geek-guides.com, elijah wright's weblog

"Are you out there, can you hear this?Jimmy Olson,

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:30 -0400

"Are you out there, can you hear this?
Jimmy Olson, Johnny Memphis"....
(link) [elijahwright]

sleepy. Feeling slightly under the weather this m

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:00 -0400

sleepy. Feeling slightly under the weather this morning.
(link) [elijahwright]

hunting for a recipe for homemade root beer. Woul

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:30 -0400

hunting for a recipe for homemade root beer. Would prefer that it not involve a keg, which I don't have. (Do have large carboys though..)
(link) [elijahwright]

http://ping.fm/HA6ba

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:30 -0400

http://ping.fm/HA6ba
(link) [elijahwright]

tinkering with a few things this afternoon. Tryin

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:00 -0400

tinkering with a few things this afternoon. Trying to relax a tiny bit in between crises.
(link) [elijahwright]

thinks the --replace option to mysqldump is the be

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:30 -0400

thinks the --replace option to mysqldump is the bee's knees.
(link) [elijahwright]

having a busy day.

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:30 -0400

having a busy day.
(link) [elijahwright]

@karlstolley i am very impressed with the #twitrhe

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:30 -0400

@karlstolley i am very impressed with the #twitrhet page
(link) [elijahwright]

14-14-21 or bust.

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:30 -0400

14-14-21 or bust.
(link) [elijahwright]

Iran protest pictures - Iran is ready to change.

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:00 -0400

Iran protest pictures - Iran is ready to change. http://ow.ly/epvr
(link) [elijahwright]

restaurant recommendation - "Double Dogs" in Bowli

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:30 -0400

restaurant recommendation - "Double Dogs" in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Good place, we enjoyed very much yesterday.
(link) [elijahwright]

a bit perturbed at having lost all of the data on

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:00 -0400

a bit perturbed at having lost all of the data on a 300GB hard drive. Fortunately, nothing terribly important on there.
(link) [elijahwright]

Told H her pants were on fire after she told a fib

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:00 -0400

Told H her pants were on fire after she told a fib. Got her to look. Quite hilarious.
(link) [elijahwright]

OLPC and AoIR 8.0 slideshows

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:30 -0400

Several folks have asked for slides from either the OLPC talk that I gave on Friday, or from AoIR several weeks ago.

Both sets of slides (in multiple formats) are available from http://stderr.org/~elw/2007/
(link) [elijahwright]

animal rescue

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:30 -0400

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

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:30 -0400

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

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:30 -0400

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]

tiger botia (multiple)

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:30 -0400

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]

greek mythology personality test

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 16:00 -0400

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

Link: The Greek Mythology Personality Test written by Aleph_Nine on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

(link) [elijahwright]

boogs!

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:30 -0400

on a bug-filing spree today.

kind of fun, but also kind of twisted. ;)
(link) [elijahwright]

Bloomington OpenSolaris User Group (BTN-OSUG)

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 19:00 -0400

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]

twilightimperium3 player map

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:00 -0400

(link) [elijahwright]

twitter

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:00 -0400

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.]

planetplanet update

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:29 -0400

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....]

Why Doesn't Google Calendar Format Entries Correctly... Or Does It?

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:57 -0400

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............

flickr brokenness

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 17:00 -0400

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]

recent movie watching

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 12:00 -0400

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]

new fishies

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 19:00 -0400

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]

Crackers

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 10:00 -0400

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]

arrrrgh.

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:00 -0400

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

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:30 -0400

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]

the tone adults supposedly can't hear

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 21:30 -0400

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]

Special Issue on FL/OSS

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:00 -0400

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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.

(link) [elijahwright]

T2000 / Solaris 10

Wed, 24 May 2006 15:00 -0400

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]

tooling around with databases

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 18:30 -0400

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

/snark
(link) [elijahwright]

Which OS are you?

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 10:00 -0400

Which OS are You?
(link) [elijahwright]

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

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:30 -0400

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]

People love SLIS podcasts!

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 20:00 -0400

See here:

http://www2.scedu.unibo.it/roversi/Blog/2005/10/universit-e-podcasting.html

:)
(link) [elijahwright]

elke michelmayr: a case study on emergent semantics in communities

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 02:34 -0400

folksonomies - what are they?
comparison to taxonomies


multi-user web applications that provide a simple categorization sy stem
- items: web pages, images, citations
tags = keywords ... can be chosen freely
every user has a web page with a list of own items
- sorted in reverse-chron order
- can be filtered by tags
public access to item collections and metadata

bottom-up approach to categorization
- no pre-defined model or hierarchy
- inconsistencies
-- synonyms, homonyms
-- singular and plural versions of a tag
-- keywords that conssit of two terms (ie semantic web, semantic_web,
semanticweb)
-- relies on aggregation of metadata
-- tag frequency distribution: tags most often used to annotate an item
categorize it best; no need to reach consensus
-- relationships between tags evolve from metadata

- amount of metadata crucial!
-- number of users, lifetime of folksonomy

comparison of metadata
- lots of discussion about taxonomies vs. folksonomies, eg clay shirky 2005
- experiment: compare metadata from two big community projects that 
  categorize web pages to find out about the differences
- dmoz open directory project http://dmoz.org
-- taxonomy for web pages
-- ~ 600k concepts and about 5M instances
-- available in RDF format (two big files)
- social bookmarking site del.icio.us
-- no official numbers; ~100k users
-- download the web pages (simple html)


procedure
-- use only items from del.icio.us that were annotated by more than 
   100 users (=popular items)
-- download random popular items from del.icio.us
-- lookup if items are present in the dmoz collection (~25% of the items 
   were also present in dmoz)
-- 788 items with metadata from both sources (~50% of them are instances of 
   dmoz concept Top/Computers)

preparation of data
- preparations (much mangling of data here...)
- example:  Top/Science/Math/Publication -> publication math science
- how to compare?
-- avg dmoz hierarchy length: 4.67
-- avg del.icio.us tags per item: 24.59

comparison
-- lookup for each dmoz category (is it included in the del.icio.us tags?)
-- take top 1,3,5,10,15,all tags into account
--- top tag is included in ~50% of all cases
--- top 5 is the fairest comparison
--- top tags match more often than the less popular ones


folksonomies and peer to peer networks
- architectures are very diffferent
-- folksonomies are centralized systems, aggregation is easy
-- p2p networks are distributed, aggregation is hard.
- user behavior is comparable
-- act autonomously
-- no central authority
-- want to share information
- data from a folksonomy can be used to model peers and content distribution
- ...


can interest-based locality be observed?
- interest based locality (defn)
- method
-- retrieve all users from del.icio.us that store a random bookmark
-- retrieve all their collections
- retrieved 4 test sets
-- 155, 248, 280, 551 users
-- distribution of items among users nearly equal in the test sets
-- avg.: 84% of items are not shared.

related work

adam mathes, 2004: folksonomies - cooperative classification and
communication through shared metadata

clay shirky, 2005: ontology is overrated: categories, links, and tags

scott golder and bernardo huberman, 2005...


summary
- investigated the properties of metadata provided by a folksonomy
- compared it to dmoz data collection
- tried to find interest based locality
- paper contains some other experiments i did not have time to tell you
about
- open questions
-- is there a way to combine the bottom-up and top-down approach for
creating metadata
-- how much could the semantic web benefit from it?


audience questions:

have you thought about comparing the tags used at delicious to the meta tags
provided by page authors?  e.g. to detect spamming by page authors of search
engines

- mention of delicious director

Phillipe Cudre-Mauroux: analyzing semantic interoperability in bioinformatic database networks

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 02:06 -0400

1) peer data management systems
2) semantic interoperability in the large
3) the sequence retrieval system
- degree distribution
- analysis of giant component
- weighted analysis
4) conclusions


beyond keyword search - searching semantically richer objects in large
scale herterogenous networks  (semi-structured or structured data)

decentralized data integration
large scale information systems (e.g. WWW) VS distributed databases

data integration: LAV/GAV
- traditional database techniques (LAV/GAV) rely on centralized schemas to
integrate data sources.
- not applicable to our context
-- scale (upper ontologies?)
-- churn
-- autonomy
- how can we foster semantic interoperability in decentralized settings?

semantic interoperability
- from 'own schema' to 'known schema'
- extending semantic interoperability to ....

peer data management systems
- pairwise mappings
-- peer datamanagement systems (PDMS)
- local mappings overcome global heterogeneity
-- interactive query rewriting


semantic mediation layer
- semantic mediation layer
over:
- overlay layer
over:
- physical layer

correlated/uncorrelated among the three layers.


schema-to-schema graph
- inter-organization of the different schemas used by the peers
-- logical model
-- directed
-- weighted
-- redundant


the semantic connectivity graph
- definition (semantic interoperability
-
- 
-

observations
- theorem
- observation 1
- observation 2

semantic interop in the large
- how can we analyze semantic interop in large-scale pdms?
-

size of the giant component


the sequence retrieval system

why is srs interesting?
- applying our heuristics on a real large-scale corpus of interconnected
databases
-- more than 380 databanks
-- more than 500 (undirected) links
-- data used by professionals on a daily basis

crawling the srs schema-to-schema graph
- custom crawler
- as of may 2005 (ebi repository)
-- 388 nodes
-- 518 edges

- giant connected component (187 nodes)
- power law distribution of node degrees
- clustering coefficient = 0.32
- diameter = 9

results
- connectivity indicator ci = 25.4
-- super critical state
- size of the giant component
-- 0.47 (derived)
-- 0.48 (observed)

graphs with same power-law degree distribution
- varying number of edges

analyzing weighted networks
- do we have a sufficient number of 'good' mappings
- introducing quality measures from the mappings
-- weights
-- attribute /schema level
-- cf. Chatty Web (WWW03)

- semantic query forwarding 
-- per hop forwarding behaviors
-- only forward if w sub i >= tau
--- tau = 0 : flooding
--- tau = 1 : exact answers


weighted results
- same degree distribution (388 nodes)
- uniformly distributed weights between 0 and 1

conclusions
- analysing a real network of bioinformatic databases
-- accurate results (even for relatively small networks)
-- weighted / unweighted
- current works
-- compositions of weights along a path
-- semantic random walkers
-- public domain simulator
- future works
-- analysing other forwarding behaviors
-- implementation in a real pdms (self-organizing mappings)
--- gridvine


references
a necessary condition for semantic interoperability in the large
cudre-maroux and karl aberer (ODBASE 2004)

gridvine: building internet-scale semantic overlay networks
ISWC2004

semantic overlay networks (tutorial)  VLDB 2005


complete reference list available at http://lsirpeope.epfl.ch/pcudre