Journal of Omnifarious

19:29 - Test Open ID implementation for Python

I got it working. I have a record for TestOpenID on the Python cheese shop website. There is also a link to my own page on TestOpenID.

It should be easy_install able.

17:18 - Business plan

I have a business idea that I strongly suspect is viable. I'm looking for someone who knows how to write business plans who's willing to help me write one up.

It is both product and service based. I suspect the time from getting the money to buy some hardware and tinker to having a viable product is about 2-3 months. I can see several different avenues the business could grow from the first product.

Current Mood: contemplative

19:45 - Eating is good

I sometimes forget exactly how useless I can be if I don't eat. I'm feeling much better and more alert now that I've eaten.

On the plus side, this morning my weight hit a new low. Not very much lower than the previous new low. But at this rate in a month or two I'll weigh less than I have since I was in HS.

Current Mood: full

14:36 - zanfur knows how to configure a network

I was poking about on Trabant's internal network and noticing a few interesting things. It is a much better configured wireless network than most I've been on. It's somewhat impressive even.

So, I go ask the staff who does it. One doesn't know and the other tells me a name that sounds familiar. Says he always wears a Utilikilt. I hunt down zanfur's LJ profile and show it to her. "Yep, that's him!".

Well... I have a few things I think could be done better about how this wireless network is set up, but not many. And the level of attention to detail is way, way higher than I've seen on any other coffee shop's wireless network, even at places like Tully's.

It's amusing to encounter people you already know, even indirectly, in random contexts.

Current Mood: impressed

10:57 - My main workstation has died

It died before, when I moved, and that was the power supply. It's died again now, and I suspect this time that it's something more serious like the video card or possibly one or both of the CPUs frying from overheating. The fans all turn on but the BIOS screen never comes up.

I want to replace it. The newer dual core AMD CPUs generate even less heat and are a lot faster. But replacing it with technology that mirrors the level of current I sprung for when I bought what I have now would run me about $3000, and I don't have that and won't have it anytime really soon. :-(

My monitor also needs replacing. It's a pretty nice LCD monitor from 2003, but it has problems. The main problem is that it gets muddy when things are moving or changing quickly because the pixel change lag is fairly high. The pixel change time is 25ms or so which means a maximum effective frame rate of 40 frames a second and anything faster is muddy. It's not even that great for watching DVDs. The secondary problem is that it is very slow (often a minute or more) to recognize that the video card is trying to bring it out of sleep mode. I usually get frustrated and push the signal select button to force it, but it's irritating.

Actually, scratch that, a pixel change rate of 25ms means an effective frame rate of 20 frames per second. This is because a pixel should be at the color it's supposed to be for at least half the time in order for it not to be muddy. 20 frames per second means a possible change in pixel color every 50ms leaving a pixel that takes 25ms to change to be at the new value for 25ms before changing again.

Current Mood: worried

11:41 - Yesterday... seemed so

Yesterday I got up after not nearly enough sleep to go down south to look at a motorcycle with cooncat that she'd seen advertised on Craigslist.

I know nothing about motorcycles. Even less nothing than the nothing I know about cars. I was along partly because spending time with cooncat would be fun, and partly as a second person to discourage nastiness on the part of the motorcycle seller.

It was interesting, a bit educational and fun. She ended up not buying it because the seller wanted her to take all the risks when it came to her taking a test drive. I don't think he was being that reasonable.

Then I took a nice nap and went out dancing. And that was a bunch of fun too.

Getting back on schedule to start my new job tomorrow is going to be interesting.

Current Mood: content

14:09 - The most amusing and creative analogy I've read in a long time

Grad school is basically my only hope at this point, really. I'm working on a Japanese Linguistics / Psychology double-major. Like a transuranium element in a particle collider, this bizarre conglomeration can only exist in academia.

I was highly impressed and amused at the same time. :-)

Current Mood: amused

13:18 - I'm going to be giving a talk on IPv6!

I'm going to be giving a talk on IPv6 and how easy it is to set up at LinuxFest Northwest 2008!

I've never done anything like that before, but I feel pretty confident I'll be able to pull it off well. I've been in situations a few times in front of a whole ton of people and haven't done poorly, and this will be an exercise in high geekery and so I should be fine.

I signed up for the bus sponsored by pogo linux, but if anybody is going and feels up for giving me a ride, that would be really good.

Current Mood: excited

02:03 - Watching 21

I watched a preview of 21 with cooncat, mizemm and luchog. That was a happy thing and I'm glad I got to spend some more time with cooncat before she flies off to Japan.

But the movie was mediocre. It was a not-very-believable dramatization of a real-life event. The dialog was dumb. The main character is somehow supposed to be credibly having a discussion of the Newton-Raphson method (which is a pretty elementary method for root finding that you learn early in calculus) in a senior level course at MIT.

The drama was predictable and also dumb. None of the characters was particularly believable. The only interesting thing was the card counting techniques and how they worked the tables. And I bet they didn't describe the real card counting system they used.

This story survives solely on knowing that somehow somewhere real people used something approximating the techniques in the movie to win a lot of money at Vegas. It would've been really nice if Hollywood could've told the real story and done some actual filmmaking to make it interesting to an audience instead of gussying it up in fake drama and bad characterizations and making it a different (and much worse) story.

Current Mood: content

16:28 - Overdoing caffeine

I greatly enjoyed Norwescon, not the least because I got to spend some quality time with a new friend. But I'm now suffering the aftereffects of having used a lot of caffeine while I was there. I can hardly focus on anything. It's almost disturbing. I hope it mostly goes away by tomorrow.

Current Mood: restless

17:22 - Good news politically!

I rarely post good news on the political front. But I felt after my exhortation earlier to call your representative about the telecom immunity thing that I should tell you all the result.

The House has rejected the concept completely in a number of strongly worded speeches given on the House floor representatives one-by-one stood up and told the administration that our country is ruled by law and not by presidential fiat. According to this article, the debate was rather impressive to see.

So people who bothered to call, you very likely did some good. Thank you. Everybody in the US should thank you.

Current Mood: pleased

20:57 - I've been a bit inspired, but also sick

I've been pretty sick, but in the few productive hours I've had today and over the weekend, I've been working on this project I've been suddenly inspired to do, mostly because of the investigation required for me to write this post on Thrift, D-Bus and RPC.

I've been wanting a self-describing binary data format that's simpler and less ugly than ASN.1. I also wanted one in which an extremely fast parser could be built for fixed-length data structures known at compile time. Either through the use of an IDML (which would be optional) to generate code, or crazier techniques like template meta-programming in C++.

Anyway, I've finished a very preliminary first pass at a parser in Python. I've called the whole concept InBus after D-Bus from which it borrows a lot of ideas.

• Python code for InBus parser
• Documentation of type tag meanings.

There are several things I would change about this parser, and a few features I would like to add.

• Selected data types are currently variable length and I would like to introduce a '<count>' syntax for annotating these types with a length and thereby making them fixed-length. I would like to add this capability to the arbitrary precision integer type, the binary blob type, the string type and the array type.

• It needs a type for time that very explicitly states that the time is represented as a arbitrary-precision integer that encodes an offset (positive or negative) in seconds from some base time in UTC.

• I would sort of like to incorporate Thrift's idea of field tags so data structures could be upgraded in a backwards compatible way.

  My current idea for this is a variant of the tuple type that would require a field tag after every type element in the tuple.

Also, that parser is inefficient. Ideally it would build up the parse as one or more calls to Python's struct.unpack each of which would unpack multiple values. Right now, though struct.unpack is used fairly heavily it only ever (well, my fancy arbitrary precision integer parser not-withstanding) unpacks one element in any call.

Lastly, right now, it expects the type value to be immediately preceded by a type spec. That's a design mistake. The type spec and type value should be handled separately except for the 'variant' type.

This brings me to another couple of features I think would be interesting, but very tricky. It would be nice if 'variant' types could refer to a previously used 'variant' type. Partly for efficiency reasons, and partly for better clarity since one use of the variant type is to record information present in various derived classes of some base class. It would also enable encoding recursive data structures in a saner way. Additionally it might be nice to be able to refer to previously decoded values in some way for data structures that couldn't fit into a strict tree.

On interesting thing, I think you could conceivably use this type tag system to describe IP packet layouts or other binary formats that have existed previously.

Current Mood: contemplative

12:56 - I'm powerful sick

I haven't had an upper-respiratory illness hit me this hard for awhile. :-/ I hope it goes away soon, this is very irritating. I do not like feeling miserable.

Current Mood: sick

14:16 - Not paying so much attention to LJ recently

It's partly that work has been ramping up, and partly that I've been trying to be even more social than I have been in the past. I've just not had the time or inclination to keep up.

I have groups for friends I read all the time and friends I read sometimes. I should probably create an even more exclusive group for friends who's lives I would be truly sad to lose track of for any length of time. That's a really hard list to make though.

Current Mood: contemplative

15:10 - A pinhole 3rd degree burn

I just got a pinhole 3rd degree burn on my fingers from one of those eye-of-the-storm plasma lamps. I noticed that if you put a piece of chocolate wrapped in foil on the lamp that the movement of the tendrils of plasma was not strongly affected. But if you then touched the chocolate it would act like it does when your finger touches the lamp. All the tendrils of plasma would converge on the chocolate.

Then I noticed that if I pulled my finger away slowly that it hurt very slightly. I experimented with this a bit, and then when I looked at my finger I noticed a pinhole sized spot that was charred. Oops.

Now the tip of my finger feels very slightly odd.

I'm rather amused by this.

I need a user icon involving Ben Franklin, a kite, a key and some lightning. :-)

Current Mood: touched

15:33 - Very sweet and recursive

For those of you who don't know about it, XKCD is, IMHO, one of the best comics on the web, at least in my opinion. No other webcomic so frequently manages to hit my sense of humor so dead on.

Current Mood: hopeful

11:12 - Working weekend

Despite feeling not-very-people oriented this weekend I ended up spending some good time with a couple of friends. I also got a bunch of work done for work. It's kind of odd enjoying time with a friend when really the idea of spending time with other people is a fairly neutral concept to you.

I've also been having really distressing dreams of late. And I slept a whole lot this weekend, which also felt good since I'd been really stretched on getting enough sleep lately as well.

Current Mood: content

22:46 - It has come to my attention...

That someone made up a reason out of thin air why I was having a hard time finding an apartment and subsequently has been telling people this reason as if it is fact. The supposed reason is that I do a lot of pot, which is an idea that would cause most people who know me at all to give you a really strange look and fall down laughing. It's really interesting to me that someone is willing to make up a reason out of thin air and spread it around as truth.

So, yeah, if you don't know the reason for something in my life, please don't tell people random garbage you just sort of randomly find in some deep dark stinky place in your own soul. You can just report what you do know and let me tell my own story if I so choose. That will be just fine, thanks.

Current Mood: annoyed

11:35 - Because I expect this post to disappear

I expect this post to be made friends-only and/or this comment on it to disappear. I'm tired of this sort of garbage so I've prepared this post as an eventuality.

In a post by mle292, she says this:

An epiphany!

---

It has recently been brought to my attention that it may be too over-simplifying to say that Libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke weed.

Libertarians suck, but they do suck in their own unique and special ways.

F'rinstance: Libertarians genuinely believe that everything that's theirs is rightfully earned, and everything that belongs to someone else has been given, and is probably rightfully theirs.

Sort of like a six month old with voting rights.

My response which is, to put it bluntly, downright mean... But then again, I was de-friended over mentioning that Chez Guevera was a torturer and murderer (which are labels I also apply to George W. Bush) in a post she made about "The Motorcycle Diaries". Thereafter she has enacted a policy of selectively deleting responses of mine in her journal that she found objectionable because they had an opinion she didn't like. So I feel that I'm a bit entitled to be mean.

And, also unsurprisingly, I've been banned from commenting in her journal now, which is just par for the course for someone who wants to be able to spout of her opinions and vitriol without ever having to listen to any dissent.

Current Mood: angry

20:16 - This should be amusing

From mokie_sassafras.

Post something, anything, that you think I should do in 2008. Can be a resolution, or something fun. Ideas will be rated for merit :)