harpojaeger.com

I’ve used Wordle before, but hadn’t thought of it in a while.  After seeing David A. M. Wilensky‘s last post, I decided to make my own word cloud, so here it is:

If you check out the Exquisite Corpse page, you will notice some pretty friggin’ awesome updates.  It is now ENTIRELY Ajax-based.  This means that you don’t EVER have to reload the page to get a new poem or submit lines, and there will be no more of the obnoxious thing where after someone submits a line of a poem, they click refresh a bunch of times to get a new prompt line, and then the line they entered gets added on over and over again because they’re resubmitting the POST data over and over.  No, no more!  jQuery to the rescue!

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s okay.  The upshot of it for an end user is that the page is way more user-friendly, has some sizzling-hot visual effects (yes, Mr. Spinning-Gear-Progress-Indicator, and Ms. Snazzy-Awesome-Slide-Up-and-Slide-Down-to-Respectively-Hide-and-Show-Content, I’m talking about you), tracks when a poem was begun, not just when it was ended, and is just generally slicker.  Enjoy!

I’ve tested the page pretty thoroughly, and I don’t anticipate any problems.  However, if you do run across something, please let me know using the contact form.

Keep up the good work!  This project has been pretty incredible, and I hope that people will continue to contribute to it.

Tonight marks the launch of the newest entry to the projects section of this site, currently called the text reassembler (if you have a better idea for a name, please let me know).  It’s something I started over a year ago that’s languished undeveloped for much of that time.  I decided to put in a bit of time to get it viewable, and put it up as a work in progress.

The project is based off of something I saw demonstrated at by Prof. Allen Downey at Olin College in the fall of 2008 while I was visiting.  Although I didn’t end up applying there, I really liked the presentation he gave, on various computing methods and some of the ways of using computers to produce humanistic output.  Particularly, he demonstrated a program that accepted inputted text, and broke down that text into an associative array with the following properties:

• the array keys were each word in the array (so the text “hello how are you” would generate an array with keys “hello”, “how”, “are”, and “you”)
• the value of each key was a non-associative array consisting of a list of every word that followed the key somewhere in the text (so the text “I saw you and he saw her” would be (in PHP format): array(“I”=>array(“saw”),”saw”=>array(“you”,”her”),”you”=>array(“and”),”and”=>array(“he”),”her”=>array())

This sounds complicated, but bear with me; the next step will make it make more sense.  Once the program has generated this array, it begins to iterate through it in the following manner:

1. it takes key from the array and outputs it
2. it selects a random item from the list of words following that key (the array stored in that key’s associate value) and outputs it
3. then it jumps to the key entry for that word, and moves back to step 2

It repeats this until it encounters a word that has nothing following it (the last word in the source text if it appears nowhere else) or until it’s output a specified amount of words (much more common).  Thus, if you take any two adjacent words in the resulting text (which sounds uncannily similar in tone to the original and sounds like it should make sense, but is complete nonsense), you’ll be able to locate them, still adjacent, in the source text.  It’s legitimately one of the most fascinating and beautiful things I’ve ever seen a computer do.

I came home determined to write a copy, and made a bit of progress.  It lay around for a while, I did some more work on it some point, but I never completed it.  I rediscovered it this evening and just manned up and made it work well enough to be publicly viewable.  When finished, it will accept input in a text field, or will be able to read input from a specified URL.  At the moment, though, it’s just dealing with block of text I hard-coded in (thus it’s not accepting any user input right now), and a word output limit imposed the same way.  Both the source of the text and the length are displayed on the page.

I’ve been using Apple products all my life.  I’ve always found them to be of terrific quality, and I’ve always been better treated by the company in sale and support terms.  I’ve also spent years as an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician.  I camped out for an iPhone 3G and spent a long time arguing AT&T into giving me a subsidized 3G S after the 3G was stolen.  I have just about as much loyalty to the Apple brand as anyone.

But I know which way the wind is blowing.  If Apple keeps going down the road of intense user control, doesn’t give up the exclusivity contract with AT&T, and continues to break with Google, I’m not going to stick with them.  Google Android, Chrome, and Chrome OS once it exists (not to mention more well-established software like Ubuntu, which I already consider second only OS X), are all completely viable alternatives.  I already have all of my email addresses (including MobileMe, which I get for free as a certified Apple Sales Professional) redirecting to Gmail, and it provides all the services MobileMe does, except for Find My iPhone, and for free.  See my general rule for computing.  It still applies.

So, while I think that Apple is still a generally moral company, one that is providing terrific services to its users, I hope they realize that down the road they are only going to be able to restrict us so far.  Google has done an incredible job of making it really easy to switch to their services, and as we offload more and more of our data storage and processing power to the cloud, that ease of transition and context-switching is a big advantage.  Either it will keep Apple honest, or I’ll switch.  I’m definitely not enough of a fanboy to stick with Apple when there’s a better alternative.  Until that point, I’ll continue to defend them as the best hardware and software provider, but I’m not blind to reality.

Thus, I publicly declare Apple not to be the infallible god that its fanpersons so often claim it is.  And I call on its directors and customers to take it in a direction that continues to provide good products and services, rather than one that treats its customers, as so many other tech companies have, as endlessly ignorant moneybags.  I, for one, will not put up with that.  We’re used to getting good value from Apple, and if we stop getting it, we’ll move on.

I was invited to open a free Google Voice account, and so far, it’s pretty cool.  I get an online inbox, free text messaging (although it may forward them to my phone, causing AT&T to charge me, I’m still figuring that out), and free calls anywhere in the US.  It can also transcribe my voicemails, screen my calls according to my contacts, and allow me to listen in on messages.  I also got a FABULOUS phone number.  I’m probably going to mess around with the settings a little more before I start giving out the number, but I think this could be pretty useful.  Probably its best feature is the ability to ring more than one phone.  If I have a dorm landline at college, I will definitely configure this; I can save some serious money and always be reachable on campus.  And I won’t have to give my number to anyone I don’t want to.  I can just block them or screen them if I want.

Downtown today, I saw a whole bunch of Mennonites singing on the steps of City Hall.  I took a bunch of videos with my iPwn 3G S.

It was a very interesting experience.  Beautiful, in some ways.  Standing by the curb, filming with the iPhone, with the sounds of pious and beautiful religious music in front of me and reggaeton, car horns, and motorcycles flashing behind me, it sort of epitomized the struggle to remain religious in a world that moves as fast as ours.  Historically, religion has been a slow-moving concept; it begs contemplation, thoroughness, and reverence.  Nowadays, it’s hard to maintain those things.  It’s possible, but it’s hard.  I liked that these people had the nerve and the interest to sing in that context.  And it’s not like they were isolated.  They were definitely old fashioned; the men wearing collared long-sleeved shirts, belts, dress pants, and the women wearing ankle-length, long-sleeved dresses and hair coverings, but they weren’t naive.  One man came up to me afterwards, and introduced me to his five children, and commented on my iPhone.  Then he asked me if I “knew the Lord”.  I told him I did, and that I was Jewish, and he was very pleased.  There was this sense of genuine excitement at appealing to someone else’s faith.  He liked that a Jew appreciated their Christ-oriented music, and I liked that they wanted to sing it for me.  He told me about their congregation, which is in Russell, and I think I’m going to try to go to some services.  They sound very interesting.  The congregation sings in this area often during the summer, so I will try to see them again.  I loved hearing them sing, and I want to talk more religion with them.  I don’t know all that much about Mennonites, and they seem like very interesting people.

The saga of my purchasing of the new iPhone 3G S began yesterday, when my mom asked why I hadn’t camped out for the new iPhone.  I explained to her the upgrade eligibility requirements, which resulted in my being unable to buy an iPhone at the unsubsidized price until December 12th.  She tried to find a way around it, and we spent a while on the phone, somewhat unsuccessfully.  The result was that I went to the Apple Store in Holyoke today to try to badger them into giving me a phone for the cheap price.  They couldn’t for any of the reasons we had thought of, but it turned out my father’s line (on the family plan) was eligible for an upgrade, so we bought the phone through that line, and then went to the AT&T store and had them switch it.  This took two full trips back and forth, but it got done, and the result is that I have the new iPhone, which is awesome.  I’m still working on a case for it, but the new features seem to be pretty great.

This evening I was in Natick seeing Cadence with two other members of 5-Alone.  The show was excellent.  They did a lot more jazz standard and barbershop type stuff than I was expecting.  It was all good, but some of it felt a little recursive after a while.  Except for the Cole Porter.  Cole Porter is really the best.  You just can’t beat him in terms of standards.  Fabulous.

It has been an extremely successful day.

I have upgraded this site and the LC(A) to WordPress 2.8.  2.8 doesn’t have as many new features as 2.7, but it’s a bunch faster, and I like it already.

I’ve made a monumental shift in my desktop computing setup.  For many many years, I have been using Namely as an application launcher.  I’ve tried LaunchBar and Quicksilver, but neither was as fast or responsive as Namely.  I have now, for the first time, found a better application.  Google Quick Search Box for Mac can launch applications with the speed of Namely (which the other two apps couldn’t), and it has more functionality as well (similar to the other apps).  It can search files on the computer, all sorts of application data, the internet (because it’s Google), and my Google account, including Gmail, Docs, Photos, Wikipedia, Google Finance, and more.  It’s incredibly useful.  It also has a somewhat under-documented and, as far as I can tell, under-utilized feature; Twitter updates.  This alone could persuade me to start Twittering, which I’ve been holding off on.  We’ll see.  Either way, QSB (for that is what they are calling it in the inter-tubes) is going to be great.

Lacking the motivating force of school as a timekeeper is making it difficult for me to coalesce my thoughts into an actual blog post.  I still have plenty to write about, but it’s less natural to write about it.  I think this will be responsible in part for some shifts in the way I approach this site in the coming months.

That being said, I do have some pretty interesting stuff to write about.  Today me and my friend presented our honors project to the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers class back at high school (remember that place?).  It was cool to be back there – for the first time since graduation.  I felt out-of-place already.  I’ve moved on, and new people have taken my place.  And that’s as it should be.  People shouldn’t waste their time and effort hanging on to lingering memories.  I want to be remembered, but I don’t want to be canonized (not that I expect to be) or overly retained.  So I sort of felt as though I was injecting myself back into the lives and routines of people who I should be leaving alone.  But it was nice to see them, and people were happy to see me, so I felt okay about it.  Also, the presentation went really well.  Originally, it was going to consist of a lecture by the two of us, and a simulation we designed to demonstrate some of the economic principles we dealt with in the project.  However, we ended up doing the project later than we had expected, and we only had about an hour for the whole thing.  So, last night we designed an extremely stripped-down version of the simulation with the intent of demonstrating Gresham’s Law, a simple but extremely important principle.  The simulation worked PERFECTLY.  We hadn’t had time to test it out on our own by playing it a couple times, but it went exactly as we had hoped.  We created a small system for buying and selling commodities (corn and iron [represented by corn kernels (intended for burning for ethanol) and steel hex nuts]) and a system for switching between gold and silver bullion (raw metal).  The commodities could be bought and sold in either gold or silver, creating a ratio between the two (simulating the effect a government-regulated currency would have), but the bullion exchange forum (representing goldsmiths, a historically accurate and important figure), operated on its own terms (historically speaking, according to the amounts of bullion available).  This creates an imbalance, and allows people to make a profit by exchanging currencies.  By manipulating the prices of the commodities and the bullion ratio available at the goldsmith station, we were able to force one currency entirely out of circulation.  We did this both ways; we first started with silver being hoarded and gold spent, and within the span of about two turns, we turned it around entirely.  We also employed paper currency for silver at the commodity stations, adding a twist, as it could be used to buy and sell, but not to exchange for bullion.  Also historically accurately, the winner had an extremely wide margin, almost three times the amount of money as the loser.  Our simulation elegantly proved Gresham’s Law, and also sort of proved capitalism too; that the more money you have the more you can make.  So that was a great success.

Also speaking of money, now that I have a debit card, Mint.com, which I was already using, has become vastly more useful.  I am starting to be able to track how much money I spend on what, and set budgets.  Within the next few months, I think I’ll gain a lot of insight into where my money goes, and how to spend it more effectively.  I also figured out that you can add your PayPal account to Mint, which is nifty.

I have been submerging myself in resources on investing.  Right now, I’m leaning towards ShareBuilder for a brokerage, because of their low fees.  Since I’m doing long-term investing, it doesn’t matter that they’re executing trades only once a week at maximum.  However, I’ve realized that I should research direct investing before committing to a brokerage account.  If I can do that effectively, I can avoid a lot of fees.  I would then have to keep track of my own investments, but with the help of Google Finance that shouldn’t be too hard.  I hope to have a substantial amount of money invested and in my planned Roth IRA within a few weeks.

We got fifth place at the Greenfield tournament yesterday.  It was an awesome day.  Very tiring, but very fun.

I just got back from Sin Nombre at Amherst Cinema.  It was really good, but extremely scary.  I would not recommend it to anyone who can’t stomach violence.  That said, I didn’t find the violence to be gratuitous.  I dislike movies where the violence is for no purpose other than to sell, and I didn’t feel that way at all about this one.  It was a scary story, and one that needed to be told in the way it was.  I think I will write a longer review of it soon when I have more time.  Tonight I need to finish a paper for school tomorrow.

Also, I now am the owner of a megaphone.  Very useful.