buffington

Surprise self referential search result

michael.buffington@gmail.com (Michael Buffington) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:38:00 GMT

I just ran across this photo Matt took while searching for something Rails related. I was actually looking for a patch I submitted to Ruby on Rails years ago, but was happy to be reminded of a wonderful spring day in Oregon over a year ago.

But now I can't figure out the search I used, and try as I might, I can't seem to get it to happen again. Closest I get is "rail patched sequence buffington 2006" (where I may have accidentally omitted the s in rails).

Songs and how miserable my brain is with them, and some discussion of Natalie Portman and nude human being parts.

michael.buffington@gmail.com (Michael Buffington) — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 14:14:00 GMT

I just watched the twelve minute Hotel Chevalier, a short by Wes Anderson that has something to do with the upcoming Darjeeling Limited, and spent the following 45 minutes racking my brain trying to figure out of the 10,000+ songs in library was a cover of "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)", a song playing a prominent role in the film.

It's crazy how I worked out the problem. There's a line from the song that says "you've got your qualifications" that I kept repeating, and kept trying to figure out how it was treated in this cover song I was trying to find.

Though frustrating, I was able to narrow just a few things down about this vague recollection of a mere hint of a song. I kept locking on: punk, British, and a bit messier sounding than the original. I kept thinking "Operation Ivy, it's gotta be, maybe they covered it at a show or something and it just stuck" but couldn't really pin it down.

Then it all started flooding to me. I started hearing the instruments, the melody, and combinations of vocals and percussion. And then it hit me: Rat Race, by The Specials. The problem is, it's not a cover at all. There's simply a single line saying "I've seen your qualifications", and as far as I can tell, no other similarities aside from nearly being punk and British.

With just 2 words matching another song my brain was convinced of two things, both of which were absolutely incorrect: that there was a cover song done by someone other than Right Said Fred¹, and that I was quite familiar with the original song (which, upon listening to it several times now, is indeed a brand new song to me).

I've been thinking a lot about the brain and how memories are retained; this was a perfect example of how "compression" works in the brain. Rather than store raw, high definition audio, it stored concepts about a single song. When I heard the new song for the first time, it felt like an old familiar favorite because it shared some of the same concepts - enough to tickle the portion of my brain that says "Hey! Now that's familiar!"

Fascinating.

¹ I'm willing to admit that there's a possibility everything I just said could be totally trashed if I actually listened to the Right Said Fred song. I assure you, I've never heard the song. Though perhaps it is the song I'm really thinking of and I have heard it but forgot, and is exactly what my brain was really looking for. But I stand by my assertion that I've never heard the Right Said Fred song. Even though I might have, though I'm confident I haven't. Even if I had, I've at least proven my memories of songs are unreliable, so there'd always be some doubt.

² In searching for more info on Hotel Chevalier it appears as if the entire internet is up in titters over this being Natalie Portman's first ever nude scene. Either I am: a. too obsessed with the song to care, or b: getting old, and don't really see what the fuss is about.

I don't recall the name of the movie, but it has Natalie Portman in it as a stripper, and if you want to freak out about a naked human being, that's the one to do it over. And just to save the adolescent boys (who probably like things like nipples) and Super Bowl audiences (who have proven to loathe nipples even more than the graphic violence of shows like CSI and the ilk) some time: there are no nipples or full frontal nudity in Hotel Chevalier.

Here are the naked human parts in the movie, listed in order of appearance, from memory: a face (though having a mustache makes this one debatable), hands, a face, hands, a face, feet (these actually shocked me the most), arms, bum, ribs, shoulders, face, shoulders, arms, ribs, hips, bum, legs, feet, face.

Update I listened to it. I've never heard the Right Said Fred song. I can sleep at night standing by that conviction.

Some catchup.

michael.buffington@gmail.com (Michael Buffington) — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 04:03:00 GMT

I've thought of a lot of things recently and not shared them. Sometimes, the longer you go without writing a blog entry, the longer you without writing a blog entry, and so on. Despite the lack of written evidence of my cognition, I have been puzzling on things lately.

A bit of each, briefly:

My wireless mouse needs to lose its dependencies on batteries of any kind and just capture some of the energy I use to push the thing, miles at a time. So does my keyboard.

I don't want to mow lawns with an electric or gas powered lawn mower any more. I seriously considered getting a sheep, but the city I live in struck me down. In hindsight, probably not the worst outcome. I will get a new, high tech push reel mower. I'm willing to mow the lawn more often if it means I don't have to push my 50 pound (without grass clippings) mower around my yard.

I sort of want to learn how to ride a unicycle as a commuting vehicle. I have no desire to juggle, do freestyle, or anything that makes the already kooky weirdness of riding a unicycle more obvious. I just figure a unicycle is easy to carry down a set of stairs to board an underground train in a big city, which I find myself doing more often lately.

I've been learning a lot about learning lately. And, though just in my head, I've been crafting a way to describe what I'm doing lately that's had me so engaged that I'm absent in every other sort of thing that used to engage me.

Leah turned five today. I'm not sure which is more a miracle - that I've been a parent for five years and still have the facilities to remark on such a thing, or that in five years a little infant baby can become this incredibly intelligent and fascinating human being.

Leah has also been able to catch every wild animal in our yard at least a dozen times. It's assumed that she actually has some sort of magic ability. When I'm out in the yard with her, and she's on the prowl for garter snakes, we see none. The very split second I walk back inside, she manages to obtain five garter snakes, and claims they just all came out of their holes. In 15 years I fully expect that Leah will command a vast empire of animals, with which she'll use to help her bend the world to compliance, much like she's able to do now.

I'll save rest for later.

My 386-33 outperformed my Mac Pro

michael.buffington@gmail.com (Michael Buffington) — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 06:11:00 GMT

Remember the olden days when BBSes were the closest thing to what we now call the Internet? I think it's safe to say that proportionally speaking, file sharing was just as huge back then as it is today, but arguably there were better systems in place to make sense of all the sharing.

For example, on the BBS I ran in 1991, people would upload interesting free and shareware apps, mostly for DOS, and the BBS software would extract a file from the zipped upload called the FILE_ID.DIZ file. This file contained a semi structured description of the application and its size, and sometimes categorical information.

This little bit of meta data was super valuable, especially when we didn't have software sophisticated enough to do text searches of our hard drives in split seconds. Most importantly it helped you make sense what everything was in a pile of thousands of files.

My now ancient BBS was a sophisticated and efficient small town librarian, and my now modern machine is a consumption-driven adult child with a trust fund, a 20,000 square foot home, and a real-time-supply of everything possible pumping into every square inch of space.

It's 2007 and I have Spotlight in OS X. I have a Quad Core 3.0Ghz 64bit Xeon machine with a 1.5TB striped RAID, each drive with 16MB of buffer cache, capable of transferring files at 300MB/second. Compared to the machine I owned in 1991, a 386-33Mhz with an 85MB hard drive, my current machine is essentially 45,000 times faster¹ than the then top of the line machine.

Yet I find myself staring at a Finder window with a mere 147 files in a folder called Downloads and I don't have a clue as to what half the apps are or do. The only way I can find out is by opening them up and trying them out.

Surely there must be some sort of solution for this problem that I'm unaware of. I'm tempted to write a web based front end that let's me add a FILE_ID.DIZ file to each downloaded app and just relive the good old days of asking the librarian what's new, and could she please find me that one app that does this one thing.

¹ Reportedly, the 386-33Mhz tested between the 0.5 and 0.7 MFLOPS range. This data is hard to find these days, so I've erred on the side of caution and given it an entire 1.0 MFLOPS. MFLOPS (M for mega, or one-thousand, Floating Point Operations per Second) are a common way of determining how fast a computer's processor can go.

Using an app called Power Fractals, I determined that my Mac Pro can do 45340 floating point operations per second. That's a lot faster than I expected. To put it into perspective, in 1991 the fastest single super computer you could get might have been the Intel Paragon which could do about 75 MFLOPS with 4 processors. But it might not fit in my office, let alone under my desk. Building a 45340 MFLOPS Paragon system would require I own a dedicated data center larger than my garage.

MFLOPS aren't the only thing that makes a computer fast, but it's an easy number to work with. I'm guessing that a 45340 MFLOPS Paragon system running software written expressly for the Paragon would run circles around my Mac Pro. But I'd stake a lot on the fact that it can't run World of Warcraft, let alone World of Warcraft and Microsoft Excel at the same time.

Admittedly, I'm not sure if comparing one MFLOPS number to another means that one is x times faster than the other. If the scale is perfectly linear, then maybe I'm correct. But if it's like the Richter scale, all bets are off. It's safe to say though that the Mac Pro is without question so much faster than a 386-33 that the 386-33 might as well be a nice round chunk of basalt.

Acute Trackinosis - a horrible mental condition.

michael.buffington@gmail.com (Michael Buffington) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 03:33:00 GMT

I've long debated about the merits of buying a product online and having it shipped versus driving over to the store and having it immediately, and the internal debate still rages.

You see, I suffer from trackinosis. It's a mental disorder that requires I check tracking data about every half hour when I'm expecting a package. And let's just be frank and honest, it's really every five minutes. Two minutes? Alright, I'm coming clean - I have software that notifies me of every move, so let's just say I'm on it 100% of the time in real time.

Without a doubt I'm less productive when worried about tracking numbers, and that $50 I save for buying online - is it really worth it? Certainly not, but it's not the fault of the tracking number, it's me.

So how does one fight trackinonis?

I have some ideas, but I'd love to hear yours as well.

Random thoughts, with no consideration of merits or pros/cons at first.

Give the tracking numbers to a significant other. They know your schedule, they will make sure someone will be there to accept the package when it does arrive, and every time you ask for the status, they get to punch you in the stomach with glee. And you must accept the punch.
Go on some sort of manic coding bender for three days immediately after ordering products. Turn off all clocks and calendars; blacken every window. Have plenty of Pepsi, almonds, angry badgers, electrocution, whatever it takes to keep you moving so that three days feels like one. Set the calendar accordingly, getting yourself a few days behind. Your packages will surprise you.
Wake up at 5am. Order your stuff, pay for overnight shipping, to arrive before 10am the next business day if you can. Do this on a Monday. You get slammed with your normal Monday stuff, and by Tuesday morning you'll be pleasantly surprised to have packages arrive while you're eating your Cheerios.

I'm tapped out. Let's hear some more ideas.

I need to hire people!

michael.buffington@gmail.com (Michael Buffington) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 06:35:00 GMT

A project I'm working on, which, while not totally a secret, will remain so here so that I might have an opportunity later to break the story, needs help from people with skills.

Specifically, I'm looking for an excellent web designer. Like one who really gets CSS and XHTML, but also wields a might sword in Photoshop and thinks about every single pixel.

I'm also looking for a Ruby on Rails developer who would love nothing more in life than to build games using Ruby and Rails.

Check out each job post here (designer, developer), send your resumes and your friends' resumes to me.

it's concerning when you

twitter@michaelbuffington.com (Twitter) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:05:00 GMT

it's concerning when you have no explanation for an increased amount of flies in your workspace

Shame appeasement

michael.buffington@gmail.com (Michael Buffington) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 04:31:00 GMT

I am ashamed at my lack of frequent blog postings, and because such shame spears me, I'm pulling in my Twitter postings.

I often post painfully not funny cheese-grating sorts of things on Twitter that probably don't deserve to exist in yet another place. But the shame must be appeased, and that appeasement is executed by way of inserting the Twitter postings chronologically between blog postings. The shame meter I built out of Legos shows marked improvement.

Eventually I plan on pulling Flickr photos and delicious bookmarks.

new deafness suggests to

twitter@michaelbuffington.com (Twitter) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:25:00 GMT

new deafness suggests to self that os x now maintains separate volume settings for internal speakers and headphones

Ok. I really must

twitter@michaelbuffington.com (Twitter) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:01:00 GMT

Ok. I *really* must do laundry now. My feet have been shoe and sockless far too long.