another weblog

In my last post I mentioned having a large archive of SOPA-related news stories; that archive is now public. You can download the 4 GB collection of WARCs as a torrent here:

http://turk.floodnetwork.biz/SOPA.torrent

I only captured a single page for each news story. In many cases, this was enough; however, for e.g. some opinion pieces on the New York Times, this means I missed the second page. Live and learn, I guess.

If you prefer to browse and/or don’t want to deal with expanding and indexing WARCs (totally understandable, as AFAICT there does not yet exist any good desktop tool to do so), I have made the archive available on the Web using the Internet Archive’s Wayback software:

http://wayback.at.ninjawedding.org/

The current version of Wayback has fairly poor search functionality (you have to search by URL prefix, which isn’t particularly good for browsing), so I’ve built an index of pages in the archive. You can browse by page title here:

http://www.ninjawedding.org/sopa/stories.html

Each story link will take you to a link on wayback.at.ninjawedding.org.

I’m totally up for better ways to search this archive, like indexing it via Solr or some such, but this was TSTTCPW.

I’m not sure how long I’ll keep wayback.at.ninjawedding.org up and running. The host is a micro virtual machine on Amazon EC2, so it suffers from nasty CPU cycle starvation on long-running tasks. For some classes of webapps this isn’t a problem, but I have noticed that Wayback can be afflicted by this when running indexing tasks. I would move up to a small or large EC2 instance, but those quickly become very expensive. I’ll look into other hosting arrangements; my host has a feature in beta-testing that looks like it might work.

Anyway, enjoy.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/protest-exposes-silicon-valley-hollywood-rivalry-15387602?page=2#.TxeTtGBA5Cc

Lawmakers may have a personal incentive to keep online piracy on the nation’s political radar, said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a non-partisan government-accountability watchdog. If the issue stays alive through the current election cycle, it may help bring in campaign contributions from high-tech donors and Hollywood later this year.

God Bless America.

In less homicidal news, front flips on springy surfaces recently clicked for me. I also — with lots of spotter help — tried some back flips today, and the sensation of flipping backwards is just so foreign to me. I need to find a way to experience it again while minimizing injury and death.

I also have an archive of several thousand news stories published about the SOPA blackout that I will be distributing shortly to anyone who is interested. I’ll probably put a torrent up on the Pirate Bay, as that is the most convenient method I currently have to distribute gigabytes of data.

Back when I was posting stuff on Google+, I uploaded this video:

I further stated that by the end of the summer that I’d run that wall.

Well, it took a bit longer than that, but it did happen. I said I’d post video, so here it is:

I need to smooth out and speed up my pop vault (the part where you actually get on top of the wall).
I’ve used that wall as a concrete metaphor (ha ha) of my progress as a traçeur. Obviously there is much more to parkour than wall runs, but it’s still nice to have a challenge that you can look back on and say “yes, I did that”.
Next up: more fluid vaults, a twelve-foot wall, breaking more jumps, figuring out how to back flip, everything else.

This year I decided to attend my college’s homecoming because it was my class’ five-year reunion.

Homecoming was fine, and was pretty fun, because I got to see a bonfire started by a bomb (video soon), I got to catch up with professors and I also found out that, somehow, my school’s anime club is Still Alive.

However, the reunion was a mistake, and unless I actually go with people I know (which isn’t happening, because most of my best friends from college are either people who were not in my class year and/or thousands of miles frm Indiana) I’m not going again. Not only did I not know anybody there, but the reunion committee thought a small bar would make a suitable venue.

Yeah, that sounds like a great time. I was in and out of the bar in forty-five seconds.

I guess it would be okay if I were a thirty-two-year old salaryman with no heady goals to achieve, but, well, I’m not.

I’m watching Jensen Harris deliver a talk at Windows Build titled “Eight traits of great Metro style apps”:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/BPS-1004

(An MPEG-4 video file is available for people who don’t want to install Silverlight.)

Readers of this blog will know that I take Tufte’s data-ink ratio, no chartjunk, honesty of presentation etc concepts pretty seriously. (Except when it comes to my weblog, but that’s more of a case of me being too lazy to fix it.)

Metro style seems to embrace the exact same ideas. In that talk, you’ll hear Jensen Harris talk about “content before chrome”, “fading into the background”, “every pixel is information”…the sorts of things you’d read in a Tufte book or hear at a Tufte presentation.

The bits and pieces that I’ve heard of the WinRT API, which implements Metro, are also interesting. I haven’t seen any official MSDN documentation on WinRT (probably because it’s still in preview, which is annoying), but from what I hear the API embraces event-driven programming in a fundamental way by being mostly asynchronous and more declarative. Having not seen any WinRT APIs I can’t really say what that means, but here’s what I do know:

• OS X’s Core Animation framework handles animations declaratively and asynchronously: you declare layers and keyframes and kick off an animation job. The framework then animates elements for you.
• Adobe Flex’s animation elements are quite similar.
• Metro makes a big deal out of animation fluidity and user interface responsiveness. One easy way to kill UI responsiveness is to block the UI thread by waiting for I/O in the same thread. Forcing asynchrony goes a good way towards eliminating those blocks.
• One common knock against asynchronous programming is that most languages aren’t designed with asynchrony in mind. If you write var x = f() then it is (often) assumed that the computation f() will complete and then x will be bound to something. Asynchronous execution does not guarantee that; instead, they require programmers to reify the “and then do something with that information” bit. (For language nerds or Wikipedia addicts: Asynchronous programming requires programs to be written in something like continuation-passing style, and that, done wrong, ends up with lots of nested functions, which is a bear to maintain.) C# 5.0 introduces some new constructs (based on CPS transformations!) that make it possible to write code that looks like var x = f(); var y = g(x) where f() is an asynchronous computation, and g() may or may not be asynchronous.

This is the first time in a long while that I’ve been excited to play with a Microsoft technology. I suspect Miguel de Icaza and the Mono team will get this stuff into Mono pretty soon, so that I won’t have to use Windows to use it, and so that my applications won’t be shackled to Windows.

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Also. When I was still using Google+ I wrote that I’d run a ten-foot wall at Grant Park before the end of the summer.

Took a bit longer than “end of the summer”, but I did it. Repeatedly.

Video soon.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218179/_whitehouse_takes_on_Twitter_Town_Hall

Is it actually possible to have meaningful conversations about complex topics in a microblogging setting?

I haven’t really told anyone this, but I have microblogged before, using the identica service. I stopped using it after five months because of the frustating character limit, which is identical to Twitter’s limit. Even discussing technical topics such as how to set up custom SSL certificates for Maemo 5’s XMPP client — you know, topics that are cut-and-dry compared to, say, social policy — was a total disaster of multiple updates and space-hungry at-notation.

I found the experience to be worse than IRC, and that’s because of a structural difference in the way messages are aggregated. There is not much difference between a single tweet or status update and a single IRC message; however, when you review a channel log, you can see all public messages and trace conversations. I can’t do that on my own page, much less anyone else’s, without lots of clicking around. It’s a terrible way to review conversations and it has left me permanently convinced of microblogging’s uselessness.

I have reinforced my experiences by noting that people tend to use Twitter not for carrying on conversations, but rather as a feed of laconic, selective, and unsubtle advertisements. (Who needs a media sky when you can route advertisements to billions of nodes?)

So. I clearly don’t think much of this move by the Obama administration — I think it’s mistakenly prioritizing breadth over depth. I also think that said administration knows this and is using Twitter not as a venue for a useful conversation with its constituents, but rather as a public relations stunt.

I am, however, interested in dissenting opinions.

So I said I’d write some more about American Rendezvous 2. I’ve written those blurbs in a separate parkour training log. Read it if you want and can deal with lots of nonsense paragraphs:

http://www.ninjawedding.org/pk.txt

Yeah, it’s just a text file. Modern blog systems are such a pain in the ass to set up compared to the immediacy of vim + rsync.

Holy freaking awesome.

More later after I gather my thoughts and subject myself to a Marquis de Sade-grade session on the foam roller.

Last night’s Journey To the End Of the Night Chicago 2011 map:

• Front
• Back

The bottom of the map are checkpoint signatures: you get one signature per checkpoint visited. The time on the front is the time it took me to do the course, and was something I wrote after being told my time from the organizer at the final checkpoint. I’m pretty proud of that time, especially since I did the whole thing on foot.

I checked in 8th. Not sure what that’s out of, except that it’s well over 100. Final statistics will probably show up on http://chicag0.org sometime.

I didn’t finish un-tagged: I was tagged about a block away from the safe zone at checkpoint 6, and I’m going to be kicking myself for not having that final sprint in me for quite a while, because I totally could have finished both 8th and alive. But that’s okay — there’s next year.

Verdict: massive fun, A++++, will do again.

So Google Video is shutting down, and I’m helping some people archive it. The archiving effort has come a long way, and we’re now able to extract some fun numbers from it. As of this writing, I’ve got around 180 GB of videos archived. If anyone reading this would like to help out, here’s how.

Some statistics that some people may be interested in:

• real-time feed of downloaded videos by ID
• continuously updated throughput charts
• my own contribution: a leaderboard (refresh every 20 seconds or so)