Posts from — May 2006

For you wikipedia users out there, here’s a couple of tips you may not be aware of:

In firefox, you can just enter “wp <entry name>” in the address bar to find an entry. For example, if I want to find the entry about Bill Clinton, I’d just type in “wp Bill Clinton” and it would bring me right to the page. Magic!

Also, wikipedia’s search function is pretty bad. It doesn’t do things like spell checking, which really annoys me. It’s easy to search wikipedia with google, though. Enter a query like this: “<search query> site:wikipedia.org”. So, if I mistyped it as Bill Clinon, I’d search Google for “Bill Clinon site:wikipedia.org” (without quotes), which would show me the correct page, whereas the same search string using wikipedia’s search would yield 0 results.

The more you know!

I’ve now been writing in this journal for over three years. Not bad!

There’s a lot I could write about today, but I don’t feel like telling the whole story right now. It did involve a trip to the emergency room, though. Ask about it if you’re interested.

I went for a run today for the first time in a while. I did 3.78 miles, which was tiring, but I made it. My speed is good enough, I just don’t have much endurance. I’m confident I’ll be able to make exercise a part of my summer.

Runstoppable is going well. I won’t write about the upcoming features right now, but I think that the next upgrade will be useful to a lot of people. Hopefully it’ll be coming out next week. If anyone is interested in helping out with the project in a non-programming capacity, let me know… there’s a lot to do. Testing and feedback are very helpful, too.

On week until work starts. I can’t wait.

I’m nervous about moving, which isn’t surprising since I get nervous when packing to go home for a weekend. I had a dream last night that I had forgotten some paperwork. It was another stupid dream (edit: that wasn’t a porcupine tree reference). There are a few things that I’ve heard rumors about through other interns, but I’ll write about them when they happen… I don’t want to count my proverbial chickens before the hatch.

I’ve got three projects that I need to finish up tomorrow, then I’ll be done for the semester (I think). It’ll be nice to have some time off for the rest of the week to work on runstoppable, clean, cook, run, read etc.

Perhaps I’ll write more later.

Today I randomly decided to do some quick analysis of my gaim log files, mostly because I need to use gnuplot of a project I’m working on, so I figured this would be an easy way to get the hang of it.

Anyway, I computed the log size for each buddy (i.e. how much we’ve talked) and sorted it by log size. Creating the data file was really easy, I just ran du * | sort -nr > total.dat. The plot is shown here:

I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at it, but I’m pretty sure this is close to a Zipfian distribution, which didn’t surprise me at all, but is interesting.

To backtrack a bit and explain exactly what’s plotted above: I have 40MB of log files stored, which equates to about 40 million letters. If you were to pick out a random one of these letters, the plot above shows the probability it would come from each of those people (though it’s not normalized, of course). In other words, it would be twice as likely that the letter is in a conversation with the first person compared to the ninth person. In this respect, it’s an unnormalized probability distribution function.

This is interesting because Zipfian distributions happen all the time: word usage in many languages, pages requested on web servers, web searches, city sizes, etc. It’s pretty neat to see it in such a personal context that might not seem to be bound to mathematical laws.

If anyone else has the interest, I’d like to see how your plots look. It would be interesting to see if people with very different social behaviors had the same distribution.

Apparently yesterday was “Loyalty Day” in the US

A few of you will appreciate this:
“It is a marriage of military technology and Hollywood fakery; some 350 Arabic-speaking Iraqi-Americans and plainclothes Nevada National Guardsman live here almost year-round to offer American trainees what one officer described as “a vortex of chaos.” The insurgents even get acting lessons, coached by Carl Weathers, best known for his portrayal of the boxer Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” films.”
from the NYT, thanks to walter