In short, Sebastian Thrun of ai-class.com, Stanford and Google-autonomus-cars fame is launching a new class to teach everyone about creating cars that can drive themselves. Well, to create their brains … but considering Mythbusters create an RC car every three weeks, the mechanics are probably a solved problem.

Having taken the artificial intelligence class last semester, there is no doubt in my mind this class will be awesome. The combination of world class professors and an online setting just works so much better than any other class I’ve been to … hell I’ve said before that I wish all my classes were online from now on.

And the cool thing about Udacity as a whole?

They’re aiming to revolutionize university education! Starting off with autonomus cars and basic computer science this semester, it will eventually cover the whole computer science spectrum and even provide students with actual certified degrees. Like a “real” university.

I wonder how long it will take before I can ratify classes by Sebastian Thrun at my university, but the sooner the better because I expect to be spending much more time on his classes this semester than on most of my real classes.

That said, I’m looking for classmates. Studying is more fun when you can share!

Did I mention autonomous cars are super awesome?

Related articles

• Architectural Technologist – Sebastian Thrun – set up his own, free-for-all university. (konstrukshon.com)
• Udacity: Reinventing Education (2) (seekerblog.com)
• The audacity of Udacity (diyscholar.wordpress.com)
• Online Computer Science Education for Free (i-programmer.info)
• Stanford AI Professor Thrun Leaves University to Start Udacity, an Online Learning Startup (downes.ca)

Timekiwi

Timekiwi is a beautiful new tool that lets you create a timeline of your social life in a single easy to digest interface.

Right now six services are supported: Twitter, Facbook, Tumblr, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr. Just clicky click and a shiny timeline is waiting for you to behold. I was lucky enough to see the beta version, which had even more flare about it – instead of creating a timeline you squeezed kiwis. That was a nice touch

Since I don’t have Facebook timelines yet I can’t quite compare with that, but what I can do is compare with lifepath.me … although I’m not sure how lively that project is anymore since @dcurtis sold it as soon as facebook announced its timelines.

Conceptually I believe timekiwi is much closer to facebook’s timelines than it is to lifepath since it’s meant as a display of your meaningful tweets (no retweets or conversations) and photos to dial the flare up to eleven. Whereas lifepath was more about putting significant events in your life on a timeline without aggregation.

Anyway, I shall shut up now and let you bask in the glory of some screenshots of Timekiwi.

Timekiwi entry page

Timekiwi vertical timeline

Timekiwi horizontal timeline

What’re you waiting for? Go get a timekiwi!

Related articles

• Create a gorgeous social media timeline using Timekiwi (thenextweb.com)
• Create Awesome Social Media Timeline With Timekiwi (techmadly.com)
• Tool of the week for journalists – TimeKiwi, to create social media timelines (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• Cool Websites and Tools [October 22nd 2011] (makeuseof.com)

Freedom Box

Or … well … a bunch of geeks who had nothing better to do on a Saturday.

There were a bunch of great talks by some marvelous people and I especially liked that there were once more lightning talks to finish the day off. Can’t remember when was the last time we managed to have those … actually, I think the last time might have been the original two Barcamps that set off the meme of unconferences in Ljubljana.

If I can say that it’s a meme since to my knowledge they’re organized by the one and only @gandalfar. That guy  could make 20 people show up to watch paint dry!

There were two talks that really stuck in my mind. @jamesvasile talking about Freedom Box and @andraz talking about … something. I think the point of his talk was mostly that nontechnical founders [of anything] should prove themselves before pestering technical people to do the heavy lifting and conversely that technical people should be much much more averse to doing heavy lifting and should try their best to reuse whatever crap they can find online.

Really I think he was just talking about what everybody is talking these days, but wrapping it up in shiny pictures and his cool way of presenting stuff.

The Freedom Box by @jamesvasile was a much more groundbreaking concept. It’s this box thingy that hooks up between your internets provider and the main router for the hosue and automagically makes sure all the data oozing out of your every port is encrypted and somewhat secure.

Angry Birds reception desk

An even more interesting concept is that of making self signed certificates trustworthy by embedding a public key that can be looked up and your identity confirmed … then there was something about splitting up your key between a lot of friends so each individual doesn’t have enough info to attack you, but together they can still stage an intervention … didn’t quite understand that bit.

Oh and apparently there’s this new python CMS called Plone that isn’t in fact new, but does happen to be used by a lot of the big players that need high security and awesomeness. Can’t remember the twitter handle of whomever was presenting this, sorry.

I also want to say that as far as my end is concerned, my talk about Tools that get you laid (express.js, backbone.js, underscore.js and ejs and ejs) went quite well. For some reason all the seats in the room were full … I think people expected something far more interesting to happen than me talking about the technical crap I use to build pet projects.

If anyone’s interested, here are the hastily assembled super boring slides with no pictures from my talk:

See you all next time!

Over the past week or so I moved my feed over to feedburner. While doing that things went wrong and I spammed all of you with a few tens of repeated posts.

Oops.

Then two days ago I finally figured out how to convince feedburner to use a full feed instead of excerpts. This lead to more spamming and I’m told some people are now receiving each post twice.

If you’re one of the people having issues, I suggest you replace your subscriptions with this link:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AGeekWithAHat2

That is the direct real feed now so hopefully there won’t be any problems

What a bunch of hipsters!

Paragraph funnel

tl;dr –> Only ~30% of readers actually read a whole blog post! 16% if it’s particularly long, but 95%+ make it from one paragraph to the next on average.

Yeah right dear blogger, that’s why you keep posting links to your blog in your twitter stream, that’s why you submit it to various link sharing sites and that is surely why you are writing all of your stuff in public as well. Writing for yourself just wouldn’t feel the same if it was done privately in a random notebook would it?

Sometimes I manage to get a couple of thousand people to come upon a blogpost I have written and … then what?

Problem is that the usual analytics tools only count hits. That is, how many people came onto your blog. Recently Google Analytics started changing that a little bit by also counting how many users perform some sort of social action. This is a pretty good measure of how good people think your post was, or even simply how interesting it seemed.

However, that’s only a small part of what I care about. I want to learn how good a writer I am, how well do I captivate a reader and keep them reading? Surely the most important mark of a good post is how many people actually read it!

Enter Mixpanel, stage left.

With this in mind I set up a simple javascript that sends an event to Mixpanel every time somebody scrolls past a paragraph of text. To this day I have never actually taken the time to look at this data, but at the beginning of this month I wrote a very lengthy blogpost.

1700-ish words, 58 paragraphs long.

That post received 3445 hits, 5 G+, 38 tweets and 3 facebook likes.

EDIT: The post was “I went through YC as an intern, here’s what I learned”

Right, not a total throwaway post. People actually liked it! Yay!

But here’s where it gets interesting. Out of all those people only 574 made it to the end. Somewhere in all that text I lost over 80% of my readers!

Wow, that can’t mean anything good for my writing skills. 1700 words is about five pages in a standard book format. Now imagine if I was writing an actual book … nobody would make it to the end!

Bleeding readers like a boss

Looking at the data in more detail it looks like only 80% of the users read the first ten paragraphs, and 70% read the first 20 paragraphs. Not too bad at all.

Then something strange happened in this particular post, only 41% of the readers made it to the 22nd paragraph. This happens to be right next to the photo of some drawings on a shower wall and the title of this section is “Work hard, party harder” … I guess people don’t like partying and showers?

After that it settles down, takes another 20 paragraphs to lose another 10% of readers. And another jump, plomps down to just 23% readers making it to the 40th paragraph. This is around the spot where I say that being only an employee in a startup is much easier than being a founder. I guess people don’t like hearing that either?

There are no more significant jumps after that, but just over 15% of the readers made it all the way to the end and for that, I thank you awesome 574 people who decided my blog was worth reading through to completion.

Although interestingly enough, outside those jumps (yes I checked, other posts ending at those paragraphs doesn’t account for the jumps) on most paragraphs more than 96% of users make it from one paragraph to the next.

Had another hit on the 3rd of August. The data there is much more level, with 33% of readers making it to the end of a 30 paragraph post. But interestingly enough, only 61% made it from first to second paragraph!

I think I need to start experimenting with this in a more organized manner. Got my baseline, about a third of my readers make it to the end of a normal length post. Now it’s time to figure out how to increase that.

PS: if you’re interested in the JavaScript that makes this magic happen, just check out the source.

Related articles

• Keeping the Content Focused… Or Not (blazingminds.co.uk)
• The long and the short of it: does size really matter? (michcommunication.wordpress.com)
• Optimizing Blog Posts for social media (convonix.com)
• My Secret Formula for Creating Super-engaging Blog Content (problogger.net)
• How to Make Your Writing Sleek and Smooth (jenswritingdesk.com)
• Seven Tips for Better Writing (prnewswire.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Invariably, though, the conversation comes up to a point where they decide to finally notice my thick accent (it’s actually kind of horrible, I thought I could speak much better than I can) and ask about where I’m from.

A surprising number of people recognize the country.

Or pretend to.

Hard to tell which, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s much different than just four years ago going to London and having pretty much everyone ask where the fuck is this Slovenia thing. Maybe there’s a lot of Slovenians in Palo Alto, or maybe Americans just don’t care as much where a particular country might be situated.

And the next step in this conversation is predictably: “So that’s a pretty big step huh, moving all the way over here? How do you like it?”

To be honest … I don’t really notice a difference. I think this has so far disappointed pretty much everywhere.

But seriously, the US is not that different than home. Sure, everything here is like Slovenia on steroids. Everything is huge. There are more people. Going to the store around the corner is a two kilometer bike ride. And something being “right next to the Bay Bridge” is the whole of Ljubljana away from the actual bridge.

That’s to be expected though. The US is a big vast country and land is pretty much worthless. Back in Europe land is practically the hardest thing to come by so naturally everything is a bit smaller. Our cities also tend to be much more centralized due to historical reasons that just didn’t exist here (think wars with pitchforks and swords).

Maybe I live in a strange bubble full of entrepreneurs back home, but aside from being a couple of sizes bigger the scene here doesn’t seem much different than in Ljubljana.

Here you can talk to a random person in a bar on University Street and they will tell you they’re an entrepreneur. They might even pitch into your conversation if they hear something awesome. This is something we don’t have at home. But go to the right bar, and you do.

In Ljubljana there is a bar that a lot of the tech entrepreneurs visit somewhat regularly. In California Palo Alto is that bar.

See, just a bit bigger.

Image via Wikipedia

Really the biggest culture shock I did notice revolves around food and such things.

People here are just simply bonkers. Everything, fucking everything has all these magical labels about what is or isn’t in there. And everything is just so fake and horrible … seriously, we even found flour that promised to be at least 20% made of flour!

Seriously.

And all the propaganda! Marmelade markets itself as having zero calories from fat … meat markets itself as zero calories from sugars  … My mind is blown literally every time I try to figure out what I’m actually eating.

Luckily we found a store barely 20 kilometers from the house that sells nice, normal, balkan food.

Oh and a surprising amount of people I meet are really into Slavoj Žižek … I find that somewhat odd.

So I decided to spend some of my study breaks doing some housekeeping around the site. This resulted in a pretty awesome super informative footer that has already produced some fine results as far as visitor behaviour goes.

Super informative footer

Yes, it’s pretty big as far as footers go, but I wanted something that’s very airy and looks nice. If it doesn’t look like the picture for you, please let me know so I can fix it.

The point of this footer is that it isn’t just some static “Hey, I’m this guy and I do this stuff, follow me on twitter, be my friend, I’m awesome”. No. The only static parts of this monster are the section titles and a sentence or two. Everything else is dynamically updated from the various social and data tracking services I use.

My current location is pulled directly from Foursquare, the last few photos are from Instagram, the latest stuff I’m working on is just a list of repositories I last pushed to on Github. The part about what I’m listening to is a last.fm widget and that awesome thing telling you that I only have about 19k more days to live is a pretty brilliant new site I randomly found … going to blog about that later this week, because it’s just super awesome.

Another important bit is the navigation linking visitors to the previous and next post. Now I dont’ have any metrics yet, but ever since I added those two links activity surrounding my old posts has shot up infinitely. I say infinitely because there didn’t used to be any. People probably thought there was only ever one post on the whole blog

Originally the idea for this footer came from Buster Benson‘s home page. He’s the guy who made 750words.com and it seems like his home page is pulling data from some of the things he writes on and making real-time analysis of how he’s feeling. I wanted to have something like that, but didn’t feel like devoting my whole site to it.

The answer came when I stumbled upon Dustin Curtis‘ home page. Everything is just brilliantly styled there, but when I saw how his footer works, I was in love. Suddenly I knew exactly where to put the data about my life and I knew almost exactly what I wanted it to look like.

So thanks to @dcurtis and @busterbenson, you probably won’t read this, but thanks for the inspiration anyway.

Also, if you have any suggestions about what I could add to the footer, do tell. I was thinking about adding a counter for the amount of tasks I’ve completed lately (Toggl has an API), or displaying some of my latest tweets … perhaps the ones that get retweeted so it isn’t too horrible to read.

Related articles

• 750 words a day keeps the insanity away (swizec.com)
• Ten Fat Footers: How to Make Good Use of that Space at the End of the Page (blogs.sitepoint.com)
• 3 Powerful Website Toolbars for Bloggers (bloggingot.com)
• My Blog Guest – Hype or Monstrous Backlink Machine? (clickfire.com)

I immediately liked the idea, but wanted to do something more with it. The only natural step was to take a photo and instead of storing it locally, just uploading it to some url and tweeting it. So last night I sat down for an hour of hacking and patched together a bunch of scripts and voila #TweetAWakeup was born.

You can view the photos live on twitter via the #TweetAWakeup hashtag.

If you want to make something like this, here’s a quick howto of as many steps as I remember. I guess someone could make a simple script to do this, but then it would lose some of its geeky appeal.

Ok here’s what you do:

1. Register an app on Twitter.
2. Get an imgur API key
3. Install Sleepwatcher
4. Install iSight CLI Image Capture
5. Download and install twurl (you might have to update RubyGems with “gem update –system”)
6. Download my helper scripts
7. Authorize twurl as per instructions on github (twurl authorize …)
8. run “sudo launchctl load  -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/de.bernhard-baehr.sleepwatcher-20compatibility-localuser.plist” (this makes sleepwatcher work)
9. Edit ~/.wakeup  and make it look something like this, obviously you should modify the path to suit your setup

10. #!/bin/bash
    
    /bin/bash ~/Documents/random-coding/TweetAWakeup/TweetAWakeup.sh

11. Go into TweetAWakeup/update.py and edit line 8 to match your imgur API key from step 2
12. Go into TweetAWakeup/TweetAWakeup.sh and edit the paths to suit your setup
13. You can change what the tweet will look like on line 6 … would be nice if you leave the hashtag
14. Run “twurl alias tweet /1/statuses/update.xml”

And you’re done! Every time your mac wakes up from sleep it will take a photo with iSight, then wait 10 seconds and post it on twitter. The wait is there to give your computer supple time to connect to an internet.

Obviously this whole thing is rather pointless, but I find it interesting. Maybe something awesome falls out over time and I get a neato introspection into my daily life … or better yet, a hawt sexy girl with no top will forget about this and accidentally post her boobies all over the internet then much funs will ensue.

PS: hopefully I didn’t miss a step

Yesterday somebody posted a blog titled Let’s End the Myth that Ideas are Worthless. This is a pretty neat idea and obviously falls right into the flamebait category over at HackerNews as lovingly represented by the 80+ comments among which the most upvoted one is basically saying “you are an idiot, get off my lawn”.

Posts like these come and go on HN every few weeks, but what’s different about this one is that for some reason or another – probably because it was 3am and my brain was slowly going into that dazed imondrugs state – it really got me thinking about the whole debate. What’s stranger still is that the topic wouldn’t leave me alone and I kept pondering during class today.

What if execution and ideas are patently impossible to tell apart?

The dictionary defines an idea as

i·de·a
[ahy-dee-uh, ahy-deeuh] Show IPA
–noun
1. any conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness, or activity.
2. a thought, conception, or notion: That is an excellent idea.
3. an impression: He gave me a general idea of how he plans to run the department.
4. an opinion, view, or belief: His ideas on raising children are certainly strange.
5. a plan of action; an intention: the idea of becoming an engineer.
6. a groundless supposition; fantasy.

And it defines execution as

ex·e·cu·tion
[ek-si-kyoo-shuhn] Show IPA
–noun
1. the act or process of executing.
2. the state or fact of being executed.
3. the infliction of capital punishment or, formerly, of any legal punishment.
4. the process of performing a judgment or sentence of a court: The judge stayed execution of the sentence pending appeal.
5. a mode or style of performance; technical skill, as in music: The pianist’s execution of the sonata was consummate.
6. effective, usually destructive action, or the result attained by it (usually prec. by do ): The grenades did rapid execution.
7. Law . a judicial writ directing the enforcement of a judgment.
8. Computers . the act of running, or the results of having run, a program or routine, or the performance of an instruction.

On the face of it, it would seem that an idea is something that exists solely in the mind and execution is something that exists solely in the physical or even real world, where things get made and do something.

Now as soon as you get into computers, the difference becomes a little muddled and strange. Just what exactly is the physical world when it comes to a bunch of bits jumping to and fro to produce a result that might or might not mean something useful?

But anyway, let’s say we all have roughly compatible understandings of what execution is. Here’s what really matters:

[an idea is] any conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness, or activity

Keywords being understanding, awareness and activity.

Once you think about it you can quickly see that rough, uncut ideas are a dime a dozen. They pop up all the time and with the current world population that probably translates into a few million good ideas every week. But an uncut idea is worth just as much as an uncut diamond … a whole lot and nothing at the same time.

All that really matters is whose hands the uncut idea is in. Give it to someone who knows what to do with it and you will get a lovely diamond, the idea will adapt and change and when all is said and done, the person will forever go down in history for having had a very awesome idea and being lucky enough not to screw it up.

But give the very same idea to somebody who doesn’t know what to do and the result will likely be that everybody will laugh at the poor sap who can’t have great ideas. That poor guy, it must be tough not having good ideas. Nobody ever (or very very rarely) blames execution, it’s always the idea that’s at fault.

This is likely because the only way of proving that an idea was ever any good is to go out and make something awesome out of it. Sure, we might fail and our cut diamond might have a black spot in the center, but at least we’d know it was a diamond. Otherwise it would forever continue looking just like a regular rock.

Therefore a better way of saying “ideas are worthless” is probably to accept the fact that ideas are just as important execution and that execution shapes ideas into their full potential.

1. There was the DjangoCamp at Cyberpipe, which turned out to be an awesome event. Sixteen people showed up and it seems that’s pretty much the ideal group-size for serious and stimulating discussion on a topic. And by serious and stimulating I of course mean completely off the charts nerdy, geeky and unmoderated.

We covered everything from obscure kernel hacks that make your TCP stack noncompliant to shave 10 milliseconds off every page load, to the finer nuances between feeling stupid and your users acting stupid.

You know you’re at a great event when someone asking “Hey, does anyone do any testing?” immediately shuts down the current talk and devolves into a 45 minute debate.

Anywho, I shared a few thoughts about forcing django to run on Google’s AppEngine. The debate started raging and I never managed to get to the epically awesome last slide.

2. After the *camp a bunch of us got together and hijacked Cyperpipe’s movie theatre rooom thing to have a private screening of V for Vendetta. Despite this being a haphazardly organized last-minute sort of event, 14 people showed up. Which I think is a great success for an event that started out as an idea 4 days before it happened.

3. I’m sure there was also an off-by-one error somewhere.

Related articles

• DjangoCampLjubljana – the day after (jurecuhalev.com)
• Running Pure Django Projects on Google App Engine (code.google.com)

On Monday I got a little bored at class. This is something that is likely to happen when you’re stuck at classes for nearly the whole day.

During a break a classmate of mine showed me something cool. It was a Java applet that used genetic algorithms (we think it was just basic evolution) to create a model of a car that can travel over rugged terrain … Actually thanks to Zemanta I found the link -> Go here for a very cool genetic algorithm demo

This gave me a cool idea to retry making an algorithm I was making a year ago in Lisp.

Because wi-fi wasn’t working I  wrote it in python this time, simply because I don’t need to reference documentation to write python.

So I made something cool. (I think) In an hour of solid hacking I created a simple evolutionary algorithm that given enough time can create pretty much any piece of text by performing random mutations and breeding strings together.  My classmates can verify that it only took an hour.

Sure, nothing very impressive on a grand scale of things. I mean, what’s cool about taking a bunch of random characters and applying random transformations to them to create a known piece of text right?

Well I don’t know, but my nerd side finds it incredibly satisfying.

Anyway I tried it with Oscar Wilde’s Amor Intellectualis.

You can see the whole code on github.

To make this post about a little bit more than just geek bravado, I’m going to try explaining why I believe the algorithm works at all and what makes it pretty successful. Then I’m going to explain a better approach that maybe I will implement some day.

How?

Ok so the basics of evolution algorithms are pretty simple. You take a population of random stuff. With every generation you mutate the members, perform breeding amongst the best members and remove the worst members from the population.

Yep, pretty much like natural selection+evolution in nature.

Obviously this means that choosing a proper breeding and fitness functions is crucial here. The mutation function isn’t very interesting … and in fact as I discovered it’s almost better if you don’t have it at all. The real reason it’s usually there is because it helps the algorithm get out of local minimums.

def mutate(a):
    return "".join([random.choice(ALPHABET) if abs(random.random()-0.5) < MUTATE_CHANCE else k for k in a])

Basically mutate just goes through the string and randomly changes characters, if some event with a low chance of happening occurs.

def distance(a, b):
    return sum([1 if a[i]!=b[i] else 0 for i in range(len(a))])

Distance between strings is my fitness function. It is roughly based on my understanding of Leiningen distance. It simply counts the number of characters that differ between two strings. Very basic stuff.

def compete(population):
    population.sort(key=lambda a: distance(a, TARGET))
    return population

My compete function is pretty basic as well. Because of python’s awesomeness and because my fitness function returns a simple integer, I can simply sort the population by distance. Lovely.

def breed(a, b):
    if random.random()-0.5 < BREED_CHANCE:
        s = random.randint(0, len(a)-10)
        e = s+random.randint(1, BREED_MAX_CHUNK)
        c =  a[0:s]+b[s:e]+a[e:]
        return c
    else:
        return mutate(b)

The breed function is where it gets interesting and I firmly believe the way I implemented this, is the reason the algorithm performs as well as it does … it’s also probably the reason why it doesn’t perform better

As you can see what I’m doing here is I’m taking a string and replacing a random chunk of it with the same random chunk from a different string. The key thing here is that I’m not shuffling things around. What this does is that it preserves good candidates in a roughly good state.

For example, if you’re at only a single character difference from the target text, this type of breeding assures that nothing but that single character will be changing.

Also of interest might be how I choose whom to breed. Because the breeding function basically clones a part of a worse subject into a part of a better subject (due to the way I’m calling it) what I do is I choose the best 20 members and breed the best 60 members with them. Roughly this ratio seems to produce the best results.

Oh and I had problems with inbreeding. It’s funny, but if the population was too small and not enough members are breeding what happens is that every member in the population becomes identical, while none of them match the target. Guess all there’s something to all those hillbilly jokes

Performance

I haven’t really put this algorithm through its paces, but I was pleasantly surprised when it only took 10 generations to evolve a simple sentence and only about 150 generations to create a stanza of Hamlet.

The Oscar Wilde poem mentioned earlier is taking a bit longer. After 1000 generations it seems to be mostly prancing around the 5-8 differences range and showing a general downward trend. The lowest peak I saw was at 4. It will probably finish eventually, but perhaps some tweaking of the settings is needed.

At the time of writing the algorithm has managed to turn this:

llajC
beq'abvnM.pvvTSEjl -S
c ue-v,ub,
lWoqf'nmhpojfWNNufyv-EywDCO,m:ayu.fqOMTbew.hCyiOkp:vlgSffDFun.nyiM'np bwlkbkj'EyST.kN.li -og
EeiqctEi.aSCwcjNSwmpnEamhoeODSc.
,wltnOvMN:oprSbi,CobNh-
iyw..hbpF-NNk'fusCtgtT.upmetwAjenlWOsAEg
AncoilDSvAO.DmMoiyFttAawTiCjaNu
asoCtynkhO-CoDdWWW,gE
iOwuk.yFS v
Nmdqtvs'fgiAS,cWtwOotm:
r,dt,FNqen:f-
y,Aa, pMNrDM
EOFFgqjM
MwmtldkD Sb.eq'D:ncc-vdvkpTme,:,'jDabdnNS'p'bFT
gWhudWprFpFywAh.bdCWOwcNk-fbou,,gWosvfTyFhrkACd CrhfbrDN
 
oMw'cEfiEcqpqS
pTdpyFT,u',TEl hmhskd,'jrAs
kgOaetibdEEfqaAyd,vhh.s
dp'Wicr: uMfa'Wl,f,WEdumCfgEDgqfhhFfDu:mnbvM'iAWjSw :
hrb-FltrDkt'atC

Into this:

Oft have be trod the vales of Castaly
And heard sweet notes of sylvan music blown
From antique reeds to common folk unknown:
And often launch
d ou  bark upon that sea
Which the nEne Muses hold in empery,
And ploughed free furrows through the wave and foam,
Nor spread reluctant sail for more safe home
Till we had freighted well our argosy.
 
Of which despoiled treasures these remain,
Sor:ello's passion, and the honied line
Of young Endymion, lordly Tamburlaine
Driving his pampered jades, and more than these,
The seven-fold vision of the Florentine,
And grave-browed Milton's solemn harmonies.

Better idea

Since this simple hack got me interested in this field, I think I’ve come up with an even better way of creating texts. One that could perhaps even be capable of creating works of art not known in advance and thus become actually a useful implementation of an evolution algorithm.

The general idea is such: instead of mixing around random characters and comparing them to a text. What if we would first use this same algorithm to generate words roughly fitting the English syllabic structure.

Then we could start putting those words together using a similar principle as I’ve used here. Just make sure when breeding you are working on the level of words. Then your fitness function basically checks for proper poetic structure.

Voila!

Not sure that would be at all useful, but it might just be something pretty cool and nerdy to make some day.

Comments regarding the suggested algorithm especially wanted!

Related articles

• Genetic algorithm demo: finding optimal vehicle design (in Flash) (qubit.devisland.net)
• Robots designed by genetic algorithms (boingboing.net)
• What problems have you solved using genetic algorithms/genetic programming? (stackoverflow.com)

It’s a bit boring up here, I’ve already watched two movies, did some actual work, read about 70 pages of Ulysses, transfered a bunxh of music to the iPad, drank hundreds of cups of water, three cups of tea, had fi ve walks, ten bathroom breaks, and ate two chocolate bars.

All @skatey has done is sleep. Ha!

We find out who’s better at evading jet lag tomorrow. He’ll be getting lots of sleep, while I’ll be arriving at San Francisco quite sleepy, but after an 8 hour sleep should wake up in the correct timezone.

Anywho, I was back in the rear galley. Just sort of loitering. And I figured the pots of hot water and adjacent baggie of tea were just as self service as the trays of water and juice and the buckets of chocolate.

Just as I proceeded to help myself a very cross flight attendant told me I can’t just do that. Something about those specific baggies of yummy tea being for the big pot … then she gave me some el cheapo tea in a small baggy.

Also, her “good god man, stop being an idiot and let me do my job, i hatebeing here because of assholes like you” look was sooper cute.

Another thing I noticed in the last eight hours trapped in this tiny chair and surrounded by incredibly dry air is that laptops are the most perfectly impractical device for economy flying.

iPads fare much better, but lack the ability to … work well with dried out fingers. Stupid fake climate!

It’s a mystery how I felt like doing a bit of creative writing when I started out wr iting this post, but ended up with this rather monotonous drivel. Maybe I should just stick to programming.

Lately there has been raging debate in the blogosphere (is that still a word?) around whether RSS is dead or not and the fact that it’s apparently been dying ever since it was first conceived in 1999 or thereabouts.

Arguments range all the way from the fact that it is useless in light of Twitter and Facebook, that it never managed to jump the gap, that people simply can’t use it and that it all looks like RSS readers are being shut off left and right. Signs of great decay left and right, let’s abandon the poor thing completely and let it die in peace right?

But there is one very very important thing that everybody is missing: RSS is not a user-facing technology. Just like the semantic web, it was never meant to be something people actually use.

RSS is essentially one big hack, a pretty good way of having content delivered to you without specifically going out there and looking for it. Even though, essentially, that’s exactly what your RSS reader does. It’s got a list of websites it checks every so often and then gets back to you with the results. In that regard it’s essentially a bunch of bookmarks, you’re just not tending to them yourself. It’s just a bit easier for a computer to read xml than a website. With pubsubhubbub the way this is done has changed a little, but no biggie.

Ok, so RSS is a content distribution technology for computers.

Now, we all know that as technologies go, there needs to be that one killer feature that trumps all alternatives right?

Well twitter’s got one, the communication protocol is dead simple, simpler than phones. Great!

And facebook’s got one too, they’re a bit of everything, not very simple, but everyone’s got a facebook so you’re not leaving any time soon because you’re locked. Great!

What does RSS have?

Well, it’s got geeks. Lots and lots and lots of hardcore geeks. Did you know geeks produce the most content on social networks? How do you think stuff gets on your twitter and your facebook? Somebody’s got to post it there before it can go viral. That someone likely found out via RSS. Sure this can be automated, but then you’ve just ruined the most important part of consuming content via twitter or facebook – the social filtering.

But there’s an even more important feature to RSS.

Infinite scalability. Infinite distributability.

Both twitter and facebook are tied to a single provider. Twitter’s servers go down and all you see is a failwhale. No content for you. Imagine, for example, a huge earthquake hits california. Now suddenly both twitter’s and facebook’s data centers are offline. No content.

But RSS would bravely go on working perfectly. Some sites might not be able to update, but the rest of the world wouldn’t even notice a glitch. Everything just works smoothly.

Basically I guess what I’m saying is the same as Dave Winer. RSS is here to stay, somebody just needs to step up to the plate and make an RSS reader for people.

Related articles by Zemanta

• No, RSS Is Not Dead, and Neither Are RSS Readers (gigaom.com)
• Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic, and I were arguing last week about whether RSS has a future or not. He speaks up for “it has a future” on his blog. Dave Winer today… (scobleizer.com)
• RSS won’t die, but news readers are evolving and becoming more social (twingly.com)
• The Changing Face of RSS – What the Death of Bloglines Means for the Future of RSS (plagiarismtoday.com)

Yesterday when I updated iTunes and got the slightly odd new version (what’s with the vertical window buttons anyway?) there was no Ping in sight. Very well then, failed already as predicted by my tweet?

Well today when I opened iTunes again. There it was! Let’s go click that bad boy.

The first screen was pretty nice, some blahblahblah about how this is a social network and can do socially stuff. Create account!

Ok, first thing that’s a bit odd is that my Ping account is the same as my iTunes store account. Luckily I have a slightly hacked one so I can use the US store, otherwise Ping wouldn’t even exist for me.

Fail #1 – only exists for US people like I suddenly woke up in the middle ages.

Another thing that strook me as odd was setting up an avatar:

I can swallow the fact there’s no Gravatar support but what’s this nonsense about my avatar being approved!? What the flying fuck is going on here?

Then there’s this lovely tidbit about being forced to choose a whole of three genres of music that I listen to and being forced to choose between a very poor variety of stuff.

Fail #2 – nobody likes more than three genres and certainly nobody listens to Metal, Punk, Alternative Rock, Punk-Rock, Cabaret,  Swing, Folk and so on. Just the top10 chart on last.fm lists stuff from at least 6 different genres, most of them not on this list.

Coming to terms with the uselessness of this profile creation screen I finally clicked “Continue” and was greeted with this little ditty:

Sure, alright, I have to allow them to scrobble what I like. This makes sense. But what the hell!? They … they aren’t scrobbling what I’m actually listening to? Just what I’m … buying? What the fuck Apple? Don’t you realise the last time I bought any music was a few years ago and even that was only after I had been a fan of the artist for a few years and only really considered that CD merchandise?

That’s Fail #3 right there – need to buy/rate/review stuff through the iTunes store for Ping to do anything.

And then, then I was greeted by the most hilarious thing ever:

Quite obviously they recommended some weird stuff. Ok, granted, I like Linkin Park. Good guess. But Katy Perry? No, good boobs, bad music. Lady GaGa? LoL! And U2? Not really a fan, some songs are good, but meh. And I have no idea who Yo-Yo Ma and Jack Johnson even are.

This is a problem that Ping could easily have solved by syncing with my last.fm account that contains the past 4 years of my listening habits.

Fail #4 - obviously commercially inspired music recommendations are obviously lametastic.

Ok let’s try searching for some of my favourite bands so I can, you know, follow them on Ping and hopefully get something useful out of this pile of steaming cow dung.

Cherry Poppin’ Daddies – nope, not there

The Dresden Dolls – nope

Amanda Palmer – nope, just some fat chick, no sign of my beloved Amanda Palmer

Inkubus Sukkubus – nope

Voltaire – nein

Cruxshadows – negative

Jack Off Jill – nope

Blink-182 – halleluya they’re there, but as a … user? O.o

Ok now I found someone and … where the fuck is my search box? Ah ok, it was a few clicks away.

The Doors – nothing

Dropkick Murphys – nope

Meh I give up, there is nothing worth following on Ping. The artists I do find are labeled as users and everybody knows it’s not really them there, it’s some automated bot thing to keep us notified of their stuff. But none of the artists I’m actually listening to are there …

Fail #5 – Ping is empty. There are no artists or anything of worth following.

I’m going to give Ping the benefit of the doubt. They’re just having a bit of a cold start problem and nobody at Apple was smart enough to put at least placeholders for some of the most popular bands/artists of recent decades on there. Even Marilyn Manson, Iron Maidden and Offspring aren’t there …

Oh and here are some more fails:

Fail #6 - Everything is locked in iTunes, you can’t send music to people, can’t use other players, nothing. It’s just plain old locked to the single worts music player in the history of music players

Fail #7 – can only invite via Email, who cares about twitter and facebook where my social network actually is? Yeah, nobody cares about that

Fail #8 - no integration with anything. at all. Last.fm would make sense, but at least Twitter and Facebook? Anyone? Yeah I didn’t think so. Who uses that crap huh?

Fail #9 – oh yeah, there’s already a ping.fm, which, coincidentally, is a social network for music that integrates with stuff and works pretty well from what I heard

And it was fucking awesome!

We went to something called Vodotocno jezero – a small mountain puddle really. But it was beautiful anyway. The trip started off with a long and bloody awesome drive. I like driving around tight gravel curves and making the car drift without using the handbrake.

When we got to the starting point it was hellishly cold. Probably less than 10C. Luckily for Girlfriend the backpack I was carrying contained some forgotten gloves. After a short wall some really lovely views opened up from a small and funny shepherd’s cottage thingy.

Then the real hike began. First there was a little steepness through a bit of a forest and after that a very nice and unsteep path across some hillsides with such a magnificently awesome view I almost shat my pants.

But the real fun began once we got off the marked trails and just winged it across the terrain. Some grass here, a rock there and those weird short pine things that grow up in the high mountains because trees can’t. Sure we almost got lost once we were near the saddle between to summits and we couldn’t quite discern where it was anymore but meh.

Eventually the view onto the small puddle and cottage next to it opened up and it was plain sailing therefrom. Well no, no it was not. Girlfriend twisted her ankle and what was supposed to be the final ten minutes before reaching the destination turned into a thirty minute painful weirdness. Turns out hoping rock to loose rock on a steep steep hill with a twisted ankle isn’t at all an easy task.

The trip back was even cunner. Took us something like three hours getting back to the car and we got a little bit lost so we took a nicely more dangerous path to get down than w did for getting up. Hoorah!

But hey, fuck it. I’m just incredibly choked that the GPS data later showed that saddle was 2004 meters high and I don’t think I’ve ever walked anywhere near that high before. Was awesome!

Therefore, some pics.

A local hackerspace I’m a part of is organizing a summer long hackday that’s starting in a few weeks.

What we need right now are the crazies, most whackiest and twoplus insane ideas you can possibly think of. And pimp ‘em out, get votes!

When the hacking carnage begins the highest voted ideas will be gathered up and teams will start working on them. You are also welcome to come put your arse where your mouth is and help make the idea happen, just so you know.

Then, when the carnage is over, there will be a demoday. Each team will present their idea in front of a bunch of business people and the likes, although personally I’m all for making them public and creating a huge party where everyone is invited. Hell, a barcamp. Hmm … yeah, I’ll convince everyone that that’s the way it should be done.

Anyhow, the demo day, then whomever is the best gets heaps upon heaps upon shitloads of bragging rights. They have essentially just become the awesomest dudes in the whole of Europe. That’s right, if you’re too much of a pussy to even participate in this thing you’re a de facto loser. Turn in your hacking license at once. You aren’t worthy of calling yourself a hacker.

Also, while you’re reading this, why not go ahead and vote for the three ideas I contributed

• Cheaper-than-beowulf cluster
• Smart RSS reader for iPad
• Mood music

Oh and do pass this around, the more crazy ideas people contribute the merrier

To the entire Black race living in America, we, the Adamic, pink complexioned race (better known to you as the White race) that came to these shores from Europe, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Iceland, apologize for freeing you from slavery by fighting a horrible war among ourselves that cost the lives of almost two million of our own race. We apologize for continuing to fight among ourselves over that very issue, even though you’ve never told us you appreciate our freeing you.
We apologize for splitting to pieces our entire race the world over to take sides with you to help you survive and become a freer race. We apologize for forcing the rest of the world to outlaw the slavery which your ancestors had practiced for thousands of years, even though many nations on your home continent still practice it today.
We apologize for thinking we could civilize you when you have proven that it is indeed an impossible feat, a feat beyond anything we could have ever imagined.
We apologize for teaching you to add and subtract (what little you can), thereby enabling you to run a household and pay your bills (what few you will) and count your children other than on your fingers and sometimes toes when you have so many you run out of fingers.
We apologize for providing you with medical care instead of leaving you under the witch doctors you used before we arrived, as a result of which you have been able to survive all sorts of diseases to multiply in massive numbers beyond what you could have without these aides.
We apologize for building schools for you which we have had to repair over and over after you vandalized them beyond use. We apologize for inventing computers and the Internet, neither of which you use very much, but when you do use them it’s mostly to bash our race.
We apologize for building factories and businesses that employ you, if you so desire to work. We apologize for creating millions of bureaucratic jobs within our government system simply to give you employment, instead of leaving you to find work on your own.
We apologize for promoting and buying your music, although you refuse to buy ours. We apologize for talking and acting as you do, although you refuse to talk and act as we do.
We apologize for placing you in our movies and TV shows and elevating you to a fictional, heroic level that you have never reached in real life. We apologize for creating this false image of yourselves in your minds, for we realize after 400 years of trying to help you that you cannot solve problems and provide leadership and create original thoughts; and the image we’ve placed in your minds causes you to live in a delusional world. For that we truly apologize.
We apologize for creating quota systems and forced employment programs to make sure you have the best jobs, if you so desire to work. We apologize for thinking we could educate you so that you could learn to build and help others, when you obviously have only the ability to tear down and take from others.
We apologize for giving you welfare and food stamps, with the result that for four generations over half of your race has not had to work, except in makesift type of jobs in our governments and bureaucracies.
We apologize for promoting your children in school as if they could understand basic arithmetic and grammar, such as multiplication and past participles, when we should have made sure they were accustomed to manual labor so that we would not have had to make up jobs for them in our governments dusting seats with their butts.
We apologize for developing farms in our own lands which you have never been able to do, and that to this day feed most of your race still living in Africa. We apologize for coming to Africa and building farms, from which you have now run us off of and have devastated beyond use, forcing us to continue feeding you.
We apologize for creating the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) and U.S. Government Foreign Aid Programs and hundreds of charities that funnel billions of our tax dollars and charitable donations to nations around the world run by your race, all because your race cannot take care of itself by itself anywhere you live.
We apologize for giving you the right to vote so you could take over all our major cities and turn them into high-taxed, crime-ridden cess pools that no civilized human being can live in.
We apologize for creating the term “reverend,” which your leaders use to give themselves credentials and which their actions have denigrated beyond repair, with the result that no decent person would call himself “reverend,” much less a Christian
We apologize for trying to come up with an AIDS vaccine to stop the epidemic spread of AIDS in Africa, AIDS being a disease that you created and passed on to us after having sexual intercourse with monkeys and then with one of our idiotic race-mixers who then passed it on to the rest of the world.
We apologize for providing you with warm, custom-made garments instead of the animal skins and leaves that you wore before we arrived. We apologize for providing you with shoes instead of leaving you barefooted as you were before we arrived in Africa.
We apologize for teaching you how to clean yourselves and your homes, and how to sanitize the water you drink to keep you from getting even more dreadful diseases than the rest of your race gets that still lives in Africa. We apologize for teaching you to cook your foods, which keeps you from getting the hundreds of parasitic diseases that your race gets that still lives on your home continent of Africa.
We apologize for providing you with solidly built, heated, and cooled homes with grass yards instead of the straw huts and dirt yards you were living in before we arrived, and in which most of your race is still living in in Africa.
We apologize for inventing sports so that you can make millions of dollars and live like kings, then kill and rape people with impunity, as O.J. Heisman-Trophy-Winner Simpson and Mike Heavy-Weight-Champion-of-the-World Tyson have done, as well as many others among your race.
We apologize for producing such beautiful people for you to race-mix with, and if they won’t voluntarily mix, you often casually rape them as if you were eating a piece of fried chicken.
We apologize for building thousands of prisons around the nation to house dangerous criminals, of which your race makes up over sixty percent even though you’re only thirteen percent of the U.S. population, and this at an expense of billions of dollars and manpower every year.
We apologize for taking precious metals from the earth on your home continent of Africa, metals which you neither knew were there nor how to use them if you had known they were there, but which you love to puncture and cover your bodies with in the most tawdry way imaginable.
We apologize for those among us who have established charitable organizations, donated billions of dollars and hours of time, and have devoted their entire lives to make life easier and better for your race, although most often to no positive result.
We apologize for all the stupid White ministers whom your race has martyred in Africa where they were trying to evangelize you to a faith that you can’t understand nor do you want to; yet when you claim to join it soon pervert it with the Voodooistic concepts you have inherited from your forefathers.
We apologize for building highways and railroads and for inventing flying machines that you could never have invented but which you use everyday to move about, yet without thinking or appreciating their origins in the least.
We apologize for paying the majority of both federal and state taxes, to maintain the governments which protect and promote you but fight against our own people at every turn.
We apologize for some members of our race who worship the monstrosities your genes have created, such as Jacko the Wacko and Little Fruity Richard and Dennis Nutman Rodman and Don Electrified King and Daryl Coke-Head Strawberry and Whitney Whacked-Out-Screaming Houston and Cassius If-Only-I-Be-White-But-I’m-Really-Black Clay and Tiger Adamic-Hater Woods and Whoopi Thinks-She’s-White Goldberg and Oprah Interview-a-Nut New-Age-Goof Winfrey and Ru Triple-Freak Paul and Morgan Act-White-But-Hate-White Freeman and Sammy Convert-To-The-Christ-haters-Religion Davis and Colin Have-A-Black-Pet-In-The-White-House Powell, to name only a few.
We apologize for defeating the major part of the communist threat which cost us several trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, but whose doctrines you still wish to have implemented on the backs of our race to further torture us and tear us down.
We apologize for spending over $2 trillion dollars on welfare and food stamps in the last thirty-five years, funds which your race received the majority of, although you are a small minority among us.
We apologize for introducing you to the rule of law under a republican form of government, a government that has gone abroad to keep your own warring nations from slaughtering other members of your race by the hundreds of thousands as they did year in and year out before we arrived, and still do every time we leave them alone and do not intervene.
We apologize for teaching you to read a language that contains more than a few words and a couple of hand signs, which has allowed you to take part in our philosophies, our culture, our art, our industry, our collegial nature, and our freedom, even though as soon as you get around them you pervert them.
For surely, if you could not read, how could you have learned the teachings of Karl Marx, Mao Tse Sung, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Lenin, Howard Zinn, the Damocrat Party, the Neo-cons in the Republicoward Party, and others who hate our race, and have brainwashed you into believing our race is evil and that you are severely oppressed?
We apologize for placing you under the form of government that our own forefathers died to create, and for which you are helping to destroy, instead of leaving you under the anarchy you lived under before we arrived.
For all these wrongs we’ve carried out against you, we apologize deeply and unreservedly, and if you will please accept our apology, we shall happily and immediately take back all of the above mentioned evils we have cast upon you and return you to your home continent, if you so desire.
We would with the greatest of glee and cheer even provide you with a nice, little stipend for traveling money, if you’d go and take your race-traitor wives and husbands and Mulatto children with you.
We have enjoyed having you here, but because you claim we’ve been, and are still being, so mean to you, we’d like to atone by helping you get back to where you came from.
You could live in peace without our persecuting you anymore, and we could save ourselves trillions of dollars over the next few years by shrinking our governments and emptying our prisons. We could take hundreds of thousands of security guards and police officers around the country off their jobs and put them to more productive use, and we could celebrate our own culture without offending you anymore.
Moreover, we could take the three-point shot and the forty-five second shot clock out of basketball which would return it to a game of plays and strategies, instead of the run and gun show our enemies have tailored especially for you. We could place the “palming penalty” and the “walking penalty” and the “charging penalty” back in to slow the game down to the point that defense and brains matter.
We could place the “bump and run” rule back in football and have referees start calling “offensive pass interference” again, to change the game to one where something more than straight-ahead speed is what matters. The “taunting rule” and the “roughing the quarterback rule” that we had to implement because of you, we could do away with completely, because civility would automatically come back into the game.
The race traitors of our race who hate their own culture and heritage could go with you, and we won’t offend them anymore either. For after a few generations of mixing with your race they would disappear into the dark tar-mix which your dominant design-genes make up.
What say? Do you accept our apology? Do we have a deal? Please let us know, soon!

Približno tako je danes zgledalo, oz. vsaj zvenelo na twitterju.

Kaotično. Zmedeno. Prijetno brez cilja in vsake logike.

Imeli smo študentske demonstracije proti opresiji nadgroznega državnega aparata!

A demonstrirali so pijani dijaki.

Imeli smo študentske demonstracije za pravo študentsko stvar!

A skup niso spravili niti sence kakega manifesta.

Imeli smo bitko in sekla bridka so se jekla proti zlobnim policistom!

A vsi so se poskrili že po dobri uri.

Imeli smo razbijanje in divjanje po ulicah, da se nas vidi! Da povemo svoje!

A par ur zatem so posledice le na 10 metrih pred parlamentom, drugje niti smeti več ni.

Imeli smo zavzemanje nadsuper študentskih organizacij za študentsko stvar!

A študentje se že jezno zbirajo in zahtevajo ukinitev ŠOS in ŠOU.

…

Jah, takle mamo, študentsko gibanje je le še senca tega kar smo imeli v 70ih. Sicer nisem bil zraven, ampak Zasedba Filozofske Fakultete je bilo tako epska, da še zdaj stari Ljubljančani govorijo o tem. Takrat … to je bilo tisto pravo, tako se te stvari delajo.

Ne pa zdaj, neka na pol mafijska organizacija, ki parazitira ljudi katere naj bi ščitila organizira proteste samo in izključno takrat kadar nekdo stopi na prste njenega denarja. Pa čeprav se vsi študentje strinjajo ali pa jim celo dol visi. Potem je pa treba pijano drhal dijaško nahujskat in jo spravit na ceste, da ne bi slučajno bilo preveč očitno za koga dejansko so demonstracije. Ja tako je, po pričevanjih očividcev so bili edini študentje na demonstracijah organizatorji in nekaj lolekov s FDV-ja.

Takrat ko so nam pa bone dražili in so jokali in pizdili res vsi študentje kar jih poznam, takrat pa nič. O ne, to pa ne bomo protestirali, še malo bomo probali skrit vso zadevo.

Ampak priznam, malo sem pa vseeno ponosen na današnje dogajanje. Cel dopoldan sem se spraševal kaj bi bilo potrebno da sprožimo nekaj pravega, nekaj kar bo vsaj na daleč zgledalo, kot da imamo kaj povedat:

Najprej je zgledalo zelo klavrno. Mislim, jao, demonstracije proti državi so se začele popoldan, zato ker za dopoldan niso dobili dovoljenja od države. Wtf? No saj, potem ko se je pa zares začelo dogajat je pa organizator namesto, da bi podprl svoje lutke, stisnil rep med noge in se “distanciral od nasilja”.

Pa vseeno, dobili smo tole:

Nahujskani dijački, ki sami zase ne vejo zakaj so tam. “kdor ne skače ni slovenc” … čaki kaj? Zakaj že demonstrirate in se tepete s prašiči? Al ste morebiti na fuzbal tekmi?

No saj, resnost izgredov se vidi že v tem kako dolgo so trajali in kako daleč so se razširili. Bojim se da Kresalka vseeno ne bo mogla upravičit nakupa tiste vodne pištolce …

Kakorkoli, ponosen sem na študentsko organizacijo in predvsem na svoje kolege študente -

Dobili smo iskro potrebno za upor proti ŠOU/ŠOS, izkoristimo jo do konca!

Because this is a local topic the post is in slovene, apologies to both my international readers.

Zadnje dni ŠOU že kar malo precej najeda z vso propagando okoli malega dela in kako je to oh in sploh konec sveta, pa da sploh ne omenimo ubogih študentekov kako, da ga bomo nasrkali in ne bomo niti za kavico več imeli.

Pa pustimo, da študent sploh ne rabi kavice ampak se na faksu kaj naučit pa zraven en malo štipendije za knjige in kak sendvič.

Ok priznam, odkar sem na faksu še ni minil mesec, ko ne bi več časa zapravil za “službo” kot za študijske zadeve – izvzemši seveda izpitna obdobja potem ko sem se pred kakim letom malce spametoval.

A vseeno podpiram in pozdravljam malo delo, čeprav sem direktor malega startupa sestavljenega izključno iz študentarije. Malo delo bo super.

Zakaj?

Ja ker se nič ne bo spremenilo, samo malo se bo povečal obseg kdo vraga lahko dela in tisti ki delajo bodo imeli kako pravico več. Kurba je ko si dva tedna bolan in zato konec mesca ne morš plačat telefona, ali pa greš na malo dopusteka in magično zmanjka vsega denarja.

Zveni zelo viktorijansko mar ne? Mogoče celo ameriško.

Pfuj in pfej. Amerika in viktorijanstvo sta kul samo za nadbogate, študentarija in reveži se v nobenem primeru nimajo kaj preveč fino. Pri nas pa? Jah študent je car …

… in tako naj ostane.

Če znaš dobro delat, kar seveda znaš mar ne, sej te močno srbijo omejitve urnih postavk, to valjda pomeni da zdaj zaslužiš bajno več mar ne? Boš po preračunih z malim delom še vedno lahko zaslužil 6000 eurov na leto. In ja, to ravno pade v tisti minimum, da še ne plačaš davkov.

Osebno sem tista leta ko sem zaslužil več kot 6k gagal ko majmun cele dneve in naredil prekleto malo izpitov.

Kar se pa tiče demonstracij …

Jaz in ŠOU sva opravila. Današnja automagična prijava na nekakšen SMS klub in to da me zdaj kar nekaj spamajo sta bila pika na i. Ne grem se več.

Sem hotel it na demonstracije čist samo tako, za špas, mogoče bi bili pa izgredi in po mojem nisi zares živel dokler nisi bil vsaj enkrat v resnih izgredih – po možnosti v študentskih letih, kasneje ni več fore. Ampak izgredov ne bo, smo preveliki papki.

Ah kje so cajti, ki jih opisujejo stari ljubljančani, ko je študentarija zavojevala fakse in ohromila Ljubljano, da so povedali svoje. Zdaj so demonstracije samo še show in komerciala. Pa kak alkohol več se proda na ta račun.

Seriously why aren’t there more teachers in the world? What a bunch of charlatans.

But I’m getting ahead of myself in this story.

Last week I was doing a lot of freelancing as a teacher and instructor in the dark arts of programming. There was this kid who desperately wanted to get a passing grade on a test this Wednesday. And there was this guy with a hat who has never in his life done any teaching and has spent all his life adamantly convinced he’s got no patience of such things. But he could do with some money in his pockets.

So the story begins. We had a three hour session almost every day and an even better reward than the easiest lump of money I ever made, was the fact that kid suggested, and seriously meant it, that I should think about becoming a teacher when I “grow up”. It was truly quite marvelous.

And all I did was explain some basic things to him and make him think.

Which brings us to the next question. Why was it that this poor bastard who has spent almost a year at the hands of professional teachers even needed someone to explain to him how a for loop works? How to distill an algorithm out of a problem description? How to … stuff?

I mean, seriously. What the hell!?

They trouble these young dudes with details like variable types, function prototypes and the fact that this thing called Dev-C needs a System(“PAUSE”) at the end.

All the while they don’t even understand that a variable will just keep its value and that this (and loops) is the basic principle behind everything a computer does and that you can change the way a computer does something by tweaking values in variables.

Pretty pathetic if you ask me.

When I was a little dude in that kid’s shoes I hated flowcharts and I hated everything to do with real programming. All I wanted to do was pump out functioning code. But the thing is, far before that there was somebody to instill The Way a Programmer Thinks in my head. I already knew most of the basic stuff.

But for those who don’t understand thinking like a programmer. Who can’t empathise with a computer. They need a different learning method and schools and universities (at least around here) are horrible when it comes to that. All they ever do at school is try teaching you languages before you even learn how to talk.

Ever tried speaking a foreign language right out of the dictionary?

That’s how people try to teach you programming these days.

It sucks and it’s got to change.

Personally I think pupils should be taught to do nothing but programming for at least a year when they start. Then, maybe, they could start getting into coding.

This morning just as I was battling with the question of going for a morning run or not I came across this facebook status

<a status I am currently unable to find>

But anyway, it was of something called @runkeeper and a dude reported he just ran 0.00 kilometers.

So why would this matter?

Because it gave me the idea that hey, if I tracked my runs I could get empirical data on what I’m doing and being the geek that I am this would inspire me to run more, harder and oftener.

Yayz! \o/

Then I went looking for this RunKeeper app … well whaddya know, it only exists for iPhones, who cares about you dirty BlackBerry users. You all suck anyway, you never do cool things! (gee I wonder why)

Well, after minutes upon minutes upon minutes upon dirty minutes of looking for something I finally came across an app that supports blackberries in the seedy underbelly of the internet’s shady alleys where drug dealing pederast’s push their wares.

It is called SportyPal.

Hoorah!

I downloaded it, fired it up and went for my run. After half an hour I come back home, look at the app and … why the flying shit is this? The stupid thing didn’t even manage to start getting GPS data during this time. Yep, 30 minutes of running and it didn’t even begin tracking anything.

Then two minutes later it failed with a “I’m sorry”

Yes I know it’s only Thursday.

All week the earliest I ventured outside the apartment was at noon. And I just didn’t do anything very productive at all for some reason. Whenever I did do some work it was at a slow leisurely pace. A few clicks here. Tap tap there. Point point test yonder.

Like, for example, instead of working hard on building a testing framework for my machine learning frameworks last night I … invited the girlfriend over, had a nice and comfortable dinner (unfortunately not a very tasty one) then watched a movie or somesuch and went to bed earlier than midnight.

No, cuddling is not being productive.

And today we watched television, TELEVISION, until something like 12 o’clock and went off into the great wide open to find new adventures.

Yep, the whole week has been one big lazy yawn with a bit of running and exercise and a little productivity. Hell, it’s already Thursday and I’ve only been productive 43 hours this week! Ew! If I didn’t love it so much I’d almost be disgusted with myself.

But truth be told, I absolutely needed a week just like this. I don’t really deal well with proper vacations, get too bored. So this is perfect for me, have a week like normal people for once.

It’s nice. Guilty pleasures are always the bestest.

Do people really survive their whole lives on only 9-ish hours of productivity every day excluding weekends?

I don’t know if I can really believe that … someone enlighten me.

’cause nobody wants that

nope.

So one of these days, doesn’t really matter when, but I found out about it today, a new service called MyTechne popped up out of the blue … and oh great, Zemanta just flashed me with a bunch of dicks in the recommendations media gallery, thanks guise …

The point is that you sign up and create a collection of all the different programming languages you’ve ever used and when you used them and so on and so forth. Marvelous!

Now the age long debate of who has the biggest coding schlong over at the pub can get fucking substantiated. Why try to remember everything when you’re drunk out of your mind? Just pull out an internet and SHOW them.

As Hugh Laurie would say in Blackadder’s fourth series: Hoorah!!

Anyway, here’s my coding schlong if anyone’s interested. For the love of god DO show me yours in the comments alright. Cheers.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes a difficult task suddenly becomes childplay? Incredibly easy? Painfully simplistic?

This sometimes happens to me and it’s a phenomena so awesome I just had to have a ponder about it. Just why the fuck does that happen?

Personally I notice this effect mostly when I’m studying mathematics. For some reason advanced maths just comes incredibly hard for me, I have a fuzzy mind and maths requires one of those surgically clean minds. But after doing maths on and off all day, BAMF!, suddenly, even stumbling upon a problem I’ve never seen, it is just soooo very clear in my mind.

Suddenly I can see complex vector spaces, I can imagine how functions behave in a hyper space, dare I say it, I can even understand how to convert a stupid point and lien to a plane. Yes! Yes I can!

And it’s all because my mindset switches to mathematics and that’s a wonderful thing because it makes me feel I might actually pass that exam on Tuesday.

But there’s a very very dark side to these awesome mindset thingies.

It’s when you’ve got two or three completely different things that need to be done that come from completely different fields. Like when work deadlines and exams start playing in the same week and disturbing one another.

Horrible really, because now you’re faced with a decision: Do you spend another hour or two switching from maths mindset to business mindset and risk not getting the maths mindset back quickly enough. Or do you risk clearing your whole schedule for that exam and then hope you can get the other mindset back in time for that other deadline?

I mostly tend to choose the maths, it feels much cooler.

Sometimes when I’m out and about and not being careful about my clothing my penis slips out.

No wait that’s not right. My linguistic geek slips out.

Yeah, that one! Linguistic geekdom! All over the place! Like a vulgar Andy Warhol rip off painted on a pornstar’s fake boobs.

So last time that happened it was because I stumbled upon something called a Slovianski Jezik, which is apparently something not unlike an Esperanto exclusively for slavic languages.

Of course I went full monty on it and was all like “Omigosh omigosh this is liek SO brilliant yeah!?” in my best cockney accent impersonation.

But the thing is that, all joking aside, us slavs are in dire need of a language such as this. The most painful thing we have to deal with is that already, as it is, in our natural state, it’s almost like we were talking dialects of the same language. Well not really, but still, there are many many similarities.

Like I’ve read once that Slavic languages are the only family of languages in the world where speakers talking to one another feel like the other person should be understandable, but has such a horrible speech impediment that they just can’t quite make them out. Combined with regional differences in vocabulary and you’re in a fucked up situation where you instinctively feel like you should be able to converse normally …

… but just can’t.

For example I went to Prague last week. When there I could almost understand everything I saw in written language and could understand something like 50% of the things I was told. 70% when I tried really hard.

But as soon as I tried to do some proper communication there was a big fail and we were all forced to default back to English, which is just horrible. Come on, a Slovenian and a Czech conversing in a stupid germanic language. EW!

That’s where Slovianski comes in. It is specifically designed to be instantly and intuitively intelligible to anyone who understands slavic languages, more specifically, anyone who is a Slav. You can try this on the Slovianski language front page

Personally I can make out just about everything it says. Even when a word is missing I can very simply understand it from the context.

This is without ever having learnt any other Slavic languages than Slovene and I guess I learned some Serbocroatian by ear simply from … well those who know why know, the rest don’t really have to know.

I think every Slav out there should learn this language, I sure know I want to. It looks easy enough anyway.

Yesterday another WebCamp took place in Ljubljana and it was the best *camp event I’ve ever been to. Congrats to all involved in making it happen, you guys rawk.

For some strange reason though I seem to have done almost nothing but hang out in the hall and only caught little bits and pieces of the talks here and there.

Perhaps the most surprising thing that I learned is that nobody writes good software anymore. Hell, why would you make your algorithms and page generators run faster … just slap some caching on there! First you make it cache all database calls. Then you start saving straight to cache too and sort of make commits to the actual storage happen a bit later when they don’t bother the user. If that’s not enough you can still just “cache” the whole output of your app in a static html file and serve that. And so on.

HELLO guise!? Bad sign ™ if you need to store the whole output of your software so it runs sufficiently well? O.o What are web developers smoking these days … I want some.

That’s the impression I got anyway from so many talks about optimisation and caching …

Another very cool talk, although I wasn’t in geek-mode enough to listen in on the whole thing, was by @refaktor who showed some funky simplistic server thingies that can perform real-time communication amongst each other. I did see the demo and it was very pretty. Hope he puts the code and talk somewhere public so I can give it a study some time.

I happened to steal two sessions of people’s time. The first was a public release of LazySharer that went alright I guess, some things went wrong but it all turned out well in the end.

And in a spur-of-the-moment kind of inspiration I also made a talk where we did nothing but watch stupid and silly youtube videos. We burned through our 20+10 minutes and ate away at half of next talk. Sorry Jure, hope you had enough time to talk about XMPP.

Seeming as how stupid videos were a marginal enough success for my tastes I got together some people and we set up a booth of sorts in the hall where we then played Monty Python and other silly videos for the rest of the day. Well actually we sort of got bored with it and then other people started playing whatever they wanted to see. It was great fun.

The WebCamp concluded a bit early because there were no more talks people wanted to give and half the public went MIA. So then the real party started because all the boring people had left.

Imagine this scene: 30-ish people, two cases of beer, a lot of pizza, 70 sooper chocolate muffins.

Yeah it was a blast. Apparently spiking those muffins with extra sugar and cocoa was the best idea we ever had at Preona. People went berserk for those things, eating three or more and stealing them for home consumption. Hell, if all this Synaptic Web stuff doesn’t work out for us we’ll open a muffin bakery.

Later on when almost everybody had left the evening evolved into Hekovnik’s first movie night. Inglorious Basterds on a huge LCD and four people on a sofa munching on stuff. Fun times.

Although those people having a brainstorming session on the other side of the room were a bit loud at times

PS: there were three pizzas (out of 40) left over and no muffins (out of 70). I think this is a great achievement.

Ah, finally, we can breathe again!

The last couple of weeks … was it two, was it three? Can’t really tell, feels like I’ve left the office just yesterday while at the same time seeming like it’s been years since I last set foot in the office to do any real work.

This my friends, this ejection from the stream of time, this rejection from life, this abortion from the normality of our daily lives, this horrible feeling of floating in time like naught is happening but what you can see on your immediate palm …

… this is what exam season does to you.

For me it is, luckily, already over. Some of my best buddies have another week of wartime ahead of them. Waring with evil warlords, waging battle with delusional teaching assistants. To them I wish good luck! Good luck I say!

To the rest of us I say, Gidday mate! Finally, finally we have come out of that Vietnam that is the few weeks of exams. Those stressful days when your future hangs precariously at a balance and your parents are wagging their eternal finger into your face “you better pass those exams mister lest we reject you from the family unit and make you get a real job”

But alas dear mother! Alas I say! Alas! For I have passed three out of five exams and that means I’ve got a 60% success rate and not even all of those were a weak mere pass! Nay! For I am victorious! Victoriously have I come out of that hell that is pure suffering.

Could’ve done better though. Crap.

PS: said season also fucks with your mind.

Naturally I’ve developed a bit of a love for pretty mathematical objects, so I wanted to share some with you.

1. Our first contestant is the cardioid. She’s a bit chubby on the sides but has a heart of gold.

2. The second contestant is an implicit heart and was contributed by a bloke on Facebook whom I believe has had this saved somewhere because it would be just mindblowing if he even know it from heart, let alone could create it.

3. This little nugget followed from my experimentation with parameters of a curve I don’t know the name of … it’s a flower if you haven’t noticed.

4. The Butterfly Curve is well known in some circles, but I found it by stumbling around wikipedia like a drunken madman

5. There are likely to be other contestants I have yet to discover.

So, which curve do you think is the most beautifulest mathematical construct?

Of course after all this hype the features I expected were:

• the casing is made of solid gold
• it can make me a sandwich
• it brings coffee
• it fits in my pocket
• it is very very useful
• it can wipe my arse after I take a dump
• it can fly me to the moon and back
• it works like The Guide mk.2 (If you don’t know what this means you should be ashamed of yourself)

So let’s see what Apple gave us:

• oversized iPhone that can’t make calls

Errr … what!? Seriously Apple? Seriously? This!? Really!? We’re doing this again!?

Ok look, I love Apple, hell I even want an iPhone. And I really believe the devices they create are marvelous pieces of technology that work very well. But this fucking piece of crap is the biggest technological let-down I have ever had the displeasure of seeing.

I mean seriously, what the fuck was Apple smoking when they designed this thing? They’re supposed to be this sooper innovative company performing feats of magic right before our eyes, but instead, they take all the old technology, add nothing of the new, and call it the next big awesomest thing.

Fuck off Apple. Call me when you start making useful and exciting stuff again.

At least with the Newton it was marvelous technology that was too far ahead of its time, the iPad is just boring, mundane and boring.

Oh and you can tell they know it’s boring and useless because it’s PRICED THE SAME AS THEIR OLD PRODUCT!