Entries Tagged 'software' ↓

FYI, for the geeks out there, even though:

{ foo: 'bar' }

Is a valid way to initialize a javascript object, it is not valid JSON. In JSON, the key and string values have to be double quoted:

{ "foo": "bar" }

This matters because jQuery 1.4 uses native parsing and the getJSON method will silently fail on malformed files.

Versioining systems are pieces of software that track changes in files. They exist in a variey of forms, and one of the more popular currently is git which was designed for maintaining the Linux kernel.

The basic building blocks of a git repository are “blobs.” In git, a blob is simply a file:

We'll start with the natural building block of any digital system: the bit. A bit is just a binary digit, a one or a zero. Bits are used to encode information. For example, imagine I have a bunch of red cards and a bunch of green cards. I give a red card to everyone in the country except for the President to whom I give a green one. Since the cards only have two possible states, they are a form of bit. The information associated with that bit, however, is highly complex.

Bits are combined into series to represent larger sets of possibilities. Whereas the President bit could only represent two possibilities: someone is the President (red card) or not the President (green card), a string of n bits can represent 2ⁿ possibilities. Almost all digital information in the world today is stored as groups of eight bits called "bytes."

This command should work, imho:

$file = ~/personal/private/.htaccess;
find ~/ -name .htaccess -type f -exec diff $file {}
              \|\| ( echo 'Replacing: ' {} \&\& rm {} \&\& ln -s $file {} )\;

It should hunt down all the copies of my .htaccess files that are only there to password protect a directory and make them symlinks to an authoritative version.

There are many ways to accomplish the task and ⟰ is apparently not one of them. ☺

In the last post I mentioned the idea of adding a user root special directory at '...'. My other new directory is the repository (or project) root.

For example, I designed the site mr.pcvs.org for the volunteers in Mauritania. Part of the site is a cookbook, both of those sites though are a part of my web repository.

I want a web service where I can easily put a url to the output of a system command. I’d like to be able to stick a tag in this post and have the output of:

df | awk '/^\//{ used += $3; total += $2 } \
        END { print (used / 1024 / 1024) "g" \
                        " / " (total / 1024 / 1024) "g" \
                        " = " (used / total) }'

Piped into it whenever the page is loaded (with some caching to handle). It would be a network-level /proc filesystem. The systems could key the values on URIs. Putting it at the network level also lets you run a genetic algorithm on the programs that and being used to configure routing.

Adding artificial intelligence to routing does sound like a pretty good idea, now that I mention it. ☺ I could let remote programs run commands that I don’t care about being public like df, free. I could even expose a version of ps.

The network really would be the computer in that situation as individual routing agents learned from each other the optimum distribution patterns.

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Version control software was created to help programmers keep track of their code. All it does is let you see the version of a document as it existed at any point along the commit chain. (It’s like Vista’s restore points except on a per-file basis, so more complex to use, but hella powerful for managing data.)

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I’m still recapping my last six months. I went from the idea of a pervasive recommender market (Pythia) to a graph database to operate in (Tipspace) and ended up with the interface for navigating: Tip.

Tip is an interface for interacting with a conversational recommender through an accelerometer-enabled smart phone. You tip the device to navigate the interface:

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Collecting the data for a system like Pythia is difficult. The goal is to get as many different types of data with the hope of catching pertinent patterns in the wide net. (This should have been left till a later version, but) one simple way to collect this data is to make it easy for other people to collect it for you.

Tipspace is a CMS that acts as a distributed graph database by structuring the data in a standard way.

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As I go through a retrospective on the issues with the DoH, one of the main issues was building idea upon idea without properly recording and vetting them. I kept trying to get them sufficiently refined to make sense, and ended up not getting anything completed.

As I work on moving forward, I am recording these partial ideas to get them out of my head. The first is Pythia…

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