Hofstadter's Title

Posted on March 26, 2003 by Pace Arko

Anyway, I’ve been busy this last week with work, mostly adding a bunch of content to Blinksoft and doing some network administration for a doctor’s office, so I haven’t really had time to post here.

Work on the Greymatter update continues however. Sockmonk now has a TODO List going.

Well, he dragged the rest of us kicking and screaming into his little adventure, but George finally got the war he wanted, that he has wanted since before he was president. Luckily we’ve got someone to double check the ‘Gon’s assessments of collateral damage. I guess I am mostly worried about what’s going to happen after it’s over. I am skeptical that the US really has the will and commitment to build a stable and democratic Iraq. It will take us years, infinite patience and lots of money. I also hope that rational heads will prevail and repair the rifts with our allies and the UN. Jingoism aside, we simply cannot afford to go it alone or to be the world’s pariah. This was the main thing that ticked me off about George’s handling of this whole affair, the fact that he alienated our allies and the UN.

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Interabang sent us this one

Posted on March 18, 2003 by Pace Arko

As has been mentioned, I am skeptical guy. For example, I laughed very smugly at that South Park episode that lambasted John Edwards. Anyway, the proprietor of !?, another ardent skeptic searching for like-minded folks, recommended that I visit the Ontario Skeptics site and perhaps drop a little science on the site board.

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Here's a thought

Posted on March 12, 2003 by Pace Arko

You know all those tools in gymnasiums? Often you have to set various levels of resistance and tension in them to fit the strength of your muscles, then you engage in all these repetitive movements. The thing that always bothered me is that, aside from building a healthier body, a lot of that energy is wasted. Why don’t we hook these machines to electric generators and batteries? Perhaps I am being naive about this but couldn’t we use a gearing mechanism and the force in dynamos to generate the resistance needed to build muscle tissue?

I remember when I was at the Exploratorium a few years ago. They had this bike hooked to an electric generator and a bank of lights. The faster you pedaled, the more the resistance in the generator fought back, forcing you to work harder and the more lights went on. Maybe gymnasiums could use this as a selling point–come in and exercise and charge your fuel cells at the same time!

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My own mod of Greymatter

Posted on March 12, 2003 by Pace Arko

Well, it’s a work in progress. After removing some bugs that people have found, plus the ones I already knew were there, I think it’s ready for prime time. Feel free to try it out (If you want to look at and mess with the code in one of the children of unix, try this one). I no longer support Greymatter in any form. I have removed, these code archives from my site.(Wednesday, July 19th, 2006)

My code is built on Seung Chan Lim’s category modification of the Greymatter scripts. Seung built on the GM version 1.21b and this was where I also forked from GM a couple years ago.

I haven’t really changed or added any functionality. All I’ve really done and the goals I am try to reach are:

  1. Stripped out all presentational HTML (layout tables, FONT, widths, borders and such frippery.) of the admin forms. This had the benefit of knocking nearly 50KB off gm.cgi.
  2. Stripped out all inline CSS and CSS class references as a prelude to a global stylesheet, now labeled “grey01.css.” This will aid “skinning” as well reduce non-perl noise in the scripts.
  3. Tried as hard as possible to make all the markup generated by the admin forms to hew as close as possible to XHTML 1 strict, but this still won’t be perfect as certain attributes (namely wrap=”virtual” which is deprecated.) are needed by GM. This is still a work in progress.
  4. Moved 3 blocks of javascript code into separate files for ease of maintenance. The client-side code that remains needs values from Greymatter in order to work, but ideally as much client-side code should be encapsulated and moved outside of GM to ease maintenance and reduce non-perl noise
  5. I ran all the code through the perltidy utility. Hopefully this will help others build and improve on what I’ve wrote.
  6. Attempted to add markup (LABEL, ACCESSKEY, FIELDSET, AXIS, etc.) to aid Greymatter’s accessibility. Greymatter is actually mostly accessible to people with screen reading software already. Noah did a great job of explaining what each field and checkbox is for in the form itself and these good usability practices are great to build accessibility with. The stuff I am adding is icing on the cake. See the WAI authoring tool guidelines for more. All that is really needed is keyboard shortcuts to allow people to jump quickly through the forms and to have all form elements clearly labeled.

In the process meeting goals 1 through 5, I’ve made extensive but small changes all over Noah’s scripts. But I really haven’t made any real changes in the functionality of the scripts.

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Wasted security

Posted on March 4, 2003 by Pace Arko

Thank you Microsoft and Apple. In introducing computers to the public, you’ve done a good thing. I’d like to think that our world is improved because of it. But, I just wish you both hadn’t taken shortcuts with security like you did. Now the public expects to do things like they’ve always done in System 6 or Windows 3 and this leads to terrible security in the small LANs found all the small businesses and homes around the world. It doesn’t matter that you’ve got OSX or Win2k now. All that new security is wasted because the public doesn’t want to give up the convenience of the old, incorrect way of doing things. I guess I should be grateful that I am paid to worry about this, but it’s a pity that I have to.

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The mysterious process 772

Posted on February 28, 2003 by Pace Arko

Learned a lot of computer stuff in the last 2 days.

Oh well, I’ll think about it later. Gotta write up some compelling plot for the gamin’ crew tomorrow.

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Swarm intelligence, artificial trees, guilt-free stem cells

Posted on February 25, 2003 by Pace Arko
  • They’ve figured out to create pluripotent, stem cells from cheap, ordinary, blood cells. This is a breakthrough because these types of cells previously have only been found in fetal tissue, which is controversial, or bone marrow, which is difficult to collect from.
  • Just saw this on Slash, an interview with scientist who describes how swarm intelligence can optimize computer networks, military logistics and factory supply chains.
  • A bright spark over at Columbia University invented an artificial tree for the purpose of drawing excess carbon dioxide out of the air. Another researcher proposes, with some reservations, isolating the genes that make certain plants highly efficient carbon sinks and inserting those genes in other plants.
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How scientists relate to buildings

Posted on February 25, 2003 by Pace Arko

So I came across this article in Wired that seemed unhappy with the security at Los Alamos National Laboratory–perhaps a legitimate concern–but it also seemed unhappy with how grubby the LANL buildings were, which isn’t such a big deal. Let me explain. When I was a kid, double majoring in astronomy and physics, in university eighteen or so years ago, the things that struck me were the priorities of the professors in the engineering/science buildings on campus. One could walk by or through these buildings and see what shacks they were–peeling paint, dirty windows, hallways cluttered with boxes filled with photocopies of preprints. The machine shops where always busy and the instruments where first rate or at least adequate for job, but everything else was worn through heavy use. These scientists spent their limited resources on what mattered: gear and data. To most scientists, whether archeologists in the field or engineers at NASA, a building is a place that protects your data or instruments from the elements–that’s it. You want air conditioning? Well, you’d better hope they have a server farm, because otherwise you aren’t going to get it. They’ll spend money on the dewar’s flasks first before spending money on a masterpiece of architecture.

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One can only hope this will end up in Memepool one day

Posted on February 12, 2003 by Pace Arko

I worked at the Lazy M Ranch in one capacity or another for four years and I saw first hand how the best brains of my time were warped beyond all recognition while there. As an example of this, allow me to point you towards the coat-hanger xmas tree.

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Been waiting for this for a long time

Posted on February 6, 2003 by Pace Arko

Progress continues to be made on robot cars–cars that drive themselves. Like I’ve said many times, human are just not reliable enough to be put in charge of a tonne or so of steel and plastic.

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