Xoti

Global Bugjam 2008 happened, and the Michigan LoCo was no exception. Some photos taken there can be seen at snap-l’s site. It was pretty good, I learned a bit more about bug handling in Launchpad and how to work with them, things like that. I find it amusing though, that instead of solving any bugs, I ended up filing one.

I normally write about more technical things, and still intend to keep to that, but for a moment I thought I'd do something slightly different and turn to something a bit less computer-related, and instead talk about books.

I don't think I've ever met someone that I would describe as "intelligent" that didn't read at least occasionally, and I don't think it's surprising. While I'm not saying there is no such thing as a good television show or a good movie, they just generally pale in comparison to a well written novel in terms of complexity and depth. This is doubly true when it's considered that nearly all television is drivel that insults the viewer's intelligence at least once every ten minutes. Watching TV really does have to be the lowest form of popular entertainment.

Books also are one of my only financial vices. I'm cheap by nature and I hate spending money. It's fortunate, because tuition is expensive and so I can't afford to have expensive taste. Still, I genuinely think that if I made six figures, I'd still agonize over spending $10 on anything non-essential. An exception to this, though, is books. While I still rarely buy new books, instead preferring used books sales and (even better) library sales, books are one of the few things I love to get more of, whether I have the time to read them or not. There's just something satisfying about a shelf full of hardcovers that I couldn't begin to verbalize.

So, I thought I'd do a mandatory blog post about my favorite books, and a little about them. These aren't in any order, or even really my "top ten" or anything of that sort, because that changes constantly. Really, they're just the ones that come to mind immediately while I write this, so if you ask me about this next month, I may very well list an entirely disjointed set. It happens.

Something that happened at Penguicon that I hadn't mentioned before was my coming on a small paper pamphlet titled "Twelve Virtues of Rationality". I skimmed over it briefly, then tossed it into my bag for further reading in its entirety later. Then, as I often do, I entirely forgot about it until emptying out my bag later on that week.

I've actually read it now, though, and it's a very nice little treatise on twelve main points of rational thought, written by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, and posted on his website (linked above, if you didn't already figure that out). I'd recommend reading over it to anyone, and while it's not earth-shattering (any reasonably rational mind should be saying to themselves "well yeah, that makes sense" while reading it), it's a nice and concise bit of writing on the topic. Sometimes even for material you know, a well-organized and succinct outline of main points makes it easier to fully digest and remember in day to day life.

Also, if you're not a fairly rational person at least... please stop being a burden to the rest of society, and read it twice.

He's kind enough to release it under a creative commons license (attribution, no derivatives), although the fact that he uses a traditional copyright symbol on the same page in reference to the same work is ambiguous. In any case, I thought I'd take advantage of his generosity and post it here as well, hoping to have a few more people read it. Enjoy, and spread it yourself as well.

Thank you, to whomever printed it and left it on tables at Penguicon, you at least got it to one interested party, and I'm sure others.

Penguicon was this past weekend, and lived up to my expectations, which was itself expected. I certainly wasn't the only one enthusiastic about it, because this year, with over 1,000 attendees, we clearly have outgrown the hotel. It's been a nice hotel and everything, but it's just not quite big enough for such a large group. Next year will be in Romulus, so that problem should be alleviated, though.

I managed to get Adam from WSULUG to come along for most of it, and Eric (also from WSULUG) made it out for Saturday and Sunday. Friday night Chris came out as well. Other than that, I mostly tended to hang around the Ubuntu Michigan LoCo Team, most of whom I had talked to countless times in IRC, but had never met in person. I also met a girl there, with whom (as she pointed out) I may have the greatest possible "how we met" story - we met while trying to devise a way to create a velociraptor from assorted garbage and tape. It's a long story, but it has to do with the author of xkcd being there. Readers of it can guess at the intention.

Other highlights of the weekend include hot sauce tasting with ESR (I love spicy food, and the guy has great taste in hot sauce, I learned), and the Giant Singing Tesla Coils. Hell, the tesla coil concerts (there were two, at least) were worth the price of admission alone. Even the hotel employees would sneak out to see them when they could.

I'm not sure if it was the additional people this year or not, but Saturday night seemed even more energetic and bigger than last year. I often describe Penguicon to those who haven't been there as "a 72 hour-ish long party, reverting to serious stuff when the sun comes out", and this year exemplified that. I didn't stick around all night, but based on some of the stories I'm hearing, I think next year I will.

So for those that didn't come - you missed out. A lot. From what I'm hearing, 2009 will be even bigger and even better. There's no reason for you not to go.

Penguicon is coming, and I am excited. Last year I finally went, and it was just incredible.

If you're either in the Detroit area or willing to travel there for the weekend, and have an interest in open source or science fiction (or better, both), you really ought to think about coming.

Every now and then, I'll watch a movie, read a book, or suffer through a television show that I normally would never bother to, mainly in the interest of staying somewhat in touch with popular culture, and making sure I can get the inside jokes now and then. Also, I just like to test the waters outside of my normal harbors periodically, so to speak. Sometimes, I'm very pleasantly surprised and find that what I thought would just be more lowest-common-denominator crap is actually quite good (V For Vendetta, for example).

Other times, no. Other times my original suspicions that the movie or show in question is utter crap are just confirmed, and the time spent on it mostly wasted.

Transformers is a perfect example, and to illustrate, I'd like to assume you haven't seen it for a moment, and reenact it for you.

It might help here to first give a bit of background. While I am still (for a little longer) a university student, I've also done web development for the past four years in the travel industry, mostly working on internal applications for my employer. We used Perl, MySQL, and the other usual suspects (XHTML, CSS, a bit of Javascript here and there).

So recently when I was given a semester-long group assignment in a class, I took the opportunity to use it as a means to get reacquainted with PHP. As I mentioned, we've always used Perl at work, mainly because that's what the people that were there before me (and above me while they were there) used, and it just doesn't make sense to rewrite potentially tens of thousands of lines of code just because.

Anyway, as many will already know, PHP is pretty much the "cool thing" for web development nowadays, and while I have used it before, it was years ago when PHP5 was still brand new. I figured this would be a good way to get back into a little, if for no other reason than so that I could legitimately put it on my resume again.

When I decided all of this though, I noticed a difference in the methods that my classmates and I went about learning or refreshing our knowledge of the language. Part of it came from me having done it before, and being fairly knowledgeable of web programming in general already, but I think it's more than that, and I think it's worth taking note of and possibly learning from.

My classmates all immediately went looking for books. Things like PHP For Dummies and other "entry level" books designed for the aspiring programmer starting from scratch. This isn't a bad idea I suppose, but I suspect that most people would stop there, or simply continue with more advanced books, and the occasional blog reading. This isn't enough.

Something about me that's probably a bit of a rarity compared to most of my peers on the Internet is that I don't pirate music. I'm not at all saying I'm on the RIAA's side or anything like that, I just think that one of the best things about the Internet and its effect on culture is the decentralization of content creation and distribution, including music. There's plenty out there to listen to legitimately without resorting to questionable legalities and rampant lawsuits, even if you do think you're justified in pirating music.

I'm not an expert on creative commons or other similarly licensed music out there, but one site I've found in particular to be great, both in selection and quality, is Magnatune. Amarok users will probably already know of this one since the program has a integrated interface to it, but for the rest of you, maybe this will be new. The rest of you should also be abandoning MS Media Player or whatever other drivel you're using, and flocking to Amarok in droves, but that's a whole other blog entry for another day.

Magnatune licenses their music with a Creative Commons license, which I've mentioned in previous posts. You can listen to everything they offer, in its entirety, though a flash player in your browser, or streamed from their site. When you purchase an album (and it's much cheaper than the crap in your local store), you can download it in multiple formats, including Ogg Vorbis, which made me happy, or even the raw and uncompressed .wav files. No DRM, and if you so choose, not even compressed. Also when you purchase an album, they not only allow, but encourage you to share it with three other people.  In short, as they say themselves, they're not evil.

As for the music itself, I've found that it's more appealing in general if you're a fan of classical music. Something like 50% of their offerings are in that general area, but not all, of course. Musical taste varies widely, so it's best that you just browse their site yourself, but some favorites (so far) of mine include Sundowner, Utopia Banished, and Monks and Choirs of Kiev Pechersk Lavra. That's just a start though, since there's hundreds of albums, and I haven't even come close to listening to half of them.

I turned in a paper today (actually a 'Literature Review') for a class about the topics you see here in the title. There were several other interesting topics to choose from, but I came up with this one myself for three main reasons. First, Open Standards are something I've supported anyway. It comes with the territory of being an enthusiastic Linux user. Secondly, despite my introverted nature and hermit-like habits, I actually find social networks and their workings, as well as applications of their use to be very interesting. Thirdly, because I really do believe that the application computing to social networks is going to revolutionize culture as we know it, and already has to some degree. This may very well be the biggest contribution the field of computing has on not just society, but the nature of our culture and civilization itself. Sounds grandiose, but just wait. We're in the initial stages, it's still gestating.

So, while this wasn't a terribly long and in depth paper, nor a technically detailed one, nor the definitive introduction to the topic (after all, I write it in all of maybe six hours, grand total), I did find some very interesting things along the way. The assignment asked that we review three journal articles, but I ended up doing five, and in the course of finding the five I wanted to use, I ended up at least skimming over two dozen articles from journals and conference proceedings from the ACM and the IEEE. I didn't consider myself an expert when I started (after all, that's why I chose it - to learn, not just regurgitate what I already know), nor am I one now, but I do think I'm better informed on the topic now, so I thought I'd share some of the interesting implementations, applications, and information on social networks that I found using open standards.

I had heard about TED some time ago, but never really investigated much. I spend an unhealthy amount of my time in front of a computer screen, and so countless possibly interesting things come across without my wholehearted investigation, for varying reasons. Sometimes I'm in the middle of more important things, or maybe it just doesn't look interesting at the time. I'm not sure which explanation to blame for my missing TED, but for whatever reason, I just didn't look into it.

Then, a month or two ago, a politically-aware friend sent me a link to a talk on TED called "Scenes From The War Tapes", given by a filmmaker named Deborah Scranton who gave cameras to American soldiers in Iraq. In the roughly eighteen minute long presentation, Scranton shows you a bit of what the result looks like, as well as some of the reactions of people who have seen it, including soldiers themselves. I'll give you a bit of a warning - near the end, the soldier's reaction she talks about is gut-wrenching. This talk alone got me interested, and TED was back on the back burner of my mind, to look at in more detail later.

Skip forward to a couple of weeks ago. I'm idling in the WSULUG IRC channel, and someone (I believe it was Jason, but I'm not positive) tosses up a link from TED again. This time it's Larry Lessig, and he's talking about "How creativity is being strangled by the law", and it's nothing short of brilliant. I'm a fan of Creative Commons, and if you'll notice, I use a license of theirs for this blog and even all the photos on my Flickr site are CC licensed. Suffice it to say, I have a passing interest in the topic, even if I'm not exactly an expert. In any case, his talk was an excellent introduction to not Creative Commons, but the reasons why something like Creative Commons exists.

So then, three related incidents - what's my point? My point is simply that if you have more intelligence than a turnip, you ought to browse through their site, and start watching some of these people speak. TED has talks by leading minds in their fields, and the fields covered span dozens of topics. They're also fairly accessible, so you don't need a Ph.D. in physics to watch Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann talk about "Beauty and truth in physics", for example.

I'll even meet you halfway, and get you started. I have yet to look though all of the talks available because it's finals week and there's over 150 of them, but here's the ones I've seen so far (besides the ones linked above) that were of interest to me, or that are on my personal "to watch" list. They're in no particular order.

• Steven Pinker, "A Brief History Of Violence".
  
• Richard Dawkins, "An Atheist's Call To Arms"
• Richard Baraniuk, "Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning"
• Richard Dawkins, "The universe is queerer than we can suppose"

There you go. Four of them, plus the three linked before the list. Get a beer, snack on some broccoli, and watch them. Then find more, because this is just the tip of the TED iceberg.