Ingrid Sequoia

Our new daughter arrived yesterday. We are all home, doing well.

Update: her middle name is inspired by this Wendell Berry poem.

File under general Thu Aug 5 10:38:41 CT 2010

Seduction and Betrayal

This is a really good op-ed. Mayhill Fowler gets just the right amount of "philosophical and epistemological" in her reflections on the recent McChrystal blow-up.

The storyteller changes reality, because the story changes our memory, personal and collective. It's always that way. It's the great lesson of the Deconstructionist school. All narrators are untrustworthy -- or rather, trust is not the same as fact. And faith is an act of trust, not fact.

File under ideas/ Fri Jun 25 09:12:59 CT 2010

CPAN test failures

SWISH::3 0.08_04 is passing all tests all over the CPAN testers universe, so that is encouraging.

However, some reports (notably on FreeBSD) report false failures because of a Wstat issue.

I've posted about it at PerlMonks and hope someone out there has an easy fix.

File under projects/swish Wed Jun 16 20:33:08 CT 2010

Open Source Business

opensource.com has an interesting thread on the open source business model(s).

File under general/ Wed Jun 9 08:35:33 CT 2010

Swish3 progress report

There's been a ton of work on Swish3 in the last year. I've actually started planning a 1.0 release, after 5 years of work.

Lately I've been focusing on three things: (1) making the Perl bindings easier to install; (2) indexing of compressed documents; and (3) supporting XInclude of document fragments. The first is accomplished: you can install the entire library via CPAN. The last two are aimed at large doc sets where I want to keep the XML compressed on disk for space reasons, and where I want to re-use subsets of the document collections in building multiple indexes.

File under projects/swish Tue Jun 8 23:33:18 CT 2010

Searching for Jesus in the Gospels

Adam Gopnik writes a cogent and articulate essay about current biblical scholarship and the life of passersby in last week's issue.

File under new yorker/ Tue May 25 20:42:33 CT 2010

But Enough About Me

A brief history and reflection on the (un)popularity of the memoir. I liked this part in which the author talks about the effect changes in technology have had on the outpouring of personal narrative:

File under new yorker/ Tue May 25 19:30:13 CT 2010

Open Source Handbook

Open Source Handbook reviewed.

File under projects/ Tue Mar 16 23:03:03 CT 2010

make test

Invoking in a project and watching as 1000s of successful tests scroll by, culminating in the message, gives me the same thrill of satisfaction as when I used to paint houses, and having finished a long day of sweaty labor at sanding and chipping old paint off, I could stand back and survey the structure, primed and ready for a fresh coat of paint. It's the anticipation that thrills, in the same way that a trip to the grocery store and a full fridge, or several loads of clean laundry folded and stowed safely away in drawers, thrills me. The knowing that I am prepared, belt cinched tight, all tests successful.

File under projects/ Wed Mar 3 21:56:14 CT 2010

The Patch

John McPhee's Personal History piece is poignant and flashes like a fish in sunlight. Reminded me of the best of Annie Dillard.

File under new yorker/ Tue Mar 2 23:29:47 CT 2010

Non-Stop News

My work colleagues and I just spent an intense day and a half effectively locked in a room, talking about our work together and vision for where we want to be. I was reminded of this piece by Ken Auletta on the current state of the media vis-a-vis President Obama. A lot of what he has to say about the impact of the internet, the pace of the news cycle and the breakdown of the 20th century business model around journalism is part of my daily grind.

File under new yorker/ Fri Feb 26 20:44:56 CT 2010

History in smells

David Owen's piece The Dime Store Floor is a bit of nasal nostalgia. The sense of smell is a vivid memory evoker. A couple of summers ago I walked into a lumber yard's warehouse and had a sensory hit so vivid that for a moment I was 8 years old in my great-grandfather's woodshop/garage next door to the house where I grew up. Something about the old wood and sawdust and heat. The force of that memory surprised me. Owen's piece is like that too.

File under new yorker/ Fri Feb 26 20:32:30 CT 2010

Yahoo! Learning to Rank

Yahoo! has announced a learning to rank contest and has put up some actual dollars in addition to some data sets.

File under search/ Fri Feb 26 19:55:02 CT 2010

Duck Duck Go

Found out about Duck Duck Go via Benad's Blog. I'm hoping to experiment with LSI at $work in the coming weeks.

File under search/ Mon Feb 22 15:29:16 CT 2010

Trailhead

E. O. Wilson's fiction piece in the New Yorker reads like a National Geographic article, not the kind of fiction I expect from the New Yorker. But then, that makes it the kind of thing I expect to read in the New Yorker, which is a wide-ranging publication. I liked the piece.

File under new yorker/ Sat Feb 13 20:15:18 CT 2010

The Apple Store

I was at the Apple Store just now getting a bad RAM chip replaced in my MacBook. All in all it was a very pleasant experience, and aside from the inconvenience of having to drive 40 minutes round-trip for a 20 minute errand, pretty painless.

I took the bad RAM chip, which I had identified and yanked from my machine a couple of weeks ago, in an anti-static bag I had in my desk drawer. My desk is full of them, along with spare parts and adapters and such, many for machines that haven't been manufactered or supported for over a decade. I'm a packrat for old computer junk, though to my credit I have tossed/recycled lots and lots of old "beige" computer parts in the last few years, especially now that the city/county has good recycling for that kind of thing.

Anyway, when I handed the bag with the bad chip in it to the young man at the Apple Store, I didn't think anything of it, but on returning the bag to me he joked that it was a vintage piece. I chuckled and replied, Well, I'm feeling kind of vintage these days.

The bag had the original label attached: 32MB Apple Quadra and Centris Series.

The chip I had replaced was a standard-issue 2GB size, roughly 1000x more memory than the bag had originally held.

You know you're getting old in this business when you can distinctly remember the thrill of a 32MB chip of RAM and how much pure computing power it held.

File under general/ Tue Feb 9 14:57:54 CT 2010

Frozen Perl 2010

It's been a long week, culminating today in Frozen Perl 2010, a Perl conference for and by Perl hackers, here in the Twin Cities. I gave two talks at today's conference, one on Swish3 and the other on Devel::NYTProf and Search::Tools. Both talks seemed well-received.

In the process of preparing the talks I also released a few new, related modules to CPAN this week:

Search::OpenSearch

OpenSearch server glue for KinoSearch and Swish-e 2.x via SWISH::Prog. There's a demo Plack app and ExtJS, using both search engines as part of the slides for my Swish3 talk.

I think OpenSearch is very cool and look forward to doing more with that spec, including adding more features (e.g. facets) to Search::OpenSearch.

Search::Query

Search::Query now has support for SQL and SWISH Dialects. I hope to add KinoSearch and Xapian dialects soon. The Search::Query::Parser now has (undocumented and experimental) support for range queries, so that you can say:

foo=( 1..4 )

and that'll be expanded to

foo=( 1 OR 2 OR 3 OR 4 )

when the Dialect query object is stringified. Handy for things like ranges of dates, which is how I am using it as $work.

Search::Tools, SWISH::API::*

New releases of these older modules as well, with some bug fixes and refactoring to support the Search::Query.

So, yes. A busy week.

I enjoyed hearing other folks' talks today at Frozen Perl. There was a good variety: pack/unpack, Unicode, i18n and best practice-related presentations. I met some new people, renewed friendships with folks I already knew, and drank lots of free coffee. The cookies were good too.

File under projects/swish Sat Feb 6 23:27:19 CT 2010

Dave Rawlings on NPR

You can watch/listen here.

File under music/ Thu Feb 4 20:35:33 CT 2010

The Vendor-Client Relationship

So I don't surf youtube very much. Or rather, only when my kids are wanting to watch Wallace and Gromit trailers. So I'm always waaaay behind the times. That said, this video is a riot.

File under projects/ Sat Jan 30 21:42:00 CT 2010

Terminal Color

For the last ten years I have used the color #E3BF70#fddc8e (hex) as my terminal background color. It's a darkish amber color that is very easy on the eyes. I'm recording it here because every year or so I have to set up a new system and always have to eyeball the settings till I get something close to what I am used to.

Update: 26 Jan 2009 Here's my .Xdefaults file for my xterm under X11 on OS X.

XTerm*background: #fddc8e
XTerm*foreground: black
XTerm*faceName: monaco
XTerm*faceSize: 10
XTerm*saveLines: 10000
XTerm*scrollBar: true
XTerm*rightScrollBar: true
XTerm*jumpScroll: true
XTerm*geometry:100x40+0+0

File under projects/ Tue Jan 26 20:13:41 CT 2010

I like Plack

Plack is a Perl Web Server written by miyagawa.

File under projects/ Tue Jan 19 10:56:20 CT 2010

CQL

Contextual Query Language is defined by the Library of Congress. I discovered it via CQL::Parser. Brian Cassidy is involved, so it must be good.

I immediately thought "oh shit. Now my new Search::Query module feels late-to-the-party." But on further reading, I think a CQL dialect in Search::Query makes some sense.

Search::Query is a SQL::Translator-like module for free-text search. I coded it up this week after brewing the idea for some many months. I'm imagining it now as a next-generation Search::QueryParser::SQL, for contexts beyond SQL. Example: I have a query string that works with Xapian and want to convert it to one that works with Swish-e 2.x or KinoSearch. Just parse it with Search::Query::Parser and assign it a target dialect and then call $query->stringify to get the translated version out.

File under projects/ Thu Jan 14 22:46:01 CT 2010

A Friend of a Friend

Saw David Rawlings and Gillian Welch in concert just before Christmas. Heard this interview just now. I like the record even more after hearing Dave talk about it.

File under music/ Sat Jan 9 23:29:40 CT 2010