He's going to write a fourth book?

It took less than nine minutes of Donald Knuth lecturing on binary trees to blow my mind, and the lecture is about sixty minutes long. I need some coffee, and perhaps a donut, before I even attempt to move forward with the rest of it. What that man knows... I would consider my duty to my craft well met even to keep up in conversation with him.

What I find even more amazing, however, is that these lectures and so much more exist in the ether, just waiting for people to pluck them out of the digital sea. I never really felt the power of the internet until Knuth explained binary tree rotation.

The internet delivers on the promise that television never realized of mass communication in all forms. It is our bank and our television and our lecture hall and our porch to gossip on. It is economics and entertainment and education and Ella Fitzgerald playing while you knock back a beer and sit with a friend.

I love today.

I heart trees

I've been taking a class on the fundamentals of data analysis and algorithms. Yesterday afternoon we talked about two methods of traversing a set of nodes and edges on a graph. Four hours ago (I can be slow sometimes) I had an epiphany that recursion is not the only method of finding a given item in a tree full of items.

For any given tree, one can search through all the given nodes recursively (a depth first traversal), or instead of that, one can search all nodes in successive levels (a breadth first traversal).

So let’s say I have a very complicated ASP.NET page that dynamically populates all kinds of simple and complex controls depending on the context of the situation. If I want to find a textbox with a certain ID that appears one quarter of the time and is not buried deep inside the control tree of the page, I am probably far better off with a breadth first traversal. Chances are I do not want to look inside of any complex web controls that may or may not be on the page for my textbox.

Also, I spent two hours today pondering asymptotic notation while sunning myself on the lawn by the social sciences building. That's joy.

Yet another would be pundit, posting on del.icio.us... prolly not even original-like

There are many arguments against how useful del.icio.us is as a service, and most of them point to problems with how folksonomies work in general. Specifically, detractors have pointed to the fact that because people create their own labels for resources when book-marking URLs, semantic problems will arise if bookmarks are pooled.

Suppose my family uses a pooled book marking service. I label www.newegg.com “Da’Egg”, my father labels it “Video Store”, and my mother labels it “The Enemy”. Now labels for bookmarks are unavoidable. If we tried to remember all of the relevant resources we use daily by URL, I think our collective brains might hemorrhage. However, how useful are each of these widely divergent labels for people who did not create them? I imagine they could be almost useless unless you knew the person who created the bookmarks very well, because these labels are full of semantic information that is only relevant to the creator, or those who can empathize with the creator well enough to get inside his or her head. I could probably figure out what “The enemy” refers to for my mother, but not necessarily for a user named “Joey Joe Joe Junior”.

This means that the primary utilities of del.icio.us are that you can share bookmarks with people whom you know (with varying degrees of success), and that your bookmarks are they are centrally stored on a server, making them available from anywhere. The latter is a interesting, though. A centrally stored repository of the way that people label websites and web pages… aggregated and analyzed properly… how much is that information worth?

Exhaustion

The moon is hanging low tonight like a half-open pupil. It matches the look I imagine is on my face. I am bone tired. In the past twenty-four hours, I wrote and delivered a presentation on location technologies in pervasive computing, and then rewrote and delivered a windows service that will automate the build process at the enterprise software company I am working for.

This tired, and in fact this whole week’s haste, is all because of 24. I watched the series premiere on Sunday and then all hell broke loose because my roommate had the DVD boxed set of the first season. The next thing I know I’ve drank an entire bottle of Chianti, it’s four in the morning on Monday, and I haven’t managed to do a damned thing besides ensure that the rest of my week will be in shambles. I don’t know what’s worse, that I watched eight straight episodes of 24 or that I’m bitching about it like a bourgeois asshole.

Damn you, Keifer Sutherland!

The big, bad, Wolf

Ah, cooking with spam.

On another note, in class today we discussed the commonly accepted model of software architecture first proposed by Perry and Wolf. The model is composed of the following items:

{Form (in the sense of order), elements, and rationale}

Now even though this model would be almost old enough to vote if it were a human being, the implementation of it in a functionally useful manner is still stuck in the birth canal. After all, how does one represent rationale in a meaningful way so that architectural tools can parse and validate it?

First, what is rationale? According to the dictionary, rationale is “An exposition of principles or reasons.” Therefore, software architecture is composed of ordered sets of elements along with exposition on why these elements are ordered in the manner that they are.

This paraphrased definition of software architecture seems easy. That is, at least until you realize that in order to be functionally useful, you have to define the meaning of the elements and their possible orderings in a very rigid manner so you that can reason about them using tools, and that such an endeavor itself is easy compared to defining your rationale for your decisions rigidly so that you can reason against that.

Have you ever tried to define the properties of a rationale? For anything? Ugh. An element at least has describable properties, as do ordered sets of elements. A rationale has…I have no idea what a rationale has. If you do please let me know. Please.

Eno for president in 2008

I was driving today and I heard a recording of Martin Luther King Jr. quoting another great man, James Russell Lowell. King read the following as part of his speech against the war in Vietnam, "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." It was a surprisingly perfect complement to a verse I noticed yesterday from Dead Finks Don't Talk on Here Come the Warm Jets.

"Oh perfect masters
They thrive on disasters
They all look so harmless
Till they find their way up here."

Over the past forty-eight hours, both Brian Eno and Martin Luther King have had me questioning whether those in power will ever decide to do what is right over what is easy. Then again, maybe I'm just upset about the Army recruiting station that recently opened on campus to recruit more young men for the current Executive administration to disenfranchise and coerce into extended occupation of foreign soil in the name of protecting us from those who “hate our freedoms“, whatever that may mean.

No math for you! You on our list!

Today has been humbling.

After hours of work, I realized that the undergraduate class in Discrete Mathematics that I was taking is simply going to take too much time out of a life that is already overstretched. So I dropped the course. I will still attend the lectures and discussions, but the homework assignments by themselves would have taken me ten hours each week to get correct, and I don't have that kind of time when working and handling my normal load here at graduate school. It sucks because I really love that class, but I can't afford to spend that much time on a subject that is not central to my degree now. I have too many other things to do.

It's funny, but this decision makes me feel a lot more grown up. I guess this is what life boils down to in the end. Choosing the correct path to accomplish your goals and not letting what those goals entail out of your sight. Being good at keeping that perspective, however, is kind of disheartening.

Look mommy, I made it myself!

Today was a good day. It started early for a Saturday, since I had to get up at quarter to seven in the morning and drag my half comatose existence all across Orange County running errands, but there was a method to the madness of the early rise. I had an appointment at ten o clock to make my own berimbau over in Bellflower.

The local Capoeira teacher on campus has an academy over there. Many others and I paid him a hundred dollars to strip wood from branches, cut wires from tires, saw holes in gourds, and scrape bark from berimbaus to be with the broken bottles of Corona that we drank as we worked, worked to fashion the instruments we will use to play the game.

It was awesome... spiritual in the sense of making a powerful instrument with great cultural meaning. I can only imagine what sitting down with Leo Fender in a workshop would be like; making my own fifties reissue Stratocaster, drinking a couple of beers along the way and listening to his life unfold in stories. Or sitting down with Ray Ozzie to write a groupware module. But today I got to do this, which is just as significant. I sat down with a Professor and had him guide me in the construction an object that I will use to guide others and myself in a game that will expand the limits of our minds and bodies.

Today was a day of sandwiches and iced tea. Today was a good day.