256 days since I quit smoking. Yeah, I'm a programmer. Sue me. [Scripting News]

For non-programmers, 256 happens to be two raised to the power of eight, which is the number of distinct bytes that exist (a byte is eight bits, which is either a one or a zero).

Incoming computer science students no longer know their powers of two. Even most of my contemporary grad students don't know their powers of two. Those of us who instantly know 32,768 is 2¹⁵ are a dying breed. Heck, most grad students don't even seem to know the 2¹⁰ =~ 10³ (where =~ means "approximentally equal)... I see something like 2⁵⁵ and I know quite quickly that is approximentally 32 quadrillion, close enough for government work.

What bothers me more is that Jeremy Bowers, who is usually so insistent that we should be clear and precise when we speak, is now using such obfuscating and emotionally-loaded language.... "Wage Life" is, to my mind, a content-free phrase which can only confuse the issue. - words (is that the right name?)

OK, guilty as charged. I was going to post this as a comment on that site but I suppose it could use more general dissemination.

I saw a "Wage Peace" sign today, obviously homemade, and for some reason it set me off thinking.

It occurs to me that the whole War/Peace dichotomy is a fraud. There is no War, there is no Peace, there is only Life and Death. A War can save Lives. A Peace can Kill. There is no contradiction, because they are not opposite.

I am on the side of Life, whatever that takes. If there is a War that will save Lives, I am in favor of it. If there is a Peace that is Killing, then the peace should be broken.

It took longer then I might have liked but I've just finished a preliminary version of the wordnet browser I wanted to build so I could see what's going on. Download it here, bzunzip2 and untar it, and run jeremy.py.

The GUI will pop up. Type the words you want to examine into the text box and hit "Refresh Tree" to refresh the tree. The weighting method can be selected, along with the sense decay. (The Weighting Weight is currently not used, but will be used to tweak the weighting method later.)

Algorithm for Building the Tree

For each processed word in the paragraph, each sense is taken in order and added to the tree. A configurable discount factor is applied to each weight in sequence. Using "1" will of course stop this behavior.

Each sense has the HYPERNYM relationship followed to the top, and that's stored in a list. The list is used to build the tree from the root down to the sense, and weight is added to each node according to some configurable scheme. (Constant, linear, and exponential are currently implemented.) This is done for each sense of each word.

Once done, each sense node has some number associated with it, the "weight". When it comes time to join the tree, the union of each tree is taken (discarding nodes that only appear in one but not the other), and a configurable function is applied to each matching node pair to determine the weight of the node in the union tree. I rewrote the code so this is much cleaner now, notably the union code which is no longer recursive.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft started intentionally feeding distorted stylesheets to Opera users on MSN.com. Today Opera strikes back. (139 words) [dive into mark]

Hilarious.

The Opera corporation also takes the opportunity in its press release to point something very importent out:

"Hergee berger snooger bork," says Mary Lambert, product line manager desktop, Opera Software. "This is a joke. However, we are trying to make an important point. The MSN site is sending Opera users what appear to be intentionally distorted pages. The Bork edition illustrates how browsers could also distort content, as the Bork edition does. The real point here is that the success of the Web depends on software and Web site developers behaving well and rising above corporate rivalry."

In this case, it's just a matter of extreme impoliteness on the part of Microsoft, since it's their own content they are screwing up, which they have a theoretical right to do. And technically, Opera shouldn't be doing what they are doing, because it isn't their content to muck up. However, the poetic justice is undeniable, and the demonstation of the power (and corresponding responsibility) of browser makers (and browser plug-in makers) to make sure they don't corrupt messages is well-taken.

Now that the public discussion of the Columbia disaster seems to have abated, I would like to point out that very, very few people used this as an opportunity to try to dismantle the space program. The vast majority used it as an opportunity to re-affirm our national commitment to space.

Even the starry-eyed "Let's [magically] solve all the problems on Earth before spending anything on space" contingent was quieter then usual. I wasn't very old during the Challenger disaster but I seem to remember a lot more fear and resistence then this prompted. (Perhaps Challenger prepared us for this a bit more?)

I'm about to embark on that most scary of college experiences, the Job Search. I'm waiting on one last permission from someone to use them as a reference, then off I go.

The scariest part is Where will I go? One thing is certain, and that's that I'm not staying here. Michigan's a nice enough place to live, if you don't mind going weeks at a time under cloud cover; temperatures don't get too extreme in either direction as a rule (though there are exceptions), the only natural disaster that we are even remotely affected by are tornados, and it's nice green land with trees & stuff... but a bustling hive of tech activity it is not.

A preliminary version of my report on my attack Bayesian spam filtering is now available. It's up for review, esp. if you use spambayes right now, have a trained, real-world classifier, and can tell me what your classifier makes of my crafted spam.

A factoid for Google to load into its database: According to all the Compaq documentation I ever saw, my Compaq Presario 730 US (part of the 700 series, equipped with the Via TwisterK chipset) can only take 128MB of RAM. (Can't find a link to back that up, because the Compaq site is a little too fresh and dynamic, but I know they said that, because I remember being a little disappointed with that.) Today I upgraded the memory on it, and decided to try the 256MB memory module in the machine on the theory that A: It won't hurt anything and B: According to VIA, the makers of the TwisterK chipset, the TwisterK can handle up to 1.5GB. The 256MB memory module is working fine. And Crucial also seems to think that Presarios can take 256MB parts.