Oblomovka

2002-08-19»

So, I’m living through some interesting times right now. I just hit 33, my wife’s expecting our first baby, and I’ve recently discovered I owe the US federal government quite a few pork-barrels worth of tax.

Now most people who know me will realise I’m a laid back kind of guy, where “laid back” can be interpreted as “bone idle“. But there comes a time when, even though you’ve reached an income bracket that keeps you in pizza and comics, you have to think about changing out of your pyjamas, going out into the wide world, and earning some proper money. This time is known as the “completely broke” time, and I’m so there. I need a career path.

I’ve always rather avoided the term journalist. Partly because, obviously, journalists are the Two-Faced and Turncoated Enemy Who Will Be The First Against The Wall When The Blogolution Comes. Mainly though, because proper journalism involves training and grammar-checking and talking to people on the telephone and selling out to the man in weekly installments.

I’ve been a journalist in the past (straight out of college). For the last five years I’ve been doing something I guess not dissimiliar to investigative journalism at NTK. And I’ve been writing newspaper columns for three years – which is what journalists are supposed to do when they’ve been journalisting for so long they can’t stop, even when they’re too senile to fact check. I even helped start (and kill) a magazine, which even I’ll grant is a bit journalistique manque.

But: I’m not a journalist. Journalism is hard. It takes practice, regular practice, and a degree of teeth-gritting determination I’ve been avoiding for a very long time. Worse, in America it involves knowing off by heart a bunch of strange quasi-legalistic rules – a discipline taught by high-falutin’ Professors Of Inkstains here, and generally replaced in the British model with going down the pub. And you have to be fast. I’ve always been a bit slow, and nowadays I’m slooooooow.

But sooner or later, I’m going to have to be a journalist again. I need the money; there are issues that need to be covered. Also Declan, my long time inspiration in this area, appears to have gone a bit mad.

But I need practice. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to practice on you. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to file stories with you (and hopefully with STAND also). I’ll be messing around with styles a bit, to see if I can get the hang of the different tones of different news services. They’ll be like writing exercises, but the content will nonetheless stand on its own. They’ll be proper interviews, and exclusives, and all that rubbish.

Let me know how it goes, and if I’m improving. If “you” are an editor, and I get it right, you can probably run them straight, but you might like to pay me, or give me a job, or some advice. Or take me down the pub.

The first story will follow in a couple of minutes. We’ll see how it goes.

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Rhys says “at least you didn’t do a course which meant you had to pretend to understand Bayes Theorem”. More helpfully, he pointed to a Bayes explanation which made it click for him. Now the probability of me understanding something, given that Rhys understands it is about 0.4, but the probabilty of Rhys understanding given that I understand it is… no, it’s gone again.

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Which is Macintosh-flavoured Word, just bombed out on me. Again. It’s the second time in a month. Oh, Microsoft, they said you’d changed.

Back to Vim. I think it’s eaten my work once, on an alpha version, two years ago. Oh, sure, it has a steep learning curve and sucks a bit for prose work. But I learnt all the keystrokes a long time ago to impress a girlfriend, I’ve just found out that ‘gG’ tells me my word count, and it now has an interface for the Little Brother Database, so la-la-la, I don’t care..

Oh, and look – somebody’s working on a user friendly version. My UNRECOVERED FILES WILL BE AVENGED.

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Wow. So, just days after Paul Graham put up his Plan for Spam page on a possible Bayesian filter for spam, people have already started implementing it. This one is for Perl and qmail, but I’m sure I’ve seen another somewhere. And I’ll bet there’ll be many many more.

Bayesian analysis is one of those concepts that is so counter-intuitve I find impossible to understand it for more than five minutes. Must try harder.

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2002-08-18»

Matt Jones has been in NY, having fun, and indulging in the latest WiFi hobby: noderunning (warning: noisy webpage)

To begin each team gets a wireless laptop with software that scans for nodes, a digital camera, and cab fare. Each is briefed on how to use the gear. Both teams take photos at Eyebeam and leave for Bryant Park.

The clock starts once both teams to leave Eyebeam. The teams have two and a half hours to connect to and photograph as many nodes as possible, collect a log (with the node scanning software) of nodes along their way, and arrive to the Bowling Green.

1 point is given for every 5 nodes the team’s scanning software logs.

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2002-08-16»

Large scale structure of Internet appears to be fractal – ginormous poster at eleven. I love the way that we now know as little about the shape of the Net as we do the shape of the universe. And why is this categorised as “condensed matter”? Is that some kind of hidden Physics insult?.

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2002-08-13»

NTK has now moved to its new, ultra fast server! Yay for the all-powerful Flirble Organisation!

(Actually, the old server wasn’t bad at all, but there was something very awry and skewiff and borken with the Perl installation. Still unresolved, much to the confusion of the *BSD Perl porters involved.)

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2002-08-12»

Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names, including:

Unsent
Absentee
Injection Hourglass
Hole <— aha!
Bran Enchantment
Each Pinks
Bill Inducer
Swimmer Reign
Penitent Pioneer
Coachman Amongst
Landslide
Heliocentric Minus Another Redhead Peripherals
Base
Regulator Thugs

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AOL subscribers using AOL’s new MacOS X client will see the Web through Mozilla’s rendering engine. I’m guessing that’s a tiny subset of the online population right now, but it’s a sign that we’re moving towards slightly more diversity – both in operating systems and browsers.

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2002-08-09»

A bad brew. Stayed up all last night trying to crank the UK Patent Office’s draft EUCD legislation into my brain, then relaxed today by learning Squeak the small mammal language left over after the Xerox dinosaur swallowed the meteor. Now my brain’s all broken.

Squeak’s a mess, which surprised me. Its developers are on an ongoing voyage between two paradigms – from the old Model-View-Controller idea that SmallTalk pioneered, and this new Morphic ideal, which seems to be visual programming on steroids (lots of dragging of boxes which represent methods next to boxes that represent numbers, then throwing them into buckets that represent data, etc). This trip has been going on since around 1998 as far as I can work out, and, in true SmallTalk fashion, they’ve been rewriting their whole environment as they went. Squeak now looks like this bastard hybrid of a Disney Children’s Constructor Kit and an explosion in an object factory.

I understand now that Swikis and online the mailing lists. So if you’re interested in playing around with Squeak yourself (and it is fun), I think that’s the first stop after the obligatory Squeak FAQs

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