Alec’s thoughts

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Man I love Python. I came up with a neat trick yesterday that also couldn’t be done in any static language. Needless to say, I’m pretty pleased with myself. This trick isn’t slow or hard to understand, and actually makes a lot of my code very simple, and avoids a lot of boilerplate that I […]

I recently ran into this crazy ActionScript scoping issue, that drove me so crazy I decided it needed a post. ActionScript is an ECMAScript language so learning it has been very fun. I’m able to use all my JS knowledge and then extend it to a much richer language.

In my test app, I’ve got a […]

I’ve spent more time with OpenSP/OpenJade trying to get everything working under Cygwin, and I think I’ve finally got it.
Here’s what I had to change:

OpenSP 1.5.1

Edit config.h.in, and comment out #define SP_HAVE_LOCALE OpenSP will work with this turned on, but OpenJade will break. Better to just disable locale support in OpenSP and let OpenJade figure […]

I’ve been working at Macromedia for a month or two now, and I’ve learned to appreciate the coolness of Flash and ActionScript. People may whine and complain that its not open, that its proprietary, that it duplicates some web functionality, but when it comes down to it, its just damn fun. I’m hoping to put […]