Amazon.com: buying info: Gloriana, or the Unfulfill’d Queen
I just wrote a review of this book. I pasted the text below (see MORE). It only got 2 stars.
Continue reading “Amazon review”
Month: August 2002
one of my neighbors writes cool software
If I get that iBook, I’d love to play with some of this stuff. I have never found a genealogy program I liked all that much, and I have a raft of old photos to incorporate into a family tree if I ever make one.
the birds
for some reason, small birds (finches, I think) have been flying into my windows today and walking around on the gutters and the vent covers, so many little footsteps, I thought it was raining.
We’ve had birdstrikes before, some fatal, but never more than one a day: some of these have been more than one at a time. They seem to bounce off and fly away, but that’s gotta hurt.
out of the ashes
Press Release – Nav4 Search Engine Patch Kit 1.0 Available for Download
Based on Think Tank 23’s patent-pending Waypoint technology, which uses advanced natural-language processing to dynamically identify thematic categories embedded within Web pages, Nav4 SEPK generates in-context related-document navigation automatically.
Good news here. This is the much improved successor to the core technology that FizzyLab, my previous startup, was based on. Steve and Martin never gave up on the idea that context and relevance could be used as navigational tools. You would all be using it now, everywhere, from the desktop to the web, but for an ill-fated drive to find relationships between consumer goods and textual information.
Why this is considered the next generation of search and navigation is easy to explain when you consider where most search technologies fail. The truism “garbage in, garbage out” applies here: if the user can’t figure out what keywords will get them the results they want, it doesn’t matter how scalable the search engine is or how many documents it searches. Eliminating keywords through textual analysis and then using that information as the example to query for is where search is headed. Like the intelligent robots of vintage SciFi or Apple’s Newton technology, new technologies like Nav4 will eliminate the searching and allow knowledge workers, students, everyone to use the information they need.
fink and Storable.pm
Where fink was taking more than a minute to report on what packages it was managing, the addition of Storable.pm cuts that to 15 seconds.
fink puts the tarball for Storable on disk but doesn’t install it where perl can find it (in a directory in its @INC array). Here’s how to do that.
[/Users/paul]:: cp /sw/src/Storable-1.0.14.tar.gz src
[/Users/paul]:: cd src
[/Users/paul/src]:: tar zxf Storable-1.0.14.tar.gz
[/Users/paul/src]:: cd Storable-1.0.14
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: perl Makefile.PL
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: make
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: make test
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: sudo make install
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: fink list xfree86
Reading package info…
Fink has detected that your package cache is out of date and needs an
update, but does not have privileges to modify it. Please re-run fink as
root, for example with a “fink index” command.
Information about 1334 packages read in 113 seconds.
system-xfree86 4.2-1 Placeholder package for manually installed X…
i xfree86-base 4.2.0-6 XFree86 libraries, utilities, clients and data.
xfree86-rootles 4.2.0-3 MacOS X/Darwin XFree86 display server.
xfree86-server 4.2.0-2 XFree86 display server (stable release)
(paul@pink)-(07:59 AM / Mon Aug 05)
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: fink index
sudo /sw/bin/fink index
Reading package info…
Updating package index… done.
(paul@pink)-(08:02 AM / Mon Aug 05)
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: fink list xfree86
Information about 1334 packages read in 15 seconds.
system-xfree86 4.2-1 Placeholder package for manually installed X…
i xfree86-base 4.2.0-6 XFree86 libraries, utilities, clients and data.
xfree86-rootles 4.2.0-3 MacOS X/Darwin XFree86 display server.
xfree86-server 4.2.0-2 XFree86 display server (stable release)
Still pretty slow: I see others reporting elapsed times of a second, but this is a 350MHz G3, not a smoking fast 800 MHz G4.
broken mrtg output
I just discovered that my network and host monitoring graphs have been logging no new data for the past week. When mrtg fails to pull new data, it logs the current datapoint with the prior value, so you get a flatline. For some reason, I wasn’t getting that (I would have noticed it). The root cause seems to have been all the perl libraries that mrtg installs and depends on were gone. Dunno why. I reinstalled mrtg and all seems well.
a delightful pest
Sadly, the Himalayan Blackberry (rubus discolor) is considered an invasive pest. Rightly so, of course, since they will grow almost anywhere and once established are difficult to remove.
But the berries are wonderful. We ate a couple of pints right off the canes at Magnuson Park this morning, and it looks to be a big yield this year.
cycling
16 miles today, from my house to Ballard, mostly along the Burke Gilman Trail. I didn’t realize it went that far, but I was by no means at the end of it. I stopped at the enormous Fred Meyer in Salmon Bay to gulp down an Odwalla and then headed back.
Still working out how to best use the 18 different gear combinations, but I learn a little more every time. I found some other riders out who I used as rabbits: they were cruising along at a steady 16 mph, so I shadowed them as long as I could. I was able to push myself to 20 mph along one straight bit along the Ship Canal, and I’ll probably feel that tomorrow . . .
And the Blue Angels are starting their practice sessions as I sit here . . . . love that sound.