http://www.flett.org Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:08:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I don't know what to think at this point. I'm obviously a big organic-eating back slapping liberal like the rest of my cronies in fair Berkeley. My wife and I grow vegetables in our back yard and do our best to eat food that was grown and processed in natural, ... http://www.flett.org/2009/10/15/i-want-to-know-what-i-should-know-about-gmo/ Last week I was sitting in the public space atrium at Mission & 2nd st in San Francisco huddled over my laptop trying to get some work done, and who should roll in but Carte415. Thanks to some in-the-know co-workers and twitter, I've been following this summer's explosion of foodie-friendly ... http://www.flett.org/2009/08/17/sf-food-carts-twitter-and-street-food/ 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, ... http://www.flett.org/2008/12/11/2700-san-pablo-filing-for-bankruptcy/ 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 ... http://www.flett.org/2008/12/11/tramp-mode-rocks/ 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 ... http://www.flett.org/2007/03/20/welcome-back/ 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 ... http://www.flett.org/2005/10/05/why-not-to-eat-organic/ 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 ... http://www.flett.org/2005/10/03/andy-rooney-on-iraq/ 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 ... http://www.flett.org/2005/08/03/building-a-graph-based-model-of-metadata/ 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 ... http://www.flett.org/2005/08/01/a-graph-based-model-for-chunking/ 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 ... http://www.flett.org/2005/07/22/an-exploration-chunking-using-factor-analysis/