow. A seat was open so down I plopped.
First they played the entire Rage Against The Machine, Battle of Los Angeles album, and now we're on to the Ramones with Blitzkrieg Bop. Sounds like they're going to play this whole album too.
We're starting our usual monthly DC Perl Mongers meeting a bit early this Tuesday (September 7th) to have a little pizza and celebrate Rakudo-Star! Arrive at 6:30pm at the Starbucks at 18th and K Street NW (call me, Brock, if you miss us and need to be let in, number on the website) if you want food. But feel free to wander in any time thereafter, we usually stay as late as 10:00pm. We'll swoop down and look for people at the normal 7:30pm time too :)
Other activities:
- Bring your laptop!
- Installing Rakudo-Star
- Giving hands-on tutorials
- Beginner and Advanced welcome!
- Never been to DC.pm before? No problem, come have some free pizza!
Tags: Perl
You might have stumbled upon some IBM developerWorks articles titled "Cultured Perl" while googling for random things. I think it's awesome and that it isn't linked to enough. Just a few weeks ago the latest article came out, Cultured Perl: Storage management on Amazon S3, which is well written and up-to-date with the latest technologies.
Thank you, Cultured Perl!
So I was right, I completely messed up the previous example and it wasn't electrified by Creox at all. But I've rectified this situation, and for your listening pleasure (pain?), here is a smaller snippet of just the guitar part of the song, before-and-after.
Original acoustic guitar (download)
Electrified by Creox (download)
I was playing with Creox the other day, which can make an acoustic guitar sound electric (amongst other things). I recorded a quick song... but it doesn't sound nearly as electric when I listen to it now as it did when I first recorded it (and now I wonder if I even had my Jack settings right for recording what I was hearing...). But it did end up with a fun crackly sound on the voice I think. Listen for yourself:
"Oh my baby" (download)
And it gave me an excuse to add an mp3 player plugin :)
Tags: C++, Programming, UIUC, Data Mining, Homework
In the class I'm taking (Intro to Data Mining) we get to implement a classifier. Alas... we must use either C++ or Java. I haven't programmed in either for quite a few years, and even with further pursuit I'm not allowed to use OCaml.
That's OK! Best to stretch my mind out a bit. I'm afraid I'm getting rusty at being multi-lingual in my old age anyway, so this is good exercise. First thing first, I have to read in the training data. But best start with the basic Hello World even before that. Google... I figure I'll start with the basics, and now I have:
I was just exploring the latest and greatest Oddmuse modules, and see that someone made it easy to embed youtube/google videos. So now I feel like I have a real blog and I can post the random crap that everyone else does! To prove it, here is a totally awesome song my friends turned me on to:
[YouTube:nstI0bjTqwQ](/
Tags: perl, linux, music
Oh how I love linux... perl... scriptability. I have a fun little command line music player named Polly. It is pretty minimalist, really just starting whatever player I like with whatever preferences I like on a whole directory tree of files. One thing that is annoying is that I have to switch over to the terminal and it ^Z to pause and then do 'fg' to play.
So I finally decided to write a simple pause toggle script. I approached this in the most brute force way I could... I just take the list of all my media players and send a massive STOP (effectively ^Z) command to all to pause, and then a massive CONT (effectively 'fg') to all to continue. To determine if I want to pause or continue, I just look to see if I have any paused player processes.
Scott linked an article from new scientist, Memories may be stored on your DNA, which relates with what has been on my mind lately.
I was reading about some hardware evolution experiments while at the bookstore the other day. They were using a FPGA to create (evolve) a sine wave generator, if I recall correctly. The end result of the first run worked perfectly, but had some bizzare attributes -- it programmed a section of the gate array but didn't wire that section to the rest. When the unconnected section was turned off, the circut no longer worked. It also didn't work when the same design was put onto an identical FPGA. As far as the experimenters could tell, the evolved solution depended upon some subtle property of that specific FPGA chip.
In other words: GP solutions cheat like hell.
Some of my family came to visit this weekend, and we did a bunch of sight-seeing. Here are the distance estimates, this is definitely a lower-bound of the amount we walked. I tried to include walks that I know everyone did, and left off a bunch of random trips to the store. Distances are in miles.
Day 1 - Zoo and Fireworks
- 3.1998 to and through zoo
- 0.3037 from dupont metro to apartment
- 3.6359 to fireworks and back
The last two didn't work out for very long, but this one has promise. I won it at our recent Corporate Bowling event... it was clearly my best score ever at 167. I got second place and thus the camera. Woot!I've been using the Tree Style Tabs Firefox extension for a few months now, and love it! Having vertical tabs has always been fabulous, ever since I first encountered them in Galeon. The chrome-css hack that I have been using for the last few years in Firefox stopped working in Firefox 3 (beta), so I went exploring and am very glad I did.
Not only does the Tree Style Tabs extension give my my vertical tabs, it also gives me (surprise surprise) a tree of them! Each has it's own browsing history, and subtrees can be collapsed and reordered and all that wonderful goo.
Just now I was playing around with the settings and thought I'd try the auto-hide feature. I'm not sure I'll keep it because there is a slight flicker that bothers me... but it is neat none-the-less! The tab bar is hidden, and then when I mouse or keyboard activate it the bar appears translucently on top of the page. It might need some kinks worked out (or perhaps there is some other cause for the flickering), but I think I like it!