animal rescue
we are now fostering two needing-much-love animals here.

1) Hera, an eight month old kitty, very skittish and non-people-adjusted.

2) Darcie, an (I'm guessing) eight to ten year old female cocker spaniel.

I should really post pictures, I guess. It is nice to have animals other than fish running around the house being friendly and playful. (These are very friendly animals, and so far I've had *zero* trouble with either - other than some minor toilet malfunctions, at least.)
(link) [elijahwright]

calendar updates
I spent a few minutes moving things from my mailbox onto the google calendar that I was using for departmental and SLIS-related events last spring.

Anyone who's interested should be able to search at Google Calendar for "SLIS Doctoral Student Association" (or similar) and find it...

In bulk, I calendared the events of SLIS DSA's "Friday Conversations", running this fall, as well as the talk dates that katy's lab sent out for their talks. RKCSI's dissertation support group is on there too; folks are meeting tomorrow to discuss meeting times for that, so I have nothing else there to calendar, yet.

I like having things calendared, even if I don't make it to the events. Somehow it makes the world feel a little bit tidier, and I find that somewhat comforting...
(link) [elijahwright]

tiger botia update
the two tiger botia appear to have scared the bejeezus out of the nuisance snails in my smaller fishtank.

I'm not seeing many of the mid-sized snails, anymore.

We haven't managed to 'catch' the botia eating any snails, and we don't see broken shell pieces, either. It does seem, however, that there are fewer snails in the tank.

The largest of the nuisance snails - the original, matriarch, snail - known derisively as "big momma" - has taken to burying herself quite deep in the gravel. I suspect that to be some sort of reaction to predation - she's never done that, before now.

I wonder how many snails the two botia have eaten since introduction... it would be very interesting to know within an order of magnitude or so. But I simply just don't know....
(link) [elijahwright]

Mon, 03 Sep 2007

tiger botia (multiple)
I've introduced two tiger botia into the smaller fishtank in hopes that they will devour the burgeoning hordes of Malaysian trumpet snails - a nuisance species. I counted about 30 of them on the surface the other night. [They're sort of nocturnal- they get active when it is dark. Counting them is one of those things you do after they've had several hours of prolonged darkness.] That was 30 that were sizable - there are vastly more of them in the tank, but they're either deeply buried or too tiny to easily see.

Botia-variety fish are basically loaches. They get big. These two are about the size of a triple-A battery. If they get too big, I guess they'll have to go back to some pet store or another...
(link) [elijahwright]

Fri, 24 Aug 2007

Your Score: Dionysus

33% Extroversion, 33% Intuition, 72% Emotiveness, 71% Perceptiveness

Although deeply emotional, you are extremely lacking in self-knowledge. You are somewhat needy, and when bored, may become very hedonistic. Your life is a quest for meaning, above all else. You are most like Dionysus. You are primarily interested in serving others, but your efforts are almost always unappreciated. You aren't confrontational, you're often out of tune with your own needs and unaware of the consequences of your own actions.

You are, at heart, a good person. You are very affectionate, and you are very loyal to your friends and family. You are very reluctant to burden others with your own problems, to the point that this in itself can become a problem for the people who care about you. This is a particular of a more general problem. Dionysus sends wave of ruin throughout his personal life. He is the photographer who seduces his subjects. He is the teacher who seduces a student. He is the art student who paints nonrepresentational splashes of color, he is the poet who rejects meter and content. You seek sexual partners more than anything else (this is to exploit the nurturing side of others to help fill your own void). If not sexual partners, this desire to become the object of sympathy with other people can manifest itself in other destructive ways. Stinkfist by Tool explains your condition pretty well. It's very likely that you haven't had many experienced mentors. You don't want them either, because you're the sort of person who rejects criticism and boundaries, but they're also your only hope for reaching any kind of emotional maturity.

Famous People Like You: John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner

I'd tell you to stay clear of Hermes, Icarus and Apollo, but you could probably learn something from them. You're least likely to hurt The Oracle, Atlas, Prometheus, and Daedalus, but Atlas and Daedalus won't like you very much.
Seek out: The Oracle, Prometheus

Sun, 05 Aug 2007

Bloomington OpenSolaris User Group (BTN-OSUG)
Along with Phillip Steinbachs from The Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, I am... 'encouraging' the formation of an OpenSolaris user group to serve the Bloomington and central Indiana area. [Indy probably needs a group all its own, eventually...]

We put a proposal in last week to the umbrella OpenSolaris organization; accepted and pushed through the process with flying colors. It was unbelievably *easy*. Now the hard stuff will start to come up.

A listserv and some content for our space on the opensolaris.org site are really the next things on the agenda. I think Phillip is taking charge of putting some content there, probably sometime this week.

Why OpenSolaris? Well... there are some things about OpenSolaris that meet different ecosystem needs than the Debian bits that I otherwise prefer to use. :-)

I am looking very much forward to Sun's Project Indiana, in hopes that the two sub-platforms (OpenSolaris and Debian) I use most for research computing will become a lot more similar than they currently are.
(link) [elijahwright]

Wed, 27 Jun 2007

Thu, 22 Mar 2007

twitter
i have a twitter account now - feel free to friend me or add me at your leisure. i will, of course, reciprocate. you can find me there at http://twitter.com/elijahwright [what is twitter? twitter is a status-notification system for friends. or for anyone, really. it looks handy, so i'm trying it out.]

Wed, 21 Mar 2007

planetplanet update
I've updated planetplanet, the software that drives slisblogs.com, to a slightly less ancient version. We'll see whether this straightens out the "issues" with a few of the feeds, or not. [Note - bzr is *cool*. This software is one of the very few things that I touch that uses bzr, sadly....]

Tue, 20 Mar 2007

Why Doesn't Google Calendar Format Entries Correctly... Or Does It?
I just added the feed for the SLIS Doctoral Student Association to slisblogs. What a mess. First, I got every calendar item sucked onto the page at once. THere are a LOT of them. Second, the formatting kind of stinks. I'm guessing, at this point, that maybe an update to the planetplanet software would help - but I'm not even really sure. Getting rid of an extra "br" tag here and there may be tougher than that............

Tue, 25 Jul 2006

flickr brokenness
I had to disable the pulling of feeds from flickr to slisblogs.com. Something was, apparently, changing repeatedly at flickr - leading to some serious spammage of slisblogs with the same photos over and over. I don't like instability that much....
(link) [elijahwright]

Fri, 21 Jul 2006

recent movie watching
Some reviews, based on my recent movie watching: 1) Superman Returns -- well, it stank. 2) V for Vendetta -- well, it was okay. I like the subversive elements. 3) Elizabethtown -- about E-town, which I drive through periodically on the way to visit the fam... okay, but a little less than lucid. Happy fuzzy movie, not really very clear at some points exactly what is going on.
(link) [elijahwright]

Mon, 17 Jul 2006

new fishies
My fishtank suffered some casualties, so I had to boost the population.

Now in the tank are six more green tiger barbs, three dwarf gouramis, and a lone blue gourami that was in one of the tanks at PetCo....

Man, I dig fish.
(link) [elijahwright]

Thu, 13 Jul 2006

Crackers
Last night, I made a trip to Crackers comedy club in Indy. Fun was had. The headliner is going to be on "bob and tom" Friday morning. I guess he was funny... sort of.
(link) [elijahwright]

Tue, 11 Jul 2006

arrrrgh.
Tonight's fun: setting up an ipf firewall. On a machine running Solaris 9. Which isn't all that ancient, actually -- but which is no longer what we use for new machines.

A little frustrating. I haven't touched ipf on sol9 in *ages* - like four years - and there are a few cobwebs accumulating on those brain cells.

I'd much rather do a nice smooth upgrade to sol10, instead, but that would probably take much, much longer than what I just did.
(link) [elijahwright]

test post
This is a test post - I'm trying out the interface to post to livejournal via jabber... from gaim, on ze linux desktop. I am pretty sure it will work, but we'll see.
(link) [elijahwright]

Mon, 19 Jun 2006

the tone adults supposedly can't hear
Some of you may have heard about this new ringtone - the one that adults supposedly can't hear, but that teens can.

It turns out that I *can* hear it, and it is annoying as heck. Very, very painful whining noise with a good large dose of rough distortion in it. Painful on the ears.
(link) [elijahwright]

Mon, 12 Jun 2006

Special Issue on FL/OSS
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======================================== Call for Papers for a special issue 'Socio-technical Dynamics in the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Social World' in the journal Science Studies, an Interdisciplinary Journal for Science and Technology Studies (http://www.sciencestudies.fi/), to be published autumn 2007 Guest Editors: Yuwei Lin (University of Manchester) & Lars Risan (University of Oslo) ======================================== The development of Free/Libre Open Source Software not only intrigues computer scientists to review processes and methods in software engineering, but also stimulates social scientists to look into what have become a mythical phenomenon of our digital era. Questions around how distributed groups of individuals work together in an on-line environment, seemingly without formal ties, to produce high-quality software that acquire cross-sector acceptance continue to puzzle social scientists. Over the past years, anthropologists, economist, historians, lawyers, philosophers, and sociologists have tried to provide various explanations to the phenomenon of on-line social networking, on-line collaboration and on-line knowledge creation and sharing (i.e. common-based peer production). However, the existing body of literature on FLOSS faces a bottleneck, namely that of lacking a STS-inspired empirical investigation of the multiplicity of FLOSS-practices. Here, we try to raise some provocative questions: What kind of questions do FLOSS-practices and networks pose to STS? And does STS really possess theoretical tools that are good enough to analyse the FLOSS development? Might it be that the materiality - and the immateriality - of code needs theoretical and methodological contributions from other fields in social sciences such as politics and economics (such as network effects, lock in and abstract objects)? But then, that challenge is also bidirectional: How does the theoretical vocabularies and the empirical methods of STS add something new to the more economical understandings of FLOSS? This special issue aims to meet these theoretical and methodological challenges in both FLOSS and STS studies. It does so by encouraging research based on qualitative research methodologies and methods. Such a qualitative inquiry challenges the universally vocal and normative way of depicting FLOSS culture and practices (e.g. a homogeneous gift-giving and volunteering culture). The special issue will take a practice-based view to exploring multiple cultures and practices in developing, localizing, appropriating, commodifying, customizing FLOSS. The issue would also like to address the diversity in FLOSS communities through asking how seemingly global FLOSS culture is translated (un)successfully into different contexts and locales. We believe that this issue will demystify several stereotypes and misunderstandings about FLOSS and shed light on many emerging and changing cultural and socio-technical practices in our digital society and knowledge driven economies. Thinking reciprocally, we would also like to allow peculiar im/materialities of FLOSS practices challenge the way STS has traditionally dealt with socio-technical networks. ----------------------- Instructions to authors ----------------------- Manuscripts in English in any area relevant to the special issue should be submitted electronically to the guest editor Yuwei Lin <yuwei{at}ylin.org> and Lars Risan <lars.risan{at}tik.uio.no>. You will normally receive an acknowledgement within a few days. Please provide email addresses for all authors. Papers, no exceeding 10,000 words including notes, references and abstract, are accepted in electronic format, with Open Document Text (.odt) or OpenOffice.org 1.0 Text Document (.sxw) being the preferred formats (other formats are acceptable by prior arrangement). Files should not be security protected, and should be anonymised. The editors reserve the right to make the style of presentation uniform prior to publication, whilst making every effort not to alter the content of an article. Paper submission will be acknowledged via email. Subsequent enquiries concerning paper progress should be made to the guest editor Yuwei Lin <yuwei{at}ylin.org> and Lars Risan <lars.risan{at}tik.uio.no>. For details of preparation of the manuscript, see the Science Studies Journal website http://www.sciencestudies.fi/?q=authors/#preparationofmanuscripts and http://www.sciencestudies.fi/authors. --------------- Important dates --------------- October 29, 2006: full paper submissions to guest editors. January 15, 2007: Guest editors and authors complete manuscripts and round robin referee each other's articles. February 7, 2007: Guest editors submit a complete set of articles to Science Studies for review. Science Studies may return articles for revision if needed before sending to outside referees. April 25: Deadline for referee reports to be sent back to Science Studies. Reports and decisions sent to authors and guest editors. August 22: Final Copy Due September - October 2007: Layout and proof-reading. November 2007: Issue goes to press.

Wed, 24 May 2006

T2000 / Solaris 10
Today's fun: jumpstarting Solaris 10 onto a Sun T2000. Nice box. Small, powerful, and incredibly noisy. I think we might have a dead fan bearing. I don't want to call support just yet... it isn't fun. Sun has horrible elevator music.
(link) [elijahwright]

Fri, 14 Apr 2006

tooling around with databases
tooling around with databases today. moving big blobs of social network data into postgresql. painful, not fun, and frustrating. good, though. ;)

/snark
(link) [elijahwright]

Mon, 12 Dec 2005

Mon, 21 Nov 2005

The top 20 geek novels, ones I've read in bol
The top 20 geek novels, ones I've read in bold.

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams
2. 1984 -- George Orwell
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks
15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein
16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick
17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham
(link) [elijahwright]

Wed, 06 Feb 2013

Wed, 02 Jan 2013

Tue, 05 Apr 2011

Tue, 15 Dec 2009

Fri, 24 Jul 2009

Wed, 22 Jul 2009

Thu, 09 Jul 2009

Tue, 07 Jul 2009

Thu, 25 Jun 2009

Fri, 19 Jun 2009

Tue, 16 Jun 2009

Mon, 15 Jun 2009

Wed, 10 Jun 2009

Sun, 07 Jun 2009

Mon, 12 Nov 2007

Mon, 10 Sep 2007