Blogging juices are flowing
I haven’t blogged frequently for a long while but I feel the juices flowing. While poking around seeing if you can have Tumblr autopost to Google+ (you can’t, yet) I thought, hey, if I write on Tumblr, it will autopost to Facebook and Twitter and I can just go post the new article on G+ by hand. I can handle that I think, but I still want autopost.
Anyway, grad school news. Made an A in Network Systems Security Concepts. That class was the prerequisite for the rest of the Capitol College IA curriculum so didn’t go in depth on much. Made A’s on the paper, mid-term and final. Maybe I’ll post the paper; I wrote an overview of SSL/TLS and some of its recent security breaches. It’s the first paper I’ve written since undergrad (since, I guess, stuff I write for work) so I’m not terribly proud of it.
Started Designing Intelligent Systems, which is fascinating because my undergrad didn’t offer an AI class and I’ve never read or worked in any AI areas since. I have two projects to do (week 4 and week 8) - will have to brainstorm a bit on topics.
My Distributed Programming class is going well and is heading into threads now after a tour in RPC. I wrote my previous homework assignments in python but now that we’re doing threading I’m wondering… do I stick with Python, or maybe Perl (rather high level languages, both implement threads) or do I go hardcore and drop back to C? Prof. doesn’t care what language we write in. I’ve been doing Python as a way to learn the language (successful so far).
All this schoolwork has kept me a lot busier than before… which was totally expected, and is a good feeling. Writing papers and programs are activities I haven’t done in many years and getting in the coding ‘zone’ feels great. Plus I am getting some mileage out of this Debian VM I set up a while back. (Switched from xmonad to awesomewm there. Also need to get awesomewm up and running on xquartz on the Mac… there are some homebrew scripts but they haven’t been merged into the homebrew repo because they need some work… maybe one of these weekends……)
Personal Weather Station
The other day I noticed this weather station was on sale at Amazon. A while back I looked into Internet-connected personal weather stations and thought they were all a bit too expensive. This one was on sale so I bought it. I got it in today and set it up, then discovered a bit of Linux software called fowsr that automatically pushes updates to certain websites (I’m using Weather Underground). There’s plenty of Windows software to do this but I’d rather have the PWS plugged in to my little Linux box that doesn’t get rebooted or shut off sometimes like my main PC.
So, now I have my own weather station on the Internet, where you can check the local conditions… in my backyard. There’s a little junk data at the beginning (from inside the house), but the instrument cluster is outside now so it should have good readings.
For twelve years, the Republicans have perfected a strategy to shrink the size of the federal government. They could never have taken on public spending directly; too many of the programs were too popular. So they concocted a different plan: First, they cut taxes. They told the public that tax cuts would inspire so much entrepreneurial zeal that they would more than pay for themselves in new tax revenues. When that didn’t happen and the budget deficit ballooned, they changed the tune. They expressed outrage at fiscal irresponsibility. They called for massive deficit reductions. They talked about the importance of balancing the budget.
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Robert Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, p. 28. It is fascinating to me that this paragraph holds as true today as it did in 1998 when Reich wrote this, discussing the year 1992.
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Google+
I haven’t been using Tumblr or Twitter much lately but I am playing around with Google+. If you’re in Google+ and want to add me feel free. (search by name)
what I’ve been reading
Finally getting some reading done.
The Information: A Theory, A History, A Flood by James Glieck - The parts on Babbage and Claude Shannon were great but it kind of tapered off towards the end of the book. Did make me purchase The Mathematical Theory of Information on a whim though. 4/5
Bossypants by Tina Fey - I’m a big fan so I liked it. Kinda short but very funny. 4/5
Next up is Inside the Plex by Steven Levy, about Google. It’s getting a lot of press, and I liked his book Hackers, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
This link needs to be spread around some more.
This looks interesting. Reminds me of Super Meat Boy with some Cave Story mixed in.
Instapaper 3.0
Marco Arment released Instapaper 3.0 the other day. For those that don’t know, Instapaper is a service that saves webpages for you to read later. I use it for long articles that I don’t want to read right now, and things I come across while browsing Twitter or Google Reader on my iPhone that I don’t want to read on the small screen. It’s a fantastic app and I use it all the time. 3.0 introduces some new social features, which look great. I hooked my Instapaper account up to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. (I guess Tumblr support was in there before, not surprising since Marco was a co-founder, but I didn’t see it until now) Marco mentioned how he uses Tumblr and Instapaper together, a process I think I’m going to steal:
Like prior versions, Tumblr posts can be created as Draft, Queued, or Published posts on any of your account’s Tumblr blogs, and if you have any text selected when you hit the Share button in the app, it will offer the choice of creating a Quote or Link post. (This is how I create almost every quote on my blog: with Instapaper set to create Draft posts, I quote interesting selections from articles and post them, and then I filter through them later from my computer to add commentary and publish the best ones.)
I’m going to try doing this on a regular basis to share links (rather than posting them to Facebook). I think of it as a Daring Fireball-style blog - not that I’ll ever be as popular as Gruber.
Marco’s podcast, Build and Analyze, is also excellent (as are the rest of 5by5’s podcasts). They should do a combined Talk Show/Hypercritical/Build and Analyze event… that would be awesome.
