Gregory Todd Williams

I’ve been doing terribly at updating this month. Really quite awful. So here’s a recap of the month:

Books

My book reading pace dropped dramatically in February, and it’s only slowly increasing again. But I’ve got some good stuff to read, so that should help:

• The Confusion
• Language Death
• Glass: A World History
• Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs

Movies and Music

I saw Closer with Laurel, Kat and Simon. After mulling it over for a couple of days, I’m ready to say that I really enjoyed it. Quite brutal and beautiful.

I saw Sideways with Kat, and I’m not yete ready to evaluate it. It was interesting to watch a movie that’s not about LA of which I can give a detailed running commentary about the location, though.

Simon, Kat and I saw The Life Aquatic at a midnight showing at the Avon. Wes Anderson’s movies get weirder and weirder, but I’m liking them.

Saw the Dropkick Murphys at Lupo’s (as previously noted). I’m really enjoying the new Jimmy Eat World disc “Futures” (who I’m seeing with Dara next month,) and the rather-new-to-me Something Corporate disc “Leaving Through the Window”.

Hacking

I ran into a rather sizable bug in my R-Tree code, and couldn’t bring myself to fix it. So I’m taking a short break from that code. I think the arbitrary OO design needs to go away, both for efficiency, and for some design issues that are really difficult to get right with the R-Tree structure. It would be much simpler, conceptually and in implementation, if it were all done procedurally (with perhaps an OO wrapper).

I got Christopher Schmidt to dump the julie RDF datastore, and I’ve been hacking on code to work with that quite a bit. I’ve got a rudimentary scutter and Morten’s smusher working overtime to find me more geospatial data. (I’d like to plug all of this into the R-Tree stuff once that’s working again.)

I’ve implemented a shortest-paths application (a la Libby’s paths search) to work with the julie dataset that’s pluggable for different relations (codepiction, foaf:knows, &c.). The data can be cached to mysql, and I’m working on ways to pre-generate and cache paths without necessarily generating all possible paths (paths to well connected or A-list people?). I’m hoping I can get Christopher to add this to julie as soon as he or I can port the code to python.

Photo

Not a whole lot of new photo stuff happening lately. I’ve been keeping odd hours and finding it difficult to merge the late hours with photo ventures. I’ve been thinking of some photo projects I’d like to do in the coming weeks though, so stay tuned. (Really would have liked to have done them during the winter, but that seems to have passed me by.)

Matt Sergeant started Photo Geeks,

… a mailing list to discuss various aspects of digital photography, with a slight slant towards using your computer in various ways to improve your workflow. This is a place where you can discuss using your D70 on Linux, or where you can discuss how to improve your pictures in Gimp, or just ask how you could improve a particular photo.

It’s brand new, but already has some interesting discussion (including pointers to tools I need to check out like neftags2jpg).

Miscellany

I went to Wheaton a couple of days ago and hung out with Chris and some others. Stayed up all night, had breakfast at Patty’s Place, and drove Simon to the airport where he caught a flight back to California for the week.

I’ve been watching with lust and excitement at the stupefying pace and enthusiasm being shown by Autrijus Tang and the rest of the Pugs hackers.

Finally, I’ve been bookmarking like crazy over on my del.icio.us page, and if you want to keep tabs on what I’m finding interesting on the net, and I’ve been slacking off and not posting anything here, go check that out.