A quick day's hack...
It has been a while, but I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon and got a working tool together playing around with XML-RPC and Mono. The tool has been uploaded to Code, but its probably not a tool too many are going to have an interest in.
Iraq Speech
Random Thoughts
- Why have fundamentalist christianity and atheist Objectivism become such strange bedfellows?
- Thanks to the Apache Friends for XAMPP. Better, free (beer/speech) than Nusphere, my previous distro.
- Congratulations to our Corporate America "Friends" for winning a unanimous Supreme Court overturn of the Grokster decision. (For the sarcasm challenged: A technology creator distributing a product with an "implied" usage of breaking Copyright law is now liable for its users' violations.)
No cause for celebration just yet...
Got the official rejection from the Google Summer of Code initiative, today. Needless to say it was disheartening, but considering that 5,000+ other people were rejected I can't take it too personally. I'm going to seek out what criticism I can get and probably still work on at least portions of my original plan.
The 1337 SP3AK is killing me...
Honestly, at this point I almost want the ability to ship people who speak in leet, or otherwise poorly, some sort of intervention. Required Remedial English Classes or something. Anyway its gotten really bad in some of the email I've gotten recently and I feel like bashing my head in everytime I see "omg", among other initialisms.
The low point of my week thus far was coming back from class yesterday to a pile of emails from these stupid Brazilians. There are several Brazillians I admire like Miguel de Icaza, and Brazil is pushing international copyright laws in some good directions (partly out necessity, as early (1700s) America once did). On the other hand Brazil is producing way too many youngsters with too much time on their hands and internet access, because their vigilante "hacker" (actually, "cracker") groups are becoming too large and aggressive.
I so would have had the urge to laugh after calling my dad to tell him he couldn't check his work email because a Brazillian gang had attacked my host's servers, if it weren't for sludging through email after email of poor, annoying leet-English. They were doing me "a favor" by bringing my host to its knees and annoying the shit out of me.
Maybe the joke is on me for being so tied into the internet that a rampaging gang of Brazillians with bad English and a love of odd spelling, believing they are working to solve the World's security problems, can be the low point of my week. Or maybe it just says how well my weeks have been going recently.
Meanwhile,I was pleasantly pleased at how my host handled things. According to my website logs they restored from a backup that was created within an hour of ...
Lamenting the Languishing Linguistics Department, Part Two
On the tails of what I wrote yesterday I chanced into an interesting conversation today about it...
This freshman English teacher (teaching 102) was sitting on the steps of the Humanities building smoking while her class was busy, and I was on break. I reminisced, "Yeah, I had one of those a while ago... hmm, I took 105." She responded, "Ah, you are an honors student...", and I sheepishly looked at my shoes and cut in with, "Well, I was." I then had to explain to her how my GPA was scrambled over in the Engineering courses and that my real draw/passion for it lies closer to the linguistic/creative edge than the mathematical/science edge. She then went through most of the questions I had asked myself in last night's blog post. It was such glorious irony, I guess, to have someone else ask them of me.
She lamented the University's lack of strength when it came to the cross-disciplinary arts, and reminded me of how what little remained of the Linguistics department had been poorly smashed into her own English department. She then pointed out that the ex-head of the Linguistics department was someone that I would do well to meet, and that the University was so poorly utilizing his skills because he was now doing menial work in the Communications department!
Just very interesting to see my own self-discussion revisited in conversation no more than eight or nine hours after I wrote it.
The Ugly, Uncaring University
First of all, I like my University... she's not the prettiest swan in a lake, but she has wings and can fly (sometimes). However, it is hard not to complain about the problems you see; perhaps in the hope of seeing something change...
Lamenting the Languishing Linguistic Department
Almost all of the University of Louisville's problems revolve around the fact that the University is "hollow" in a way. The outlying, more vocational or research oriented areas (Engineering, Medicine, Dentistry, Business) have well rounded curricula. But, each is its own segregated fiefdom (largely due to the fact that the University was indeed created as a series of individual schools that were sloppily integrated). There is little communication between them, even after so many years of pretending to be a part of the same University. What's worse is that the Arts & Sciences department that is supposed to act as the glue binding them is weak and in disrepair. What money there is is being spent on the individual fiefdoms and sports leaving A&S to pick up the scraps, and it shows: the areas that A&S pushes money into are the ones bordering the fiefdoms (the Gen Ed courses required for accreditations and the science courses required).
I'm in the third week of German and reminded of how much I love languages. UofL has a mere handful of linguistic courses; most of which are modern language courses which remain only because of general education accreditation requirements for other degree programs.
Not that I didn't know this going in... when I applied, dead tired of school, I stupidly thought the last thing I wanted was a "pointless" liberal studies degree. Funny how four years later I feel myself sometimes regretting not taking a degree of more diverse ...
RailNet
The RailNet series started simply enough. I wanted to try my hand at writing a personal story of the end of a universe. In a simple, dueling narrative The Last Train to Beldor V told the story of a young girl doomed to this ending universe and the impersonal beauracratize that made sure everyone knew the end was coming. Then something unexpected happened: I fell in love with characters and the story. As one of the few DRAGONzine stories planned from the beginning to not be a series, I suddenly realized that where I thought I had written an end, I really created a beautiful beginning. What resulted was a retooling, reexamining, and redocumentation of the universe. I wrote two short stories with bits of the larger world history shortly after the end of DRAGONzine and also pushed RailNet from its humble roots into being one of my top documented universes.
Which is why on 6/9/2005 I'm planning to use RailNet as one of the foundations of the Open Mythos Endeavour.
Tuesday Night Excursion
Went out tonight (alone, as usual) to The Jazz Factory and heard two sets of the Metro Louisville Big Band - Summer Edition. It felt somewhat sinful to listen to a big band like that in such an intimate setting as the Jazz Factory. I enjoyed it, and just wish I had someone to enjoy it with...
The Problem of Work
I filled out an application for the Google Summer of Code initiative, and have been reading/responding to some of the messages in the discussion group for it. It is an exciting thing. (Google is planning to sponsor nearly a million dollars of new Open Source development from College students, partly to entice more into joining the Open Source community in the long term.)
It's surprising to me, though, that I'm really not all that excited or incentivized about the money. I'm not desperate for money anymore; I've slaked that thirst. I really wouldn't have noticed that if it weren't for following the discussion group where I see some kids complaining about not being able to compete for the money and how much "age-ism" that is, and I remember when I was like that.
My major incentive has been the possible that with money involved in a contract I might be able to claim this with the co-op and avoid at least one semester of working for a giant uncaring corporation. To me, that is the real excitement about this initiative is that it puts up a monetary bounty to go out and do some of the philanthropy that I was planning to do anyway. I'm still planning to do as much as I can this Summer, with or without the stipend, but now the prospect arises that I might get a few bucks for the philanthropy that I think needs to get done. I've always known that there are a few groups I could go begging to once the concept was proven and the costs of running it got to be too much for me, but until SoC I saw no real prospect/need for charter funding.
Anyway, speaking of the ...
XML formats new Office defaults
New XML formats will be the Office 12 default formats. This is really excellent news. The files are very simple to play with XSD-backed, ZIP-compressed things. As a coder who spent 3 months in stupid corporation land, this is pure excitement. So often the pointy-hairs want reports in .DOC, .XLS, .PPT from a web application, and this will make things much simpler to do.
Modernism v. Romanticism
Very rare for me to post one of these, but this one has some interesting pyshcological questions. (Quiz results follow...)
 | You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility.
What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com |
Ich spreche Deutsch! (Sort of...)
Started a new class today (Intensive German 1)... learned that if I felt like switching my third term summer class I could have a definite minor (in 10 weeks, total... hurrah for Liberal Arts) and if I felt really desperate and sick of school I would probably only be a few credits from a BA in German. Not that I'm planning to do such a thing, but I can't seem to shake that feeling that I'm going to be here forever, and reassurance from the A&S school that I really have been here for 4 years and that it hasn't been just a dream felt nice.
I also started a new diversion today. Signed up for a 14 day EVE Online trial. This will be another MMOG vacation I can add to my list. Like Matrix Online, I don't think I'm going to stay. EVE Online is beautiful and well put together for the space genre, but the problem is that without the arcade dogfighting (sure its unrealistiv, but it is fun) and even with the added RPG elements (skills, attributes) it just doesn't excite me as much as some of my earlier favorites (Freespace 2). Of course, I'm not sure I ever really got into the trading/ship-building aspects of the games. I've always been a story guy, I guess.
