Today I started walking early in the morning and ended at 2PM after a great lunch. Certainly until my cast is off, I will not be able to walk as much as I did today. I overdid it and I'm expecting awful problems to start to occur tomorrow with my arm. Generally walking and a cast do not mix. I will have no problem covering more territory by metro in the coming month though. It has now come to my attention that I am in way over my head as far as Portuguese goes. Every time I have attempted to listen or to speak it has been a train wreck. If someone with an automatic weapon were to shout an order or a question at me, I would be toast. Luckily those sort of people have no questions or orders for me.
Since I have now learned that Portuguese is more difficult than I thought, I am putting mouseover text which should translate a few interesting things for you. Look for italic green text like this and put your mouse over it for a few seconds. If you think of a better way to display this, let me know.
Over the weekend I have made massive improvements to my blog. I chose a theme and applied it quite well. I made a logo which is not really a logo but the name of the site using my AltSci font. I'm not too thrilled about the splash part on the main page but I'll figure out what I should do later. The comment system is working (I even caught a bug in Django while I was at it). The quote system is up on the front page and the About page. So what's new on the Brazilian front? I have downloaded 64 PDFs and 72 MP3s from Busuu and am turning them into a study guide for myself. At some point I intend to compile this data from my mind into lessons for English speakers. It could also be used for Brazilian Portuguese speakers to learn English. I'll have to see if I meet anyone who can test it out. Currently my setup is 2 pages and I have enough data for 5-10 pages. I plan to only bring 5 pages with me though. I'll be traveling light to keep only one bag. If I was more confident of where I was going and how I could get there I would probably take a light duffel bag. Having carried it enough trips I don't want that extra weight. Since my wrist is broken I won't be able to switch hands which would be annoying if I carry anything heavy. Limits are not necessarily bad. My website is limited by the time I have available. Though I could have saved time and made it a copy of my other blog, I decided that I need a bit of Python on my website.
Now seems like as good a time as any to advertise my other blogs and my projects. Currently I have a really cool project that is already making some steps. It's also written in Python Django and has about 105GB more data than this blog. Almost none of it is original, but don't let that stop you from visiting Philisophical Transactions. A blog post here wouldn't be complete without a link to my normal blog and my previous travel blogs: AltSci Europe and AltSci Japan.
Read more »
Nov 2, 2010
You may be aware of my work on RockBand 2 Drum "drivers". If I had written my code as a kernel module (and it would likely be accepted into the mainline), it would be easy to call it a driver. However, I wrote it using libusb and ALSA, which makes it a userland program. I feel that I made the right design choice. ALSA libraries are low enough latency and libusb allows efficient use of interrupts, so it works quite well. Also, adding any complex code to the kernel that isn't totally necessary seems like a risky endeavor.
Anyway, that code is here: RockBand 2 Drum Instrument for Linux
Read more »
June 10, 2009
Update July 23, 2009
Digg Diversity is a new project by AltSci Concepts. It uses the Digg API to calculate a more fair score for articles on Digg. Why is this algorithm necessary or preferable? Digg has an algorithm that is based entirely on profit, which is acceptable for a company like Digg. The more diggs that occur, the more profit that Digg makes, which means that they will accept, even encourage their users to game the system. The Digg front page algorithm which promotes articles to the front page with as few as 100 diggs means that a small number of people can control the front page of Digg by simply getting 100 like- minded people to digg their articles (and visa-versa). The company Digg benefits when corrupt users promote the same content repeatedly, but the overall community is diminished (especially those users who wish to see important non-repetitive content). This topic is extremely deep and deserves an essay but definitely not tonight on the night of the beta release of Digg Diversity. Many digg comments, blogs, and even a mashup that is currently offline have been written about this issue, but I hope to write the solution.
Digg Diversity is a entirely javascript mashup using the Digg API to retrieve important information about what data is found on Digg. The first set of results may be rather surprising. You will see a list of results quite similar to the front page of Digg. However, the order is by "divvs" which are a new calculated value based on timing and repetitiveness of the digger. The raw data can be found at the bottom of the page (there is a link that displays the data).
Read more »
