5/17/2007 #
From the Once-Fertile Loins of Alt-Rock
Productivity is at historical lows as a result of the delightfully quirky stylings of the Silversun Pickups. It might be worth your time to locate a DMCA-questionable instance of a YouTube video for the song “Lazy Eye,” which is so Smashing Pumpkins-esque I’m about to put water all in my hair and headbang in front of my 2 Watt laptop speakers.
I also have a high-quality version courtesy of ClearChannel’s poor website security, and the inherent vulnerability of the mms protocol to elegant destruction.
Having a girl playing bass just adds to the Pumpkins-related fun; all we need is for the lead singer to shave his head and don the Zero shirt of olde.
I have to say the video “plot” is a bit hackneyed, but I think the video is more about differentiating the vocal timbre of the lead singer from the girl, since the tonality is so elevated from your normal rock vocals (pre-emo, at least).
I’m not ready to crown them kings (and queen, I suppose), but it’s nice to hear some real sound coming from a band these days. They sort of remind me of Straylight Run, only maybe a bit more sustainable past one awesome mellow song.
5/17/2007 #
Bogosity
I have been jawing around about cobbling a few pet technologies together to make an interesting/uninteresting filter for RSS news. The reasoning behind this is the whole “Web 2.0” thing, where user-rated content seems to be all the rage. The problem I see with user-rated content is that you need to align with the opinions of other users if these evaluations are to have any context and applicability.
This leads me to the problem of going to Digg and having to search through perhaps 10% of postings within the “OMG!!! Bush has a booger. LOL!!! Worst President EVER!!!” ilk, despite my general interest in the technology and “oddly enough” stories typically featured on that site (moreso than Fark, etc.).
So, I had this idea. Combine a caching RSS parser with a Bayesian spam filter, using no spam corpus to train the filter initially. Mark interesting stories as “not spam” and uninteresting stories as “spam.” Start training the filter in this way until predictions arise.
I originally thought to do this with Python (thanks to its somewhat holy union of easy memory management, an http client, and an XML parser). However, PHP features somewhat unholier capabilities on these vectors, and I plugged in MagpieRSS last night for a grab-and-go RSS dirty work agent.
I used the venerable bogofilter, effective in both naming and function, to perform the Bayesian classification. The thing is running as a local web application on joey.home.local, which is magically running here at home.
The prototype of the whole thing is running in about 20 lines of PHP. It’s about as inefficient as you get; each RSS feed item forks a separate bogofilter instance from the shell (yeah, I know, the term “orders of magnitude of performance decreases” comes to mind). There’s also no foreseeable way to have multiple databases – as in, a database of Bayesian classifications for each user in a large group of users. This completely defeats the stated purpose of personalization (save for myself alone), but it’s just a mock-up using the path of least resistance.
The verdict is that the darn thing refuses to classify new content until the database is built up to be more robust. These filters tend to count on a large corpus of both spam and not-spam to use as training before being installed in the wild. Since I’m not using that (can’t: all not-spam is not intrinsically interesting), it will take a while to know if it’s even a good idea.
5/12/2007 #
Har har har
Har har har har har har har har har.
Glad I’m out.
5/10/2007 #
Misdirected Attention
The Movie Announcer Guy gets too much credit. There should be more attention directed toward the Drag Racing and Monster Truck Show Guy.
5/10/2007 #
He Was a Luddite, Lexically
Text is not a verb
Text is not a verb
Hi, ho, the dairy-oh
Text is not a verb
Flix is not a noun
Pix is not a noun
Verizon ads can kiss my butt
Don’t make up stupid words
Avoid dumb acronyms
Avoid dumb acronyms
OMG ROTFL
Real English FTW
Cell phones are for voice
Big contracts are your choice
But I’ll never pay for TV
On a 1.2 inch screen
5/9/2007 #
Counter-Cultural Culture
I’ve decided that Digg is full of a bunch of people obsessed with being counterflow on everything for the sake of the “coolness” it provides. When you look at the story flow recently, it’s been nearly obsessively focused on getting Ron Paul and Mike Gravel listed and recognized as front-runners for the 2008 election, while their popularity poll numbers have them ranked below “Someone Else” in most polls.
Then, I read through the comments about a beer article, and they’re filled with a bunch of “your favorite mainstream beer brand sucks because you don’t know about my favorite unknown beer brand.” Note that “mainstream” includes microbrews that have national or major-regional exposure. Somebody even eliminated the entire east coast from having decent beers.
Then, you add on the Ubuntu fanboyism, and then meta-fanboyism of hating the emerging thing to be a fanboy of, so that you look cool fanboying something else.
It seems like the web is breeding “information snobs” that feel they have researched everything in the world and honestly know everything about a select group of issues. They then scorn the major distributors of information for forgetting to include the marginal details that fuel their elitism.
This seems to be going strong in the medical field, as well, where patients are talking back to their doctors because they took a 10 question test on WebMD sponsored by some prescription drug company.
But as for me, you all don’t even understand how good I am at picking things to consume! I should start a blog to trumpet the things I like and you don’t know about!
5/5/2007 #
Dow 13,000?
I don’t see how this country can devise and commercialize such a stupid idea and still have a modicum of financial success.
5/4/2007 #
Who Would Have Thought?
There was a mistake on an answer to a clue on the USA Today crossword today! It really messed me up, too.
5/2/2007 #
Take-Home Versus In-Class
Just about every finals week / end-of-year since the beginning of my college education, I have had some specific song or two that I played incessantly to relax. I remember it was “Back to You” by John Mayer and “She’s Every Woman” by Garth Brooks my first year of undergraduate. Last year was “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts. I don’t remember any others right offhand.
I don’t have one this year. If I had one for the semester, it would by “Philosophy” from the self-titled Ben Folds Five album, but that really doesn’t count.
I want to pick up a 7 Mary 3 album at Best Buy this weekend and see if I can force something on there into the position.
Anyway… Maybe I should actually write something now.