Saturday, January 29, 2005

Avida

an Alife toolkit, moderately interesting.

inspired by a recent message on the sl4 list.

http://www.sl4.org/archive/0501/10657.html

Monday, January 24, 2005

The sensation that is sweeping the nation
Get Firefox!

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

a2i2 website updated, finally.

sort of.

my handiwork, of course

Monday, January 17, 2005

Joshua Truett, as Hulk;

"Don't make me stupid. You wouldn't like me when I'm stupid."
Justin Corwin, after 10 hours of proofreading and business english had this to say: "Stimulants will solve everything".

Looking back, it may really be a contextual statement, not something to live by.
Brad Templeton's Blog

I usually don't link to other people's blogs, but this is a good point that is worth expanding on.

The ability to discern the truth is perhaps the most important skill anyone can ever be taught. Creationists do us an unwitting favor when they insist 'Just a Theory'. It is just a theory, everything is science is just a theory. We should be inculcating our children, not with scientific platitudes, however detailed or certain, but with great and hard won process of scientific acquisition of knowledge. With the ability to use science, use math, use simple uncomplicated things that are hardly worth ten questions on a multiple choice exam, and hardly anyone knows to separate fakirs from researchers at a glance.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

Ask ET: Corrupt Technologies in Evidence Presentation

an amusing, and interesting draft on a guide for what to look for in evaluating presentation material.

Highlights some of the difficulties in assessing credibility, as well as communicating effectively and honestly.

Friday, January 14, 2005

http://thinkcycle.org/

An interesting project. I am a student of design, and of new organizational technology. I haven't carefully investigated yet, but this may be of significance.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Google Search add-on

Google Desktop Search is a wondeful thing that you all should be using already(if you're on windows). One of it's weaknesses for hep multifaceted people like myself is that it's constrained to certain nice predictable file types, like microsoft office files, and .txt. But there are many other textual files, like .logs and xml and code you may write. This add-on allows you to specify which files GDS opens in it's scans of your hard drive.

Quite nifty and ratchets up the usefulness of the thing quite a bit. Now all it needs to do is spider network drives and start indexing meta data and labels better, allow constrained exhaustive searches, and increase the maximum size of file parsed.

Regular expressions are unneccesary but would sure excite a lot of people.

Friday, January 07, 2005

AMD announces Turion mobile CPUs

to leaven the realism of dobbs, here is some exciting news. AMD in the front as usual, pushing capabilities.

Your box rox, and will be mobile as well.
The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software


You should be reading Dr. Dobbs anyway, but if you missed it, important analysis for you performance coders and in userland, speed junkies.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Well, Crystal's been here for a week now. She's going home on Sunday, which is too bad. It's nice to have her around all the time. It's certainly easier to sleep.

It's interesting. Because she's here for a while, I've been trying to integrate her into the normal schedule of things, as well as keep a moderate schedule of work on. We've been seeing each other over weekends and holidays these last months, so we have become somewhat used to that kind of interaction. I don't know how well I've really been doing at it, but it feels.. much realer, more grounded. Of course, it's still special, and I'm not getting near my normal amount of work done.

We're going to Santa Barbara today, if all goes well, and then later in the week a few events with local friends.

The experience is oddly nostalgic. I'm sure I'll look back and wonder at the exact mix of stress, excitements, companionship, and professional satisfaction.

For example, today, leaving for Santa Barbara, I'm certainly glad to be going, I'm sure it will be fun. At the same time I'd like to just stay home, and I'm a little worried I might miss something at work, despite the fact I'll only /actually/ be gone for 25 hours or so, compared to the usual gaps of 3 days or more when I visit Crystal in SLC.

It'd be nice if I could get full measures of everything, be a loving boyfriend, have interesting hobbies, and work full time. Some people may be good at that sort of thing, but I just feel a little less competent at each task I add. Of course, having no choice rather leaves me in a unique position. at this point I'm just aiming at getting a bit better at my activities one at a time.