Facebook released an anonymized set of social network data for research purposes. It seems its been quickly identified as the social network for Harvard. This has interesting parallels to the AOL search logs release a while back.

Tags for this post: blather()

Wonder how bad sub-prime is in America? 700 homes in SoCal are foreclosed per day. This video gives an interesting look at the "trash out" process, which is what happens when you abandon stuff instead of paying your loan.

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I didn't realize HIV is so old. Apparently they've found samples going back to 1960, whereas I have always thought of HIV as a 1980s problem.

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Finally I understand the subprime crisis!

"Seller: Right. So, I think the Q-grades are dumped and leveraged upwards across 25 underplummeries? Our unicorn gives it a kick, and presto: you've got 300 percent annual growth.

Buyer: Now, you just said "unicorn." There is such a thing?

Seller: Uhhh. Kind of? Honestly, I don't know. Don't care!

Buyer: Well, you also said "300 percent." So, I'm sold!"

Its sad that consumerist is cutting two staff. I read Consumerist all the time, and its a great site. The economic downturn is quite noticable at the moment -- a couple of car dealers on El Camino Real have closed already...

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Better testing:
• r114: Unit tests for video.py
• r148: Updated unit test now that we create more tables
• r151: Start work on syndication unit tests
• r153: Unit test for bad syndication dates, as well as more flexibility in db connections needed for this unit test
• r157: Nicer unit test failure output, and refactor GetVideoDir() into the utility module
• r181: Slightly improve syndication unit tests
• r183: Add flag parsing to unit tests, and fix some more flag name changes

Better documentation:
• r117: Added a man page for video.py -- I'm not 100% happy with its name though

Bug fixes:
• r114: Fixed a bug where the new filename for video transcode could be the same as the input filename, resulting in video corruption. This was found with one of the new video.py unit tests
• r116: The logic for the --prompt flag was the wrong way around. Fixed.
• r119: Nicer download status messages
• r121: Handle 404s in feed updates better
• r129: Slight tweak to SVN submit script
• r131: More accurate tracking of proxy usage (update during download, instead of just at the end)
• r137: Proxy budget being exceeded doesn't count as a failed download attempt
• r143: Subscribe now renables inactive subscriptions
• r146: Add support to decimals to utility byte printer, fix a bug in the check for video directories
• r155: Have users send problems to the mailing list, instead of me personally
• r161: Don't throw exceptions for the videodir command line
• r167, 169: Display friendly sizes in records_tool output
• r171: Move verbose update arg into a flag
• r173: Add "-vo null" to mplayer invocation per Ryan Lutz. This improves support on machines without X, and speeds up the identify operation
• r175: Import patch from Thomas Mashos which fixes subscription removal, started work on syndication unit test improvements
• r177: Fix character escaping bug in show subtitles during import
• r179: Renamed --datadirdefault to --datadir. If set this will now change your data directory, regardless of if there was a previous value set.
• r190: Recording_tool now prompts for deletes
• r192: Improved explainvideodir output
• r194: Don't crash in explainvideodir if there is no video directory
• r197: Order results by subtitle in recordings_tool output

New features:
• r115: Upgraded schema to version 15 to support http_proxies for subscriptions. Added http_proxy command line, which allows you to use HTTP proxies for specified URLs. Moved HTTP accesses to use the proxy code.
• r127: Bump schema to v17, and add proxy use tracking including the "proxyusage" command
• r133: Allow daily budgets for proxy usage
• r115: Provide a user agent for HTTP requests, instead of just Python-urllib/1.17
• r117: Users will now be prompted to subscribe to an announcements video feed. This will happen exactly once. This behavior may be disabled with the --nopromptforannounce command line flag.
• r125: Add a full info dump command to video.py's command line interface
• r139: Bump schema to 19, and implement categories with the "category" command
• r141: Implement recording group support, and clarify category support
• r151: Implement a helper (recordings_tool) for handling the MythTV recordings table, this is useful for testing.
• r159: Add videodir and explainvideodir debugging commands, and update man page
• r163: Add title list feature to recordings_tool
• r165: Include recording count in title list
• r185: Add the resetattempts command

Development changes:
• r123: Added a submit script to automate putting the revision number into the ChangeLog
• r135: Tweak to new ChangeLog auto logging formatting

Tags for this post: mythtv() mythnettv()

My kids are in the Whisman School district. The campus they are at has around 150 more kids this year than last, and is really crowded. Is seems like hiring a private investigator to find incorrectly enrolled kids is going a bit far though.

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• Enchanters' End Game
• Robot Visions
• Forward the Foundation
• Foundation
• Foundation and Empire
• Guardians of the West
• The Stainless Steel Rat for President
• King of the Murgos
• Second Foundation
• Sticklers, Sideburns and Bikinis (not fully read yet, its a reference book)
• Foundation's Fear (didn't finish cause it sucked)
• Demon Lord of Karanda
• Sorceress of Darshiva

Tags for this post: book() read()

LibraryThing is an awesome site, and its good to see that they're growing. Anyone hack in PHP and want a job?

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Interesting news. Motorola and Nokia are apparently building teams of Android developers.

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Normally, I do a lot of my reading on the train (BART for those of you familiar with San Francisco), getting to and from work. An engrossing book keeps me awake and I read it relatively quickly. "Foundation's Fear", especially the first half of it, set a record for putting me to sleep. There were days in when I only managed to read a couple of pages. A paragraph or two and I'd be out, even before the train started moving. As others here have pointed out, there is a lot of boring dialogue and description and much of it focuses around the Voltaire and Joan of Arc artificial entities. Hundreds of pages of philosophical noodling and descriptions of imaginary scenes conjured up in cyberspace become numbing.

This book is not good, not because it's not Asimov but because it's simply not good. I had the luxury of reading it within the context of the other two "new" books and while that helps in hindsight, it doesn't while you're slogging through Benford's weighty prose.

Don't expect Asimov but then the reader shouldn't. As Bear and to a lesser extent Brin show, authors can bring a fresh perspective on the topic and do it fairly well. Benford never seems to make up his mind which of his myriad little sub plots will be the main plot and thus, nothing really happens that expands our understanding of the Foundation Galaxy. Moreover, instead of fleshing out some of Asimov's admittedly skimpy ideas in the Foundation galaxy or introducing new themes that build upon previous concepts, instead, we take a quantum leap into a muddled unknown with concepts (aliens and tiktoks being the two most egregious examples) that clearly don't belong in the Foundation setting.

• This book is much more explicit about Dors' nature than Asimov ever was. There was some element of doubt in Forward the Foundation right up until Dors' death. That is not the case with this book.
• This book reworks Hari's entry into the First Minister position, which I found annoying. Especially because the discussion around that entry is slow, and lacks action. Basically the new version was kinda boring.
• Worm holes are a major part of the economic makeup of the galactic empire in this book, but somehow Asimov never mentioned them in his books.
• This book dwells on computers, robots, artificial intelligence, and aliens -- all things Asimov left out of his books (except for robots of course). Its not like Asimov was unaware of these things, he just didn't use them in this universe.
• This book is really long (600 pages), but nothing much seems to actually happen in the first several hundred. The Sims sequence is the first really interesting part of the book, and even that drags on into long boring descriptions of polygons waving in the virtual wind.

Tags for this post: book() Gregory_Benford()

WaMu (a reasonably large US bank which people I know use) went under today. Its clients have been sold. I guess their massive network of branches would be worth something.

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And here is a fresh salsa recipe I should try as well.

This thing looks so much like an Ariel atom. I'm thinking that has to have been the inspiration for the chassis design.

The first android advert appears to be on YouTube now. I liked it, but then again I would be biased...

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. The best video to play in the office when everyone is needing some motivation.

Fellow office dwellers seemed to prefer stopping for a Hammer Time to be honest.

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svn co http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/svn

Tags for this post: mythtv() mythnettv()