James Tauber's Blog 2005/04
The Hard Way
Tonight I discovered the hard way that my rental car doesn't have a low fuel light.
UPDATE (2005-05-01) : And today I discovered the hard way where Burlington Police has your car towed if the side of the road you push your car to happens to be a fire lane.
by James Tauber : Created on April 30, 2005 : Last modified May 1, 2005 : (permalink)
Finally Tonight
Finally tonight, I got to try my new keyboard. I actually got used to it pretty quickly. Spent a little while playing the first exercise from Hanon's The Virtuoso Pianist. It's amazing how much of a buzz it gave my fingers.
Finally tonight, Amazon shipped Tiger. It should arrive on Monday, just as another busy week of work begins.
by James Tauber : Created on April 30, 2005 : Last modified April 30, 2005 : (permalink)
Did I Miss Something? (Besides Tiger)
I ordered Tiger from Amazon because they said they'd ship on 28th. It's now 29th and my order still hasn't shipped.
by James Tauber : Created on April 29, 2005 : Last modified April 29, 2005 : (permalink)
Keyboard Arrived
The M-Audio Keystation 88es arrived today.
I haven't hooked it up yet but I have tried out the action. It's the first non-Hammer-action keyboard I've used in five years and so it feels really light. They call it semi-weighted so I'd hate to feel non-weighted.
But for $250, it's worth it and as a colleague just pointed out, I have 88 more keys than I did yesterday :-)
by James Tauber : Created on April 28, 2005 : Last modified April 28, 2005 : (permalink)
Poincare Project: Topological Properties Revisited
Part of the Poincare Project.
Recall that a topological property is one based only on the open sets of a topology and not any other structure. For this reason a topological property is preserved under a homeomorphism. If one topological space has a topological property and another doesn't have that property then the two spaces can't be homeomorphic.
So far we've talked about the following topological properties:
Compactness is enough to topologically distinguish a circle from an open interval. A circle is compact whereas an open interval is not.
Connectedness is enough to topologically distinguish the real line R from the plane R^2 because if you take away a point from R and from R^2 then R is disconnected but R^2 is still connected.
We don't yet have a topological property that can distinguish a sphere from torus. We shortly will and it will be at the heart of the Poincare Conjecture.
UPDATE: next post
by James Tauber : Created on April 27, 2005 : Last modified April 27, 2005 : Categories poincare_project : 1 comment (permalink)
Should I Continue Title-Only Feed?
Two (separate) questions:
Would anyone continue to subscribe to the title-only feed if there were a summary feed?
Would anyone object to me stopping the title-only feed all together?
Please email jtauber /at/ jtauber /dot/ com.
by James Tauber : Created on April 27, 2005 : Last modified April 27, 2005 : (permalink)
Designing from the Outside In
In his post Designing from the Outside In on the new O'Reilly Radar blog, Tim O'Reilly mentions a conversation he had with Jason Fried from 37signals (is it so-called because 37 is a psychologically random number?)
Jason...
believes that contrary to the normal expectation that applications are built on top of frameworks, applications should always be designed "from the outside in." That is, at 37signals, they try to design the usability and function of the application first, and that drives the implementation. And if they can then extract a re-usable framework, all the better. For example, basecamp wasn't built on top of Ruby on Rails. Rather, Ruby on Rails was extracted from basecamp.
That notion of extracting a re-usable framework after the fact struck me as interesting because that's really what's happened with Leonardo. Two years ago, I wrote a little wiki-like script in Python in order to enable editing of content on jtauber.com from a browser. I then decided to expand it just over a year ago to include a blog. Now, as more features are being requested, an underlying web framework is emerging that could very well be useful outside of running a wiki or blog.
It reminds me of a point Jon Bosak used to make that Backus-Naur Form (BNF) came out of work on the specification for Algol. Another example of extracting the general from the specific rather than attemping to build the general in isolation of a specific use.
Tim also mentions Jason's referring to Christopher Alexander's Paths and Goals pattern.
If you read Tim's full post you'll also see there's another whole aspect to what he's talking about with regard to UI-centric development and the role of designers. Jason's blog is a great read too.
by James Tauber : Created on April 27, 2005 : Last modified April 27, 2005 : (permalink)
Finally Made IMDb
Fulfilling a 10-year-old dream, I'm now listed on IMDb although my producer credit is still missing for some reason.
by James Tauber : Created on April 23, 2005 : Last modified April 23, 2005 : Categories filmmaking alibi_phone_network : (permalink)
HTTP Abuse and Leonardo
Jon Udell started it with his article End HTTP Abuse and Leigh Dodds and Ryan Tomayko continue.
Jon Udell is focused on misuse of GET versus POST, arguing that if client-side toolkits made it easier to POST, then GET wouldn't be misused by developers on the server-side. Jon seems to give server-side developers the benefit of the doubt more than I would. I'm with Leigh that it's the server-side frameworks that need to improve.
Both Leigh and Ryan go further with the kinds of things a server-side framework needs to do well including:
- URI design
- use of HTTP methods
- status codes
- content negotiation
- HTTP authentication
- media-types
Maybe getting these right in a Python web framework is what will help push Python as a language for Web applications.
I'm trying hard to do the Right Thing in Leonardo (which is actually shaping up to be another Python web framework for better or worse). I've done a bad job in some areas (which I hope to fix) but I think I've done an okay job with things like status codes and URI design.
One thing I hate having to do is overcome the lack of HTML forms support for PUT and DELETE by having two URIs /put and /delete that you POST to when you want to PUT the contents of a textarea as a resource or want to DELETE a resource.
I also need to work out how best to do authentication, rather than using cookies like I do (and almost everyone else does).
by James Tauber : Created on April 23, 2005 : Last modified April 23, 2005 : (permalink)
Congrats to Jill Effron
Jill Effron, who James Marcus and I hung out with at the Palm Beach festival won the Audience Award for Best Short Film for her film A Day in the Life of a Bathroom Key. Way to go Jill! Must have been my 5 out of 5 vote that pushed it over the edge :-)
It was a great film. Very funny and executed very well.
by James Tauber : Created on April 23, 2005 : Last modified April 23, 2005 : (permalink)
M-Audio 88-Note MIDI Controller
One of the biggest problems with being away from home for months at a time is not being able to play music. I don't mean listen. I mean compose, improvise and perform.
So tonight I ordered an M-Audio 88-Note MIDI Controller from Amazon (Sam Ash, actually) which I can keep here in the US.
The cost? $250. One-tenth the cost of the Roland A-90EX 88-Note MIDI Controller in my studio at home.
I'm not expecting the touch to be anything like the Roland or my Korg Triton LE 88. But when the alternative is not being able to play anything for months at a time, I'm willing to cope :-)
I don't know why I didn't do this two months ago.
by James Tauber : Created on April 23, 2005 : Last modified April 23, 2005 : (permalink)
Cutting Down on Blog Reading
I reached a peak of 272 blogs. It's a long way from Scoble, but it's too much for me. If I go just a few days without getting a chance to read blogs, I end up one to two thousand entries behind.
So I've started unsubscribing—at least to keep things to a steady-state 256 although I will likely drop further.
It's actually difficult to work out which blogs to drop. I need to be able to rate entries and from this derive a rating for the feed as a whole. But even this isn't quite right as there are some feeds that are very easy to skim and so my tolerance for a lower proportion of good entries is higher.
What really matters is the comparative effort I need to put into reading a particular feed given what I get out of it. Is yield the right term here?
Perhaps what I want is something that combines rating with monitoring of how much time I spend on the feed. Which leads back to attention.xml.
by James Tauber : Created on April 22, 2005 : Last modified April 22, 2005 : (permalink)
Poincare Project: Paths
It's been a while. Back to some topology—we're almost ready to state Poincaré's Conjecture.
Consider drawing a curve on the surface of a object. If we view the surface as a topological space then the curve can be thought of as a set of points in the space with the following property: there exists a continuous function from a closed interval on the reals to that set.
This is the notion of a path. Some topologists will refer to the function as the path while others will refer to the image (i.e. the set of points in the space) as the path. Often it doesn't matter which is meant, e.g. in the sentence "there exists a path between any two points".
Note that there are an infinite number of continuous functions that result in the same image and vary only in the choice of parameterization.
UPDATE: next post
by James Tauber : Created on April 21, 2005 : Last modified April 21, 2005 : Categories poincare_project : 0 comments (permalink)
IMDb for Music
I've long wished there were an equivalent of IMDb for music.
You would have songwriters linked to songs linked to recordings (linked to albums and producers) and performances (grouped by concerts and also linked to recordings) with both recordings and performances linked to individual performers and bands (linked to performers).
Can someone please start this? I don't have the time :-)
UPDATE (2005-04-22):
A bunch of people wrote to me and mentioned MusicBrainz (which I knew about) and allmusic (which I didn't). Allmusic definitely seems to be closest to an IMDb for Music although the openness of MusicBrainz appeals and might enable some of the more obscure information (like producer, mixing and mastering engineers) that I'm interested in. Integration with things like the ASCAP ACE Title database would be good too.
Thanks to Michael Plump, Henning Koch, Will Guaraldi, Kevin Dangoor and Gavin Burris for replying.
by James Tauber : Created on April 20, 2005 : Last modified April 22, 2005 : (permalink)
Are We In or Were We Once In?
This morning I received an email from a prominent US film festival that I won't name. It basically started by saying "seeing as you are part of the official selection for the festival, we thought we'd provide some tips on how to promote your film".
There are issues though. Although we did apply,
- this is the first I've heard about us getting in;
- the festival is about to start;
- they don't have a tape of the film; and
- we aren't listed in the programme anyway.
So, was the mistake in the email being sent to the wrong person or did we get accepted and I never received the acceptance?
I've asked for clarification but haven't received a response yet. If today's email was in error, I would have expected a pretty prompt correction.
If, however, we did get in, somehow never found out and weren't programmed because they never received a tape from us, then I'll be really really disappointed.
UPDATE (2005-04-22): Turns out we didn't get in and the email was mistakenly sent to me. Not sure if that makes me feel better or not.
by James Tauber : Created on April 20, 2005 : Last modified April 22, 2005 : Categories filmmaking alibi_phone_network : (permalink)
DATR in Python
I previously talked about wanting to implement the lexicon language DATR in Python. Well, I just received an email from Henrik Weber saying that (apparently inspired by my post) he has gone and done an implementation at http://pydatr.sourceforge.net/
Well done Henrik! I'm looking forward to trying it out and maybe contributing.
by James Tauber : Created on April 19, 2005 : Last modified April 19, 2005 : (permalink)
Current MorphGNT Work
For the last few months, I've been making corrections to MorphGNT by attempting to merge an English translation (NASB) marked with Strong's numbers with my database. Although it's a tedious process, it's revealing numerous errors.
When James Strong compiled his concordance, he assigned a number to every lemma in the underlying Greek text of the King James Version. Other translations are often made available annotated with these Strong's numbers. Zack Hubert provided me with an electronic text of the NASB translation with Strong's numbers which I converted to something looking like this:
010101 record 976 010101 genealogy 1078 010101 Jesus 2424 010101 Messiah 5547 010101 son 5207 010101 son 5207 010101 Abraham 11
The first column is the book, chapter and verse, the second column is the English word as it appears in the NASB translation and the third column is the Strong's number. Note that not all words are included.
I then found an electronic text of Strong's lexicon and stripped out the formatting and the definitions to just get a list of Strong's numbers with a transliteration of the Greek lemma:
1 a 2 Aaron 3 Abaddon 4 abares 5 Abba 6 Abel 7 Abia 8 Abiathar 9 Abilene 10 Abioud
Finally I took my MorphGNT database and extracted the lemmata:
010101 βίβλος 010101 γένεσις 010101 Ἰησοῦς 010101 Χριστός 010101 υἱός 010101 Δαυίδ 010101 υἱός 010101 Ἀβραάμ
I then wrote a Python program that attempts to merge the first and third files on the basis of the second. Note that the transliterations in Strong's lexicon don't have accents and there is ambiguity too (both epsilon and eta go to 'e'). That's a fairly straightforward part of the join, however, because it can be automated by the script.
The real challenge comes because:
- NASB versification isn't the same as the MorphGNT Greek text
- the text underlying the NASB is not the same critical text as that of MorphGNT
- there are errors in each of the files
- there are spelling differences
- there are differences in the granularity of the lemmata
So my program simply indicates whenever it had trouble performing a match and I have to either:
- correct my MorphGNT lemma
- correct (or merely change to my lemma conventions) the Strong's lexicon file
- correct the NASB-Strong file
- change the verse numbering in the NASB-Strong file
- comment out a particular word that appears in the text underlying the NASB but not the MorphGNT text
There were initially thousands of exceptions that each required one of these actions. After a number of months, I now have one thousand left. It takes me about 4 hours to make 100 corrections so I still have a little way to go.
When I'm done, I'll release a new version of MorphGNT with the lemma errors that this task revealed corrected.
by James Tauber : Created on April 19, 2005 : Last modified April 19, 2005 : Categories morphgnt greek new_testament_greek : (permalink)
April 29th
Tiger (which I've pre-ordered) and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie both come out on April 29th. 10 more days to go!
Does anyone know if Tiger ships with Python 2.4?
by James Tauber : Created on April 19, 2005 : Last modified April 19, 2005 : (permalink)
Film Project Update: The Palm Beach Screening
Saturday was the big screening of Alibi Phone Network at the Palm Beach International Film Festival. There were maybe 100 people in the audience and our film was first of the six shown.
I was really happy with how the film looked on the big screen and I didn't cringe as much as I normally do at my editing.
Very positive feedback. My favourite comment was from one of the festival volunteers who commented that "it was so nice to see a short film that actually had a story".
After the screening I got changed into my tux and went to the Gala dinner. I came close to asking Salma Hayek to dance but chickened out at the last minute.
by James Tauber : Created on April 18, 2005 : Last modified April 18, 2005 : Categories filmmaking alibi_phone_network : (permalink)
Film Project Update: Today is the Day
Today's the day Alibi Phone Network screens here at the Palm Beach International Film Festival. James Marcus and I have been having a great time since we arrived Wednesday evening, hanging out with some wonderful people and seeing some good films (When Do We Eat? on opening night and A Perfect Fit last night). Tom Bennett joined us last night after the film when went for drinks with the producer and director of A Perfect Fit.
Our film is showing at 4pm. Then tonight I'm going to a black-tie Gala dinner that's way more expensive than I can afford and more than I've ever spent on a dinner. But hey, I have my tux here and I know I'll regret it if I don't go.
I fly back to Boston tomorrow afternoon, then it will be back to Leonardo, MorphGNT and editing the Atlanta reality pilot.
by James Tauber : Created on April 16, 2005 : Last modified April 16, 2005 : Categories filmmaking alibi_phone_network : (permalink)
Film Project Update: In Palm Beach
Between a product milestone at work and this site being down for a few days, it's been a while since I've blogged.
I'm now in Palm Beach for the Palm Beach International Film Festival. James Marcus and I arrived last night. We decided to rent a convertible.
Tonight is the opening of the festival. Our film is screening on Saturday.
On Tuesday we picked up the postcards advertising the film.
by James Tauber : Created on April 14, 2005 : Last modified April 14, 2005 : Categories filmmaking alibi_phone_network : (permalink)
More Stuff Coming Soon
I've got lots of other stuff to blog about including MorphGNT, Leonardo, some work I've been doing on Bayesian Belief Networks and Pearl's Belief Propagation algorithm (which I'm writing a Python implementation of).
I doubt I'll get to it while I'm down in Palm Beach but hopefully next week I'll be blogging about a bunch of technical topics. Also have some more Poincare Project posts to make too.
Stay tuned.
by James Tauber : Created on April 14, 2005 : Last modified April 14, 2005 : (permalink)
Film Project Update: Boston Underground Beats Palm Beach
The Boston Underground Film Festival will actually be the first public screening of Alibi Phone Network, not Palm Beach. It's screening at 4.30pm tomorrow (Friday) at the Somerville Theater in Davis Square. James Marcus dropped off a DVD and BetaSP to them today.
Will be interesting to see it on the big screen.
by James Tauber : Created on April 7, 2005 : Last modified April 8, 2005 : Categories filmmaking alibi_phone_network : (permalink)
Film Project Update
It seems like ages since I've blogged. Extremely busy with work and preparations for Palm Beach and the network at my hotel was down over the weekend.
Last Thursday, James Marcus and I dropped off a DVD-R containing the 3GB uncompressed video for Alibi Phone Network to a transfer house.
On Monday, we picked up 2 DigiBeta tapes and 2 BetaSP copies from the transfer house and FedEx'ed one of the DigiBetas to Palm Beach. It arrived today.
A photo of James Marcus is now up on the official site as well as a bio for Kelly Feener (now in LA and using the name Kelli Daniels).
IMDb still hasn't included me or the actors in their entry on the film.
by James Tauber : Created on April 5, 2005 : Last modified April 5, 2005 : Categories filmmaking alibi_phone_network : (permalink)