It Is A Mystery…

It’s 2008.  Why the heck doesn’t my computer know what I’m probably going to be doing when I download a file?  My computer should be able to learn that I transcode video files with English hardsubs to MP4 and put them in my iTunes share, or that PDFs that I read may tend to be related to research and should be saved…  So why doesn’t it?

So I’ve returned after some time at MIT where I was getting a bearing on where I’m going next with my part in the TAMI project, and I’ve come out with a few goals:

• Finish tinkering and profiling the current TAAC setup.  This has already resulted in some interesting results, namely, that the planned OpenID setup is really slow.  To be fair, I’ve also only tested it with one physical setup, so I need to test a couple other servers, and so on. Unfortunately, it seems that the number of round-trips needed to get the FOAF file, get the OpenID identifier, and then establish a shared secret with the OpenID provider takes way too long. We can cache some of this (especially the former two), and can even avoid it all with a cookie established at the end of the first authentication, but the first sign-on takes entirely too long to process on this VPS.
• Examine other authentication methods.  Since the key right now is shortening the time needed to authenticate against one’s FOAF URI, there are several other methods out there that may cut out the authentication issues, including RDFAuth and Toby Inkster’s FOAF+SSL.  The former has less round-trips (as there isn’t the cost of setting up the SSL connection), but the latter doesn’t require the maintenance of a PKI, and can be done with self-signed certs.  I hope to be talking with Toby and Henry Story, among others, to see what’s been done with FOAF+SSL, and to see how we can work that authentication method in.
• Get a better idea how the reasoner engines work for the AIR reasoner. Seeing as my understanding is not terribly good at their reasoning methods, I’m going to be trying my hand at reimplementing a Rete system, a TREAT system, and a backwards chainer…  In Erlang (or at least do such for a Rete).  Why Erlang?  I think it will give me a good idea about not only how the system’s productions are called (as a network of alpha and beta nodes is rather nicely done in a functional framework), but it will give me a better understanding of the problems with trying to make a Rete concurrent (and why TREAT is ostensibly better at concurrency).  With Erlang’s BUILT-IN concurrency and light-weight threads, rather than a lock-based concurrent framework like in the Python we’re currently using, there’s no additional cost to making the functions concurrent if I take the time to do it in Erlang.  Luckily for me, I’ve worked with the Mozart Programming System in my programming languages class, and Erlang isn’t too different from that…  Plus, it’s another programming paradigm/language under my belt.
• Implement cwm built-ins into the AIR reasoner.  Yosi and I have already discussed some of the issues with doing so, so it’s just a matter of my understanding the code that’s standing in the way of my adding such.  Thus the reason for the above, and studying the existing code.

I suppose it’s about time for me to announce a status report of what I’m up to lately…

First: I’ve picked up my Pixonomy project again, and while I’ve JUST put it on hold again, I’ve progressed the library with a refactoring and I just need to do some cross-platform hacking (to get it to compile nicely on OS X as a universal binary), and implement a couple of search functions to actually get it to a state where I can actually start programming client software in GTK+ or wxWidgets (I haven’t decided which) to demo the library.

Second: I’m currently taking a break from Pixonomy to work on a nifty font for OpenTTD.  Since I noted that they finally implemented TrueType support and Unicode support in 0.5.0 (which I’d tried to implement before, but never really got around to), I figured I’d try my hand at something fun.  After I get all the lower case characters done preliminarily, I’ll start adjusting the bounds and kerning by testing in game…

Third: Been watching some of the subs for this season, and I think Allison & Lillia does seem to have some promise, but we’ll see where it goes.  Zettai Karen Children, though, is not so much up my alley.  We’ll see where the other series I want to check out go (namely, Library War)…  There’s a few others that might be good, too.

My final year of Genericon as Chief of Operations is over.  Kinda surprising that I’ve been such for three years!  Oh well, I think my replacement will do a good job.  I did my best to train him, but even so, I’ll probably end up as auxiliary help for Genericon XXII if grad school doesn’t interfere, just to make his and the new chair’s lives easier.

There were a couple of fun things we had, but I think Scott’s Horrible Video Game panel was one of the coolest things I got to do all con.  I recorded it on my camera, and even though it’s crappy quality, I’m gonna see if I can’t stitch together a Youtube post featuring it in the next week or so.  Standard work for a lot of the rest of the con, but even so, it was pretty fun.

It’s been fun, but it’s time for the new-old-guard to start moving on…  And time for me to actually get to work on the work that needs to be done for this semester.

P.S. djpretzel, Liontamer, and zircon were all awesome guests.  I didn’t see the others as much, but I think this years’ guests were all great and courteous guests and generally cool to hang out with!  Even though…  I kinda stayed in the ops room for half the con again.

Here are a couple AURA rating icons I came up with to use with the system. Combinations could probably work similarly, and I could shrink it or make a dark matte if you like… Read the rest of this entry »

The writing is just as good as when Futurama was cancelled.  Much better than Family Guy when it came back.  I need to go back and actually buy the other DVDs…

The following is my TODO list for the next week or so: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve already given a bit of thought on Galaxy after having taken a couple of days break from the purple coin quest. For my review, read on… (Thanks to Nina for letting me use her Coin and AURA rating systems)

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So apparently Nintendo actually made Galaxy suck.  That’s right, I got 104 stars, beat Bowser to get the last, and then, as expected, out came ‘collect the 100 purple coins.’  Of course, having first collected purple coins in the process of unlocking the best powerup in the game, I figured that these purple coin stars would have said powerup, or at least be challenging and fun, but instead, it becomes a monotonous grindfest.

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“Not bad! I guess I chose the right guy to be my archenemy. At least you always put up a fight.”

P.S. 68 stars and JUST beat the Bedroom Boss.  I want to clean up the Engine Room before heading to the center of the universe.  I just like breaking the game where all 5 galaxies appear at once.  It’s rather amusing that way.