A Full Moon, one moon late

Nicholas Bayle mentioned me, I believe. I believe I fit the description of spurring moments, but I can't recall when I ever had a celery-stick bunny...I named a photo gallery after celery, and I did draw a simple-as-can-be bunny once upon a time (I believe Madeline has / had it), but I never combined the two quite like I combined Apple and Pi, to get...well, so it goes.

I haven't had many, or rather any, opportunities to
spur a moment for quite a while. I was hoping to remedy this with a road trip to Willamette soon, but that has now come down to a question of how soon I can finish my SAS project.

I do greatly enjoy photographing the environment around me. Unfortunately, at the moment, that involves mostly, well, the environment, which is growing less interesting with the development of the Merryman Lots behind my backyard. Those vast expanses of empty sky, serving as a roof over roofs over packed houses, while allowing a view of plenty of sky, don't make the ground too terribly interesting. It's trees that make land interesting.

Don't you think?

Lesbians Be We Fine Men

(Small note: Hit Refresh to see colors.)

What is this strange obsession with making the funny parts of conversations available to the internet? If I could do this with my Trillian profile, I would. Alas. I have but this blog.

So, let this wisdom be known to all. Absurdity? Profundity? You decide.

[22:17:11] Loup-Vert: Complex Analysis is fun stuff.
[22:17:30] Loup-Vert: If you had time, I'd recommend it
[22:17:48] Loup-Vert: Because it COMPLETELY fucks up your ability to comprehend polynomials.
[22:18:08] El Jimbo: nope, I'm taking abstract algebra and geometry, and the rest are all gonna be applied math
[22:18:09] Loup-Vert: And equations have zeros that the mind is taxed to conceive.
[22:18:14] Loup-Vert: Fah.
[22:18:21] Loup-Vert: You and your applications...
[22:18:42] El Jimbo: applications make money
[22:18:51] El Jimbo: theorems make annurisms
[22:19:04] Loup-Vert: Nonsense!
[22:19:07] Loup-Vert: Theorems make applications!
[22:19:12] Loup-Vert: Applications make money.
[22:19:21] Loup-Vert: And then, what makes theorems? ...oh, money....
[22:19:31] Loup-Vert: Touché.

…Soon, Jim asked me to figure out how to start a 3-way conversation in Trillian. I suspected it was just the push of the big "Invite" button, but...oh, wait it was. Happy day, and darling Katie joined us boys…

[22:38:53] Loup-Vert: See, soon, Katie'll make me into a lesbian, and all shall be well in the world.
[22:39:20] Loup-Vert: *awkward silence*
[22:39:27] El Jimbo: alex, you are a lesbian, trapped in a man's body
[22:39:32] El Jimbo: as am I
[22:39:59] Loup-Vert: ...Dude, does that mean...ew. Dude. DUDE. No way, hosé.
[22:40:10] Loup-Vert: jose. Whatever...
[22:40:10] El Jimbo: lol
[22:40:13] El Jimbo: what?
[22:40:19] Katie: one of you lovely gentle men would want to spend some time in portland this weekend dancing and watching exotic foriegn films would you
[22:40:21] Loup-Vert: If I'M a lesbian...
[22:40:24] Loup-Vert: and YOU'RE a lesbian..
[22:40:39] Katie: then i'm a gay man
[22:40:52] Loup-Vert: See, Jim, THAT causes an aneurysm. Theorems be damned.

…Later, the conversation turns to the Swing club at Willamette…

[23:03:21] Loup-Vert: How many members?
[23:03:29] Katie: 15-20
[23:03:33] Katie: but they won't all be there
[23:03:36] Katie: maybe half that
[23:03:38] El Jimbo: that's big enough for our purposes
[23:03:44] Katie: very true
[23:04:34] Loup-Vert: What are our purposes, besides gettin' out and about and dancin'?
[23:04:42] El Jimbo: that's it
[23:04:48] Loup-Vert: Yeah, plenty big
[23:05:04] Katie: well i guess i just want to dance with someone other then the clug
[23:05:06] Katie: club
[23:05:13] Katie: because i always dance with them
[23:05:14] Loup-Vert: Aww, I wanna clug partner
[23:05:21] Katie: and they all know the same moves...
[23:05:27] Katie: *poke*
[23:05:30] El Jimbo: alex, you can be my clug partner
[23:05:43] Loup-Vert: Dude, we're already lesbians, that'd just be weird.

Hybrid Week: Day 15 of 16

A week with 16 days? What in the world could cause such an uprising in time span? Nothing less than assignments of three distinct hues.

Take-home final, due last Wednesday. I submitted it at 5 in the morning, as 23,000 characters of HTML and one little program. (For comparison on HTML character count, my 'blank' assignments, with places to put 10 problems and their red "Incomplete" flags, takes up 1,500 characters.) That was my Curry final / what really became a Programming Theory final. I was almost giddy when I had an epiphany that let me solve the Typed λ-Calculus problem; I would've been happier if I had that epiphany before 12:30 that night, but oh well.

Regular assignment for Formal Languages, due last Thursday. I only did half of it, because I misread the assignment and tried to use the wrong theorem. I shed no tears for that one.

Take-home midterm, due last Friday, and homework due the same day, for Math Logic. The homework wasn't bad, it was a few quick exercises in Peano Arithmetic. The midterm's one hard-ass theoretical question went over my head, but as far as I know, nobody in the class got it when they submitted their midterms in class (I e-mailed mine in at 5:00). I bet they were banking on me not being able to solve the last two problems, though, and thus have everybody miss the last two. Whoops. Oh well, at least we all set a curve on the hard theory (I hope).

Take-home midterm for Formal Languages, due tomorrow, along with a regular assignment due in Math Logic. The midterm is murderous, having some of the most time-consuming and intricate algorithms to run through for 65% of the test (I spent 20,000 characters, most commented out, and 3-4 hours, on doing one problem; the minimal DFA I had designed by the end broke on the simplest, correct input. %#$*). The Math Logic exercises, at least, were a breeze. I've been playing a formal theorem-prover like a game for homework; it seems as addictively entertaining as doing menial tasks in some MMORPG, yet is (mathematically) productive.

Of course, that's just school work.

For music-related activities, I had a student recital the Friday before last, and I gave a speech at a SOGO Contributor's Reception last Monday. The recital could've gone better; my nerves snuck up on me when I was performing and made me miss a few notes, and add an extra spiccato, but I was told I did well overall. The speech at the Reception went ok, and I didn't resort to poking fun at Mr. Welsh or Mr. Allison – I did zing Andrew Pouw, partly for not being there like the rest of the Student Board. I got an easy end to the speech by announcing where I'll be in SOGO next year.

I'm graduating from Evergreen in June, and I'm taking next year off of school. That means I won't be a student; also, I'll be 21, which is the membership cutoff age. However, the Allisons like me; I like them back. They invited me to join the SOGO Executive Board. Looks like I get to stick around there after all. I'm glad to be there...and I intend to enjoy delegating work to the student boards. Oh yes.

And now, the work front:
I found out one of the projects at work is due next Wednesday; that took me by surprise. Then another project I knew about is due the Wednesday after that; shouldn't be a problem, once I muster a free day. Then the week after that, my ILC SAS project is due for evaluation. Quoth my boss today: "…That sucks."

And now, for something completely different.

I got asked to a Tolo two weeks ago. I declined, because I thought I'd be out of the country on that day; keyword, "Thought." I didn't realize 'til after I got home that I mixed up dates, and have decided to get back to her. (I'll back-blog the story in a while...heh, like the rest of my to-do list.) Everyone I talked to about it has encouraged me to go; however, the main reason I'm considering not doing it is because the dance is 5 weeks away, and I'd be able to see her...well, see the above. Friday / Saturday night on any week, tops, and not for another two weeks. The other reason is it's a high school dance, and I've had a history of having a fairly godawful time if a lot of rap music was played. I even skipped senior prom because of that (sorry again, Katie darling). I think my adverse, nigh allergic, reactions to that music have died down after a year or two, but not all the way.

Well, we'll see if I can muster the energy to get back to her, and talk about this stuff...preferrably, over dinner. Meanwhile, I have to get back to this 16-day week. It started two Mondays ago with my Curry final being assigned, and then it proceeded to grow into some abominable hybrid of concurrent finals, midterms, and lecture with homework. That's why this week gets 16 days. And now, back to the last test. If all goes well, I'll be done by 3.

I hope none of us here use KaZaA…

…because they have been undeniably revealed as badware.

An Archiving Question

To web-savvy folk:

Let us say I wanted to download a web site to a local location. By web site, I don't mean just page x on some site, I mean the whole little web x is built into - at least, kept locally on their site.

Clarification, since I think I didn't word that very well: Let's say I wanted to download what a blog has online (I should note that this isn't my original motive for looking for this software). For example, let's use my blog. I want to download everything at http://fallenearth.org/blogs/loup_vert, linked from the index page. By "At," I mean everything which is a stored under the blog's URL. I put this "At" clause in because this blog happens to have archived entries that link to several different websites, like Slashdot.org and BoingBoing.net, and the collection of sites those sites link to would make this little "Web" grow to fantastic proportions. And woe if I try to download half the 'net because of one link to /..

Algorithmically, if I had the know-how to download web sites from the command line (Linux, not DOS), this would be:

Loup-Vert's Web Crawler ("Wolf-Spider"?) Algorithm

1. Set an "environment variable" ROOT to some directory (e.g. my blog's directory);
2. Download site x (e.g. some index.html), preserving its URL with respect to ROOT;
3. Traverse x's contents;
4. Upon finding an anchor link (easily just the string "<a") or a <link> element (for stylesheets and the like), view the href attribute;
5. If ROOT is in href, or if the href is relative (doesn't start with "http://"), call this algorithm on what the href points to;
6. For all absolute hrefs that point to a file under what is the web site's root, change any absolute hrefs to become relative to ROOT.

It seems simple enough that somebody must have written it already. Or maybe it's some feature already available to Opera or something and I don't know about it.

If any of you are curious why I want this, it is to enable fast downloading of a class web-site, which has many examples I would like to download for future reference, but for which I don't have the time to manually download all the hundred-plus files.

Thank you for any help, or scorning if necessary for reasons I may not comprehend at the moment.

It's people like you who write programs that end up getting discussed in technology ethics classes. – Kobar

I welcome ethics discussions too, if necessary.

I don't know why, but I suddenly got struck with the idea that this could easily be applicable to a porn environment. But then, that idea seems rampant with technology 'round here. =)