| meditation timer 0.1 |
[May. 17th, 2007|10:37 pm] |
Eventually, I'd like a command line interface, to abstract the following code to this call:
>>meditation.rb bell / 15 / gong
require 'win32/sound'
include Win32
base = "sounds\\"
#files from http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/
bowl = base + '2166_suburban_grilla_bowl_struck' + '.wav'
gong = base + '19547_tobi123_Klangschale_weich_ff' + '.wav'
sleep(60)
Sound.play(bowl)
sleep(60*15)
Sound.play(gong)
UPDATE:
"meditation.rb bell 15 gong" it is... rev. 3 and I stayed up way too late for such a silly thing.
sleep(60) # give a meditator the time to sit down
ARGV.each do |arg|
puts "parsing" + arg
case arg
when "gong"
Sound.play(gong)
when "bell", "bowl"
Sound.play(bowl)
else
sleep(arg.to_i * 60)
end
end
|
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| Hi-Life |
[May. 8th, 2007|09:24 pm] |
King Sunny Ade and Manu Dibango's track "Hi-Life" is the perfect soundtrack right now.
I worked over-time to start cracking a problem I wanted to solve: quantifying social influence in a viral marketing campaign. I have a data set, I got results but not enough time to make a pretty graph. I identified the top 2% of most influential people in our target market. I feel slightly evil.
So I'm a geek working for an advertising company. Last week I got asked the classic... "so how do you see your role inside the company?"
We basically didn't have an entry interview when the companies merged. I'm a coder that doesn't take kindly to noisy surroundings (a temporary situation while offices are being re-jigged), bureaucratic expectations (think meetings and 9-to-5 seat warming). My job is so abstract most don't know what I do, so they can't measure my productivity.
That naturally got people nervous.
A frank discussion followed that question, which gave me much to think about. I am craving stability, I'd like to stay in Quebec and the colleagues are a fun bunch. I had a few ideas of where I could add value, but somehow I couldn't find the common thread, couldn't boil it down to a sound-bite.
The internet disrupts traditional communications and branding. There's no better place to be helping that disruption than in a growing and dynamic agency. Especially when that agency has incredible sales people, an established client base and a willingness to find out what the geeks can pull off.
So I'm going to be the geek that proposes disruptive ways to make a lot more money. And I think this is going to be a lot of fun. |
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| Freebasing |
[May. 7th, 2007|01:47 pm] |
I got my alpha account to freebase, and filed a couple bug reports this week-end. If you don't know what Freebase is yet, follow that link.
Answers came in today. One bug report was legit, the other was my not quite understanding Metabase Query Language.
I feel like I did when I started learning about SQL, overwhelmed and confused. It's not a comfortable feeling, but I'll try to grok this technology.
So why put myself through that again? MQL seems very powerful. And I think this could be the "Next Big Thing" (TM).
The real test will be after I get the hang of MQL, if I can manage to add data programmatically. My data is more valuable if I can query it against other data. It should spawn a virtuous cycle, since the more data there is inside freebase, the more appealing it becomes to add more. |
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| More CD's and a tea-ball |
[May. 6th, 2007|02:53 pm] |
I just bought used copies of Goldman's En Passant, and Johnny Clegg's Shadow Man. Old stuff I had lost and really wanted to hear again.
After the toaster-oven and ironing board, I'm now buying things like tea-balls and nut-crackers. My home life is starting to feel settled and normal. Routine, even. That "settling" energy is a by-product of my deciding to stay in Quebec.
I discussed this with Ellen K. She pointed out that since she's known me, I have never had a settled home base. After twelve years of a vagabond lifestyle, buying a tea-ball takes on a whole new significance. I would never have guessed that a $2.99 purchase would feel so grounding. |
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| Sarko president |
[May. 6th, 2007|02:30 pm] |
Lots of separatists here in Quebec are disappointed Ms Royal didn't get elected president. Ironically, her mildly supportive statements in favour of Quebec helped torpedo her campaign.
If there's anyone looking at this through a smart gender/politics prism, I'd like to hear about it. My gut feel is that Sarko looked presidential while Royal didn't, and that it's next to impossible for a woman to remain in her gender role and act presidential. If sexes had been reversed, it would have been a slam-dunk for Royal.
There are some interesting news I wish I had more time to dig through. It was Le Pen's last dance, and I've no idea what will happen to France's now splintered extreme right-wing parties.
Since I like predicting the obvious: French politics are going to get weirder. The Socialist Party (Social Democrats) will slowly slide into irrelevance unless it really groks both the environment and civil liberties, aligning itself onto the 'bright green' school. The center party and the greens will duke it out for disenchanted voters, helped by openings to proportional representation. |
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| Chocolate and other photos |
[May. 5th, 2007|06:20 pm] |
The J.A. Moisan grocery store kitty corner from my place has about a hundred types of chocolate, so I took a picture of a small sampling.
I've uploaded a few in the last couple days to my flickr account, and will be putting up more since I've finally managed to get pictures transferred to my computer. |
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| sick, working from home |
[May. 1st, 2007|10:49 am] |
I expect to be deliriously happy any hour now.
There's a roll of toilet-paper on my desk, and some diluted orange juice. It wouldn't be possible without music and work to stay busy.
Getting sick is just the body's way of forcing me to a meditation retreat. If the mind doesn't wander while the body produces its natural pain-killers it really isn't all that bad. One of these days I'll just preempt it and go sit on a cushion for a few days. |
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| Moneris: PHP is a client-side language. Give us your money |
[Apr. 30th, 2007|07:54 pm] |
I've mostly been ranting on my LJ. Now's the time for me to tell you about how Moneris blows chunks. They are owned by the Royal Bank and BMO. Maybe that provides context?
Note: opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. Just their disgruntled coder.
Let's start with their welcome message to developers:Cher Marchand,
Au cours de cette année, le produit eSELECTplus sera sujet de plusieurs modifications. Quelques changements sont dus aux règlements des associations de cartes de crédit, mais la grande partie des modifications sauront faites pour rencontrer les exigences de nos marchands... Continué Translation: French not their language first. Continued.
- You can delete the test configurations for other companies, although they ask you nicely not to do so. Security through politeness - How Canadian.
- In their tech documentation, they state PHP is a client-side language. And server-side too.
- Their example HTML code isn't (XHTML) valid. All upper-case, some attributes unquoted, tags not closed.
- The server hosting most of the documentation was down today, the PDFs inaccessible
So - two banks, unable to publish coherent statements, technically retarded and unable to keep a simple web server up.
And they actually expect us to trust them with online payment processing. |
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| Not a startup anymore |
[Apr. 26th, 2007|06:43 pm] |
There's a lot of great things about not working for a startup. A computer and a decent chair for example. More colleagues, after-work outings to watering holes.
They also expect you to work 9-to-5ish, which is fairly difficult to adapt to for a person like me. Of course, no one complains when you're trouble shooting at 10 PM and getting up at 7 to see if things were fixed by the sysadmin. Well, the thing is most people don't understand it takes a solid hour of reading a day merely to keep up with the field I'm in, on top of things like studying adwords. So it can look like I'm a slacker.
Meetings, time-sheets and managing appearances all come with the nice things of working for a more established company. I guess that's life. |
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| Virginia Tech: the killer was also a victim |
[Apr. 23rd, 2007|11:05 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | caring, culture, guns, hospitality, murder, shooting, suicide, videogames, virginiatech | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Quebec, QC, Canada | ] |
Gary is preparing an interview on video game violence and asked about my perspective.
Video games, gun control, religion. None of the above explain what happened. They are easy scapegoats that let us avoid thinking about own responsibility.
Like hundreds of thousands of others, the killer wasn't getting the help he needed. He was suicidal and psychotic. He was "the least of these".
There were people that noticed, tried to help him and/or protect themselves. It sadly wasn't enough.
Jeff Trexler is quoted in boingboing:In an eerie coincidence, the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education features an op-ed by two attorneys on Virginia & the law affecting how university administrators respond to students with suicidal students: Link. Its conclusion in a nutshell is that liability concerns & statutory restrictions keep universities from addressing otherwise preventable tragedies. The date of this issue is 4/20/07. It went to press before the VT shootings. Preventable tragedies. Despite individuals that tried to do the right thing, we're not collectively set up to deal with these situations. We're not organized to provide hospitality - to students, visitors, immigrants. We can't welcome those that are ill.
The mass murderers are the tip of the iceberg - there are thousands of students that only kill themselves. It's a huge loss. If we can learn to deal effectively with those students, we'll also catch the occasional serial killer. |
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| Bank card fraud |
[Apr. 22nd, 2007|06:23 pm] |
This week it was my turn to have my card swiped. QOTD: "Oh, that's weird. There's already a deposit-only order on this card".
Also this week-end, my aunt was celebrating her 50th anniversary as a nun. I waited the table for the close family supper last night. As with each family reunion there's always a black sheep there to make some asinine comments. "It's in the Koran that all Catholics should be killed". "With Fortress North America, we could prevent all the Islamics from entering".
Remarkably, I managed to hold my tongue and avoided dropping plates or hot drinks. One uncle that usually tries to pick an argument noticed I wasn't arguing at all, a sign that I'm getting "better".
Today was the public reception. 50 people, mostly women with a median age of 70 were all there to celebrate my aunt's golden jubilee. All these women found me quite delightful. My reputation as a computer-fixer, waiter and my "You are here" t-shirt may have been to blame. I knew better than to wear the "Practice Safe Hex" t-shirt.
That's my life right now. No cash/bank card, 31, single, and really popular with nuns and older women. And getting "better" all the time. |
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| Whalebone corsets |
[Apr. 20th, 2007|07:22 pm] |
In a group walking to the bar last night, a woman was talking about corsets
me: "well, at least the modern ones are more comfortable. imagine being in one of those old whalebone corsets"
girl: "whalebones? that's crazy."
me: "that's what they used to stiffen them"
girl: "you're making this stuff up"
The party was crazy. By 3, after two bottles of Veuve Clicquot, I knew this morning's breakfasts with my parents would be rough.
And now I'm at the office, hungry, waiting for the re-cabling to be finished. |
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| Time to learn Adwords: 609 minutes |
[Apr. 18th, 2007|11:03 pm] |
Google has a "Google Advertising Professional" program, which has lots of perks. Since I'm now working for an advertising agency and interested in marketing and stats it was only natural I look into it. Among those perks, being able to give out up to 60 $100 vouchers to clients. So I'm ready to invest some time in this project.
There are teaching materials. I realized it would take quite a bit of time getting through it all. I am too lazy to count, and a guesstimate wouldn't cut it.
I copied and pasted the relevant section into the variable 'time' in IRB:
time.find_all {|line| line =~ /(\d+) min/}.collect {|line| line.match(/(\d+) min/)[1] }.inject(0) {|sum, item| sum + item.to_i }
=> 609
To qualify I also need to manage $1000 of advertising spend in a 90 day period and get a 75% grade on their exam, which costs $50 to take. This should be easy :) |
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| Mind-bogglers |
[Apr. 16th, 2007|11:27 pm] |
# 1 Amazon
Take "The Wealth of Networks" by Yochai Benkler. amazon.ca, amazon.com. The same ISBN. The exact same link, save for a .ca and a .com. One has 5 reviews, the other 0.
How the @#$% does a technology-intensive company like Amazon not clean up its act with simple things like that? And are we just some hinterland that doesn't justify the investment of a bit of polish?
# 2 Caisse Desjardins
A colleague had his cards "frozen" over the week-end. Fun stuff. Scammers installed a little device on top of one of the bank's ATMs. My colleague didn't have his account emptied because of prompt action by the bank / Credit Union / whatever. That's good. He unfortunately didn't have any cash all week-end, which is less cool. What's crazy is he found out at a restaurant that his card was no longer valid. Embarrassing and a hassle.
So how the hell can't a bank, uh, call its clients to warn them? Maybe they could shift 5% of their ad budget to being pro-active in keeping customers...
Nah, that won't ever happen. Hell, if they had anything resembling a clue, they'd have figured out how to detect something covering their ATM's card-slots.
# 3 Bad news bearers
Why the hell do people feel the need to make my day by informing me of every mass murder that happens? There's a reason I don't watch news - it's depressing. And being depressed about bad stuff just makes me angry at all the stupid things people with power do. |
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| Please don't sue me |
[Apr. 15th, 2007|02:58 pm] |
Dear Hon. Peter Van Loan, Minister for Democratic Reform,
I'm emailing you to make sure our government doesn't sue me.
Well, there's more. I ask that you to open up more civic data in Canada, including postal code data. This would benefit taxpayers by avoiding duplication in government departments. It would also avoid the disgraceful practice of misleading some Canadians as to who their elected representative is.
Let's start with the legal question. Is it illegal for me to copy a list of members of parliament from parliament's website? I made a copy after hearing a couple different (non-partisan) advocacy organizations had staffers copy and paste the database from web pages into their excel databases. You can find my list here:
http://lokobo.com:3000/mps
To import it into excel, you can obtain it as CSV:
http://lokobo.com:3000/mps.csv
Several people have told me that this constitutes copyright infringement, although it seems to me a straightforward list of facts.
Once I had completed this list, I was asked for a function that retrieves a member of parliament for a postal code. (More precisely, something that returns a list of possible electoral districts ids for a postal code.) You can see that function here:
http://lokobo.com:3000/
Is that illegal? Again, straightforward facts. I'm not even redistributing a database or making any efforts to build an exhaustive one.
Advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum use similar tools. Egale, Preserve Marriage, CLC, United Steel Workers, Automotive Industries Association's Consumer (Right to Repair campaign), Micah Challenge, Make Poverty History, CAHPERD, The True Voice, CNIB, all exhort supporters to "Contact your MP".
Some groups link to the parliament's website, others copy the information. The richest buy data from Statistics Canada. If we care about democracy, this information should be freely available to all. A government that spends millions encouraging citizens to vote in media campaigns can surely forgo a few thousands in licensing fees to make it easier for citizens to express concerns on policy issues.
Besides the cost to democracy, there are a couple other points worth considering.
-Elections Canada is not a customer of this product. They also buy a file from Canada Post, a crown corporation, duplicating the costs of development.
-The elections.ca website results seem less accurate than those on the parliament's website (which I hope was obtained from StatsCan rather than duplicated).
You can verify this for yourself by searching for 'H1T4C6' on
http://www.elections.ca/scripts/pss/FindED.aspx
and comparing it to:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/people/house/PostalCode.asp?Language=E&txtPostalCode=H1T4C6
Is it one or one of five possible MP's?
Making this data freely available in an open format is a great way to ensure citizens are given accurate information, to increase participation in our democratic process and reduce error-prone bureaucratic duplication.
I have copied some of your colleagues, hoping they will support you in changing policy on this matter before the next election is called. When every political party has a function to find their candidate by postal code, advocacy organizations should be entitled to the same.
Some of my colleagues want sites where a citizen could input their postal code to find all candidates in their riding, along with their programmes and other communications. It would be nice if we could do that without the threat of litigation.
I look forward to hearing from you.
----
Note: that parl.gc.ca link broke. It's now
http://www2.parl.gc.ca/Parlinfo/Compilations/HouseOfCommons/MemberByPostalCode.aspx?Language=E&Menu=HOC&PostalCode=H1T4C6
Dozens of advocacy groups in Canada had their links to the parliament website broken by this change. Sigh. |
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| Music, food, the good life |
[Apr. 14th, 2007|07:39 pm] |
Just bought 4 more CDs. It's cheaper to rip the stuff than buy crippled DRM stuff online.
I'm really enjoying Talking Timbuktu and
Wakafrica.
Food wise, I finally got around to eating at the Happy Carrot or whatever it is they call that health food store up on St-Jean. The big surprise was finding Mackerel fillets marinated in Muscadet. Oh, how much I love those! It's one of those foods that's pretty common in France, but pretty unknown here. For unfathomable reasons mackerel here in North America is often served in curry or tomato sauce. Yuck!
I just ripped Van Morrison's how long has this been going on?; next is Paul Simon's Rhythm of the Saints.
With music, food and chess playing, it should make for happy cocooning tonight :) |
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| My hood |
[Apr. 14th, 2007|11:35 am] |
Google's "My Maps" feature is pretty nifty. Check out my neighbourhood.
It's not really accurate as far as boundaries of old quebec go, but the rest are good landmarks to know / places to eat. |
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danieljohn's journal
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