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Nov
2nd
Mon
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Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0: "The most typical mistake is to model emotions as a small number of intense states such as anger, fear, joy, and sadness"
Aug
13th
Thu
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Ghost room (from a series of experimental photographs)

Ghost room (from a series of experimental photographs)

Aug
6th
Thu
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My threads of attention today

  • Ruby: making a little Sinatra app that tracks morning, afternoon and evening.
  • Ruby: looking at StaticMatic to dynamically create static web pages.
  • Ruby: preparing to install Passenger so I can use Rack.
  • Ruby: dithering abut whether to sign up with Heroku (free Ruby webapp hosting).
  • Apache2: working out the best way to install Apache2.2 on OS X Tiger.
  • Apache2: revisiting Macports as a free, easy and tweakable solution.
  • Legends: reading about Tristan and Iseult because I mention Iseult in a song.
  • Legends: reading about Lorelei because I mention her in a song.
  • Django: learning more about 'flatpages' and templates.
  • Django: getting ready to upgrade our server to install mod_wsgi.
  • Django: editing Greg Turner's guide to starting with Django for my business website.
  • Java: installing Java 6 on OS X - researching the options for OS X Tiger (10.4.11).
  • Songs: practicing and printing out words to 6 songs.
  • Email: trying to pin in-box to around 30 messages, but it sticks at 42, despite the daily trickle.
  • Personal: arranging an EMDR session to help with my lack of focus...
Jul
25th
Sat
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retro terminal games

Emacs has some nice little games. Open a terminal and type: emacs

hit: esc and the ‘X’ key

then type in any of the following and hit return:

  • gomoku
  • snake
  • tetris
  • pong
  • doctor

(the latter is an implementation of Eliza).

There are more - find your Emacs and list the games:
ls /usr/share/emacs/[emacs_v-number_here]/lisp/play

Jul
12th
Sun
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‘It is better to have loved and lost’… but without the other part from Tennyson’s 1850 poem In Memoriam:27: ‘than never to have loved at all’ Is it? And, if so, why? Found on a wall in Holt, North Norfolk.

‘It is better to have loved and lost’… but without the other part from Tennyson’s 1850 poem In Memoriam:27: ‘than never to have loved at all’

Is it? And, if so, why?

Found on a wall in Holt, North Norfolk.

Feb
26th
Thu
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we are in the midst of a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses significant challenges to education at all levels
— Katherine Hayles, quoted by (colleague and friend) Simon Mills in a comment-critique of Susan Greenfield’s assertion that social media are infantilising the human mind.
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Sharing my web3D pain

Okay. Despite the current renaissance of VRML as web 3D I’ve tried every single option on the VRML/X3D plugin and browser detector page and none of them work on my Intel iMac running 10.4.11, depite tweaks, symlinks to newer dylibs than the old ones the stupid things are calling, and other hacks. Despite the claims on their websites, they either crash, fail to launch, or display the 2 simple models I have incorrectly. And none appear to work in any browser or - if they do - the method is far from clear. This all took about 2.5 hours of my time, because I simply wanted to demonstrate a project created in 2002. Not happy.

Feb
11th
Wed
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write 14 songs in the 28 days of February

I’m trying to do this. I’ve written 2 so far…
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people think more creatively when they are calm, unhurried and free from stress… time pressure leads to tunnel vision
— Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow
Feb
9th
Mon
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A dream of bright blue birds

last night in my dreams I was talking with friends when two strikingly bright blue birds landed nearby, the size of large geese. One was very interested in me, came close and changed into a huge parrot. I stroked it’s feathers and patted it’s head.