fare, posts by tag: smop - LiveJournal

I've long noticed that the focus of a gaze, the a propos of a smirk, can distinguish the aware and open-minded from the fools and the fanatical. Just peek at random people in the street, compare to pictures of random researchers on the Internet, or to pictures of random religious fanatics also on the net. There's a lot you can tell -- or maybe you can't, but then odds are a lot of people could tell you can't.

Several friends recently shared their similar experience with me. And so, in the spirit of HotOrNot, I eventually bought DEFTORDAFT.COM. The idea would be to rate people by intelligence according to published pictures. Is there a business plan? Not quite yet. Maybe I could just be diversification for the hotornot site. Or maybe we could link to a geek-oriented dating site such as OkCupid? We could also provide a captcha system in the spirit of HotCaptcha that recognizes people intelligent enough to differentiate the deft from the daft.

I suspect the data processing will be more complex than for HotOrNot, since a sense for sexual attraction is more uniformly shared than a sense for intellectual discrimination. Although even HotOrNot could probably classify people in clusters according to their aesthetic tastes. Because DeftOrDaft will judge the intelligence of the viewer as well as the viewee, we'll probably have to resort to pre-calibrated samples, such as people with known IQs or SATs, or from colleges with known SAT averages; and we'll probably have to use Bayesian analysis techniques such as used by LikeBetter. So, interesting stuff going on behind the scenes...

Ideas are cheap. This one is free. Wanna join with the expensive part: actually building the site?

I am pleased to announce the availability of Exscribe, a document authoring tool programmed and programmable in Common Lisp. It currently only targets the web, but it's extensible, so who knows?

You may remember that I am looking for a solution to the SNAIL problem, which will have to be based on epistemic monotonic logic. Well, monotone offers half of the solution, monotonic logic. And that is also the more useful half to me, considering that the instantaneous latency of my SNAIL networks is actually low: when my computers are connected to each other, then the communication latency between them is below a few tenths of seconds at most.

I am glad to announce my latest piece of semi-useful software, CL-Launch, an infrastructure to easily make your Common Lisp software launchable from a Unix command line.

At the request of an Indian student, I have worked out a formal document containing my term project proposals for students completing a Masters in Computer Science, specializing in Distributed Systems: http://fare.tunes.org/computing/term-project-proposal.html.

For a long time, I've considered it an awful practice that students should have term projects consisting of toy programs and rigged demos following the MWRO principle: many write, run once. Instead, they should be encouraged to systematically participate in actual useful real-world projects, and if possible free software projects, that make academic peer review possible. I never could do anything about it when in French universities, so maybe this is a godsend opportunity to move things in the right direction.

Here are a few things I'd like to say about dynamic software development, after I've just had the opportunity to test first hand with CTO what I had been studying in theory and through the experiences of other people.

Now is a good time to announce that the software behind Cliki.Tunes.Org, aka CTO, has been noticeably improved.

The Linux framebuffer console for the Jornada820 and other machines does not heed all the cursor controls that it has on the x86 console. Therefore, many programs that try to reprogram the cursor, including the login program and emacs, end up making the cursor invisible. A correct escape sequence to make the cursor appear, as per the Framebuffer-HOWTO, is ESC [ ? 2 c (thank you once more, pineal gland). Now, my problem, is to convince Emacs to output this control sequence instead of the one it uses to program the cursor, or sometimes after it makes the cursor invisible, so as to ensure the cursor is visible. Can any (X)Emacs guru out there help me find out how?

Yes, of course, an alternative take would be to edit the framebuffer driver and fix it so it works as advertised, or at least doesn't make the cursor invisible unless explicitly requested. However, I'd also like to convince Emacs to output other control sequences when it initializes its output: for instance, I sometimes found the console in the wrong output encoding mode, I'd like to ensure latin1 output encoding with the ESC ( ? B control sequence. The scary thing is I remembered enough of this sequence to retrieve it by testing things on the console, since I had spent quite some time fixing the same issues on a PC. (that is, I remembered ESC something, ( something and an uppercase letter.) My experimentation included the writing of a shell script to display those characters in the ASCII table that are not control codes; the script takes several seconds to run, spawning three subprocesses at every character, and using eval. Ain't Unix a wonderfully designed operating system? I don't think so. Just because I may prefer Linux to its current competition doesn't mean I'm not more and more of a Unix-hater.

Since I'm beginning to get seriously interested in SNAIL, that is, Slow Networking with Atrocious Interchange Latency, I've done a bit of research as to decentralized replacements for CVS. After a liminary consultation of my pineal gland, here is what I've found, thanks notably to Rick Moene: There is indeed a package based on monotonic logic, appropriately named monotone (doh!). There are also several other promiseful software packages, including the following ones that attracted my attention: Arch, Codeville, DARCS, Meta-CVS. If you anything about these software projects and their rivals, I'm curious about you opinion. Meanwhile, I'll investigate these, and see which is most hackable.

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Après un (trop long) voyage en automobile de Metz à Paris, voici quelques miennes ruminations sur l'automobile...