Alec’s thoughts

Check out this article in the Berkeley Daily Planet: San Pablo Condo Project Defaults, Forced Sale Scheduled. I live very close to this building, and the building is, sort of, a big improvement from the abandoned gas station that was on this lot previously. But ever since it’s been finished, all of the storefronts and street-level live/work spaces have been unoccupied.
About a year ago this building was being finished, and 3 more projects were in the works: 2747 San Pablo (a huge 40+ unit building where there is already a business), 2748 San Pablo (a 20-23 unit building where Clay of the Land used to be) and another one adjacent to the one at 2700 San Pablo (I can’t find the link now, where there used to be a car dealership)

Now all these projects seem to be on hold. New businesses have sprung up in the latter lots using the existing buildings. I must admit I’m pretty disappointed with how the whole thing turned out.

I am actually a bit in favor of some actual development along this corridor because the vacant lots and failing businesses were of questionable value to the neighborhood. (The used care dealership was just full of broken down cars, I always wondered who actually went there to buy a car, because the cars never seemed to change) But with this housing downturn we may be heading back where it was before…

And now I just found this: San Pablo Condos Top ZAB’s Agenda - looks like some nearby projects are still going forward. Huh.

ok, it’s been a while since my last post, but I’m going to try starting up again.

I just want to rave about “tramp mode” in emacs. If you haven’t yet seen this, it allows you to load up files from a machine that you have ssh access to. Accessing it is super-easy. Rather than C-x C-f to load a local file path, just enter the file path as ssh://userid@host:/path/

After that everything you save will be saved over ssh/scp. Brilliant.

Ok, so it’s been well over a year since I last updated this blog. I’ve had numerous things to say, but the ideas always come to me on the bus, or in the shower, or somewhere else where I don’t have access to a keyboard. I’m going to once again try to revitalize this blog with some actual comments and insights. First up, I’ve got an entry about development in Berkeley.

A while back I was exercising my writing, trying to find an voice for this blog, and wrote Why to shop organic. A friend of mine recently gave me a hard time about it and through a funny confluence of events, I found two reasons not to eat organic.

Reason number one: Probably the reason Heather used to call organic strawberries “armpit fruit”:


Yes, that is a dead worm in my artichoke. Yes, I had to eat this far to discover it.

Reason number two: Sure they don’t use pesticides, but I don’t want babies working the fields any more than I want 12 year olds making my shirts.

I never thought I’d be sending around something that took Andy Rooney seriously, but this morning I ran into a post on BoingBoing that blew me away. Last night Andy Rooney’s segment on 60 minutes (BitTorrent link) blasted the Iraq effort in a way that I think much of Middle America can understand: basic facts. (Also see the transcript.

I have a theory that many more people would be against the Iraq war and more critical of the Whitehouse administration if they simply understood the implications for this country. For example, I wonder how many people know that our budget this year for defense is $336 billion, yet our educational budget is $61 billion? I wonder how many people would support the simplest proposal of say, cutting $30 billion from the defense budget in order to increase the education budget by a whopping 50%?

And so I can’t begin to express how pleased I am that someone like Andy Rooney, who is typically viewed as fairly harmless, suddenly has become so vocally critical of the war. I think the mainstream media finally got some backbone with their outrage over the handling of Katrina, but I’m going to predict that Andy Rooney’s segment yesterday is a turning point for public criticism of the war and this administration. I think this changes the face of opposition. I think for many people it all sounds like the just the rantings of some that crazy mom Cindy Sheehan, or some crazy Californians who are too disconnected from the real world to have a legitimate voice, or some vocal celebrities jumping on the bandwagon of rebelliousness.

I have had some success building an in-memory graph of my iTunes database, in Python. I discovered some rather interesting things about my collection in the process and I’ve started thinking about a way to use this information to cleanly chunk the data.

In my graph, nodes are represented by Python tuples that refer to the metadata culled from the song list. For example, there is a node for (’Artist’, ‘U2′) and another for (’Genre’, ‘Rock’). I keep track of the relationship between these nodes with a weight that comes from the number of songs that have both of these pieces of metadata.

So for example there is a line between (’Artist’, ‘U2′) and (’Genre’, ‘Rock’) which has a weight of 15, because their new album is categorized as ‘Rock’ - though songs from the album October are categorized as ‘Rock/Pop’

When I combine all the different pieces of metadata in my collection I get a whopping 1589 different facets, represented by nodes in my graph. But whats more interesting is that about 1500 of these nodes are connected, and the other 90 or so are divided into about 30 different individual chunks of 3-4 facets each. I tried to visualize this with GraphViz but the data was just too big.

But this got me thinking more about how to chunk the graph. It was really surprising that so many of the nodes were connected, but really what matters to me is knowing which nodes are the most connected. This means that I could start dropping lines (connections) between nodes where the weight is just 1… or 2, or whatever number yields an appropriately chunked graph. Hopefully that will break up the large cluster of facets into smaller, more usable clusters.

Factor Analysis seems very promising, but I was thinking a lot about a presentation given by Mimi Yin at OSAF. In particular the Venn diagrams which showed items as existing in a number of collections based on the attributes of the item. These collections may or may not really exist in real life, but their virtual existence is important.
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I’ve been developing my ideas about chunking as I’ve been writing. My faith that there is structure expressed by facets keeps me believing that there is a way to extract this structure.

Last year I read (most of) The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen J Gould. Aside from being a fantastic book, its last chapter on Factor Analysis has been floating around in my head for quite some time. I think this could be one way to extract the kind of chunks I am looking for.
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So in my previous post, I talked about the need for chunking large datasets. The problem I discussed is that it is very difficult to browse large datasets in small enough pieces, and find what you want.

I should mention that in this context, browsing is different from searching. Searching is looking for something very specific (i.e. ‘Desire by U2′) and browsing is when you don’t know exactly what you want, but can narrow it down through a series of small decisions. Browsing is also a more appropriate mechanism for devices, where you don’t want to try typing in a search term on a small keypad with your thumb.

So how do you, at a software level, provide the minimal set of choices to the user to allow them to find what they’re looking for most of the time? This is the core concept behind “chunking.”
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My wife and I have a collection of about 45G of MP3s. This was a long effort to rip all of our CDs over the course of a few months. All the files are stored on a linux box, but managed with iTunes. This is some 10,000 songs, by many different artists, in many genres.

Recently we purchased a Linksys Wireless Music System so that we could play music in our bedroom. The concept is pretty cool: its a WiFi radio - it uses UPnP to find music collections on your network, and then you can browse and stream them to the radio. It has a remote control and a little LCD display so you don’t even have to think about the fact that these are MP3s off on some Linux box. Good idea, huh? Not quite…
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