Being for the Month of 2007-09
These are quick notes taken by Sean B. Palmer on the Semantic Web, Python and Javascript programming, history and antiquarianism, linguistics and conlanging, typography, and other related matters. To receive these bits of dreck regularly, subscribe to the feed. To browse other months, check the contents.
It's taken me most of the day to install scipy, to try out somebody's new Seam Carving code, in MacPorts. There's some really buggy dependencies. Anyway, it wasn't all that worth it; the new code is rather quick, but the results aren't as good as in the original seam carving paper, or from my own seamless.c. Might be good if the author keeps at it, though.
Books always seem strange on autumn evenings. People are frolicking and gamboling outside whilst the books are inside sitting around being staid and boring. But because it's autumn, there's a thinness to the air which makes the frolicking seem sad and the staidness sound. A huge library is a good place to be on a sunny autumn evening.
Not that the air was literally thin, incidentally: the pressure has actually been just about the highest I've seen it so far this year. Unusually, in the evening I could also hear lots of distant sounds. Our local church is usually silent, and yet there were church bells. Footballers were playing miles away, but they could be heard as though they were playing just a field away. Sound carries better in high pressure still nights, then? Seems intuitively right, and Wikipedia suggests that a temperature inversion can also assist with making sounds travel further.
Today I discovered that relatively complex PNGs can give better compression than JPGs, as long as you can reduce the colour depth to 50-100 without any dithering. This was quite surprising because normally I use JPG when the image shows anything over a really trivial amount of complexity.
When you reduce colours in The Gimp by converting an RGB image to indexed, however, it usually turns white backgrounds into an off-white, which is highly annoying. Cody stepped in to show me how to fix that: Dialogs -> Colormap -> Edit the off-white.
Once you've exported that, of course, you'll still want to compress the output further if you can. optipng -k -i0 -zc1-9 -zm1-9 -zs0-3 -f0-5 is good for that, though expect it to take a while.
Firefox 2.0 stores its history in a file format called Mork. And guess what? This format is crappy. Thankfully, jwz waded through the crappiness and wrote a parser for it which was bundled up by someone else as a CPAN module, which I downloaded and tried. It failed with this error:
$ mork history.dat > history.txt UTF-16LE:Malformed LO surrogate da24 at /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/darwin-2level/Encode.pm line 166.
So instead I just got jwz's mork.pl directly and used that instead. It took two hours to complete, but boy did it complete. Meanwhile I had checked it on my Flock history (I've only used it once or so) to check that it really was doing something pertinent rather than trying to calculate BB(BB(100)) or whatever.
At the time of parsing, my history had 182,713 URIs in it. Awesome. And now I have them in plain text.
Word of the day: Vadlaheidavegavinnuverkfaerageymsluskúr.
Danny Ayers joined the demorking craze and wrote mork2rdf.py, which, quite obviously, converts Firefox history to RDF. I couldn't get it to work on my own data, but Danny got me to try it out on his test data and it worked. Not sure what the difference is; our Firefoxen are the same too.
Leobard also wrote briefly about Demorking. In Firefox 3 the problem'll be changed since they're moving over to the new "Places" storage system, which is sqlite backed. One interesting thing I learned from Danny is that Mork stores a lot more data than jwz's script gets out of it, including referer. Could be neat for drawing graphs.
I wrote a new bot yesterday called "happen", which is basically a calendar bot fed by phenny. At first I used Twisted to get the bot working, but I found that its threading behaviour is pretty weird and the IRC modules undocumented, so I switched to using my own brand of IRCware derived from phenny instead, and that's all working fine.
Though happen appears to be working, it's a bit annoying having to keep tabs on another bot, so I might just merge the feature into phenny, keeping the event files in the datadir, though that'd clog it up somewhat.
As for the kinds of events that I added, I put in moon phases, current events, things like that. One very interesting thing that I found in the process was Moon Watch, which is a project to find the first moment of the new crescent moon. I'd only heard about the new crescent moon a few weeks ago from an unrelated Swhack discussion, so it was nice to find something concrete and contemporary going on involving it.
Apparently my old f2o account, sbp.f2o.org, has been revoked, and I'm not sure why though I suspect inactivity. It's a shame because I had a lot of nice little hacks on there such as WyPy (the very small Python wiki) and FOAFQ (a FOAF query service). With FOAFQ, I tried setting up the CGI on inamidst, but since Libby's swordfish box is currently down, probably whilst she tries to switch it to run off of the lost Mac Mini, it's not working anyway.
I've asked f2o if they still have my data because whilst I probably have most of the static stuff, and I was able to get FOAFQ's source from the Web Archive at any rate, the dynamic stuff such as what people were writing in the WyPy installation would be fun to have. I think I do have a backup even of that, but it's probably from quite some time ago.
I'm thinking about some RDF stuff still, what with having played around with the Tabulator API, which is why I was peeking at FOAFQ. Someone reminded me of rdfdiff the other day too... and Arnia's doing his whole Trinity RDF API in Haskell. It might be fun to play with the current state of the art in tools a bit more, and get back into some RDF hacking.
Michael Katsevman mentioned on Swhack that he sewed his trousers up with kevlar thread, and it gave me the idea of sewing up my ailing guitar strap using the same. I had a strap from 2000 to 2007, but the replacement that I bought is already wearing out—very annoying.
A hint on a fly fishing forum that I found via Google, "site:uk kevlar thread buy", led me to Lakeland Fly-Tying Ltd. and their Gudebrod kevlar thread, which comes in lots of colours, though black had sadly sold out so I've gone with scarlet. Only £1.80 without shipping and £3.80 with, so not too bad.
Of course, much of the point of this is that I'm wondering just what the kevlar thread is like. Supermaterials are possessed of preëminent awesomeness.
Today I asked people what they would name a rabbit. Nobody beat my suggestions of "Luzz", "Pennifred", and "Slippa", which I'm quite pleased about, but as tends to happen the topic quickly changed to French anyway. In French, rabbit is lapin, which makes sense, but wolf is loup, which doesn't. Loupe is just too nice a word for such a creature: crazy scary things should all be named in Germanic, and lovely sweet daisyish things should be named in Romance.
Terje therefore coined a new word for wolf which I am pleased to give the dubious honour of being the Whits Word of the Day:
Überschwartzkillteethrippischdogze!
According to Björn the first live televised coast-to-coast sporting event in America was broadcast on this day some years ago. This got us wondering when the first televised live sporting event took place, which is decidedly more interesting, and we quickly found out that it was John Logie Baird's transmission of the Epsom Derby on 3rd June 1931. It wasn't a national broadcast as, apparently, it was only shown in a single cinema in London.
I looked through the archives of The Times for clues on which cinema, what time, and how successful it was &c., but The Times had apparently gone downhill by 1931 since it didn't report it at all. I went sniffing around for other newspaper archives and I found that the British Library has a Newspapers Digitisation Project up and running which is going to be released in the middle of this year. Something tells me that they're not going to make the deadline.
I've emailed the project manager of the digitisation scheme asking for more details, but from her autoreply she's away until the 1st October, so I guess it's going to be at least after then. It may also be that a trial is already on the web somewhere, of course, but just not linked.
Today I made £1 thanks to impossible mathematics.
I got the kevlar the very next day after having ordered it (probably on the order of ten hours later, having been shipped hundreds of miles; pretty good service for regular first class!), by the way, and put it to the intended use that very morning by sewing up my poor dilapidated and, may I say, discombobulated (or discombobracated as it was when it first appeared in 1834), guitar strap.
I am now pleased to have one of the world's few or only kevlar reinforced guitar straps (go on, prove me wrong; there must be someone out there manufacturing these sorts of things for hardcore jamming sessions), and it's working beautifully. Now I just have to make sure that it doesn't get exposed to too much ultraviolet light, because kevlar loses its potency in said light. Perhaps I should cover it with some opaque tape or something, not that I do open air gigging or any such public effusion of musicianship.
Yesterday was a slow news day—a very slow news day—so I took to reading The Times for the 23rd September 1907. The Scottish Arctic Expedition had arrived at TROMSÖ [sic], and they were predicting that Taft would become the next president. In Toronto, "Shrubb, the English runner, defeated Nebrich, an American, in a four-mile race on Saturday by a quarter of a mile." There was Discontent among Hop-Pickers, and letters were about everything from book clubs to Inebriate Reformatories. There was a "Sale Of Hunters At Leicester", meaning a sale of horses and ponies, one of which was a yearling called Gay Lassie which went for 35 guinies. Quite cheap given that "Lady Marmion, the property of Mr. W. Herbert" went for 70 guineas.
Rugby Union results were listed under FOOTBALL -> Rugby Union Rules, and regular football was listed under FOOTBALL -> Association Rules. Almost all of the association clubs listed are still recognisable today. There was plenty of Automobilism at the fairly new Brooklands Racing Club, and De Dion and Miles-Daimler cars are mentioned, as well as a Mercédes [sic] that won a mountain trial on the continent. On the other hand there was a char-a-banc accident and Lord Portsmouth's butler was killed in another accident; early motoring was dangerous, and one letter writer (who mentions the electric landaulette, which got me heading for a dictionary), knew precisely where the blame lay:
"Your correspondents have suggested difficult and costly remedies for putting an end to the motor nuisance, by which I mean the inconsiderately driven car. It seems to me that there is one simple and very cheap expedient, which is to make it illegal to carry or use a motor horn. I have again and again noticed, both when driving in a car and when walking, driving, or bicycling, that almost every discourteous, startling, or illegal act practiced by motorists is generally only made possible by the use of the motor horn."
Yet more letters grumbled at the recent intimation that nonconformist churches had more people in prison (not true! trumps one writer), and there is some detailed and quite dry discussion of The Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907. More entertaining by far are the advertisements. Things up for sale in the display ads include Prince's Plate, Scott Adie's Scotch Tweed Coats, Delaunay Belleville (a kind of car), "LUNTIN" Mixture (tobacco blend), and Dinneford's Magnesia, but by far the best is the following:
HE HAD THE "BLUES."
"Life is a failure," said the tired-looking passenger from behind his pipe, in a grave and far-away voice. "Man is a fraud, woman a bore, happiness a delusion, friend- ship a humbug; love a disease, beauty a deception, marriage a mistake, a wife a trial, a child a nuisance; good is merely hypocrisy. evil is detection, the whole system of existence--life, morality, society, humanity, and all that--is a hollow sham. Our boasted wisdom is egotism; generosity is imbecility. There is nothing of any importance but money. Money is everything, and, after all, what is everything? Nothing. Bah ! ! Bah ! !"
"Glad you've got it off your chest, old man," said the bright-eyed, spruce little man in the corner, extending his tobacco pouch to the speaker, "I used to have it like that myself sometimes. There is only one cure. Give up that common tobacco and smoke Craven Mixture. Every pipe of that cheap and nasty mixture you're smoking now acts on the liver like a lobster supper. Smoke Craven, and you'll look at life like the MAN that nature intended you to be. In five minutes you'll say that life it worth loving. And to-morrow you will agree with J. M. Barrie, that Craven "IS A TOBACCO TO LIVE FOR."
Perhaps by far the most ironic thing that I found, however, was the article entitled "From The Times of 1807. Wednesday, September 23". Yes, even 100 years ago they felt compelled to read the news from 100 years ago—200 years ago now to us. Not much was happening in 1807 though; just the Duke of Portland retiring from office.