http://www.flett.org Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:21:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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/ 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 ... http://www.flett.org/2005/07/18/what-to-chunk/ 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 ... http://www.flett.org/2005/07/13/chunking-large-datasets/ How often have you wanted to do a number of things in a loop, but had to move items out of the loop for performance reasons? Here's a cool use of generators that I just figured out to hide the initialization. I was trying to use PyICU to get the locale-sensitive ... http://www.flett.org/2005/06/29/using-generators-to-hide-loop-initialization/ I'm learning more about how properties work in Python. One thing I'm learning is that a property objects are only evaluated in the context of the parent object they're attached to. After my last property trick, I now needed a way to manage groups of color tints. After thinking about ... http://www.flett.org/2005/05/10/demangling-property-values/