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Ever since the OMG Ponies! incident... Slashdot just hasn't been the same...

I want my Pink Ponies back... that was original... everything yesterday was so lame I just avoided slashdot for the entire day...

http://www.metlin.org/content/...

http://www.metlin.org/content/...

THAT was a great April Fool's Day prank. Go pink or go home..

Ya, they'll keep polluting the comments with this crap for a few days. Then Slashdot will or won't go with the new format. They done a couple pushes to go to new formats. There was less bitching, but they still never went with them.

At least this one never stuck. :)

http://www.metlin.org/content/blog/omgponies.jpg

There is an online version.

Exactly. I do not know who the hell this person interacts with, but as a consultant, I exchange business cards with people on a very regular basis.

In fact, I even have personal business cards -- as someone who believes in the value of a personal brand and who is very interested in entrepreneurship, this has come in immensely handy.

Of course, I get mine printed at Vista Print for a measly $10; but if you're interested in creating a good impression, there's always letterpress.

Why is it that whenever a company tries to market its product towards a particular minority subgroup in the population, it's always a fail of epic proportions. Anyone remember when Slashdot tried to appeal more to women? ;-)

Who says that working out a lot, working 80 hour weeks and reading books are mutually exclusive?

All it takes is half hour 3-4 times a week to work out, which isn't much. And I fly a lot so that is my reading time.

If you must know, I also climb mountains, bike regularly, trade and manage my finances actively, read a lot and have a girlfriend.

And I'm sorry, but what's your point again? Just because you are terrible at time management doesn't mean the rest of us are.

Who says that working out a lot, working 80 hour weeks and reading books are mutually exclusive?

All it takes is half hour 3-4 times a week to work out, which isn't much. And I fly a lot so that is my reading time.

If you must know, I also climb mountains, bike regularly, trade and manage my finances actively, read a lot and have a girlfriend.

And I'm sorry, but what's your point again? Just because you are terrible at time management doesn't mean the rest of us are.

Okay, here are some pictures from what happened in our apartment's parking garage just last night.

Someone drove through the wall fast enough (in a parking garage) to cause a hole through the wall and their car fell off into the street.

Now, imagine a world full of these drivers, flying their cars over our houses and schools. Oh yeah, joy.

I mean, VTOLs are a great idea, but as long as they don't land on *my* terrace I am happy. There is no dearth of idiot drivers in this world and all that.

WTF? What's with the pony craze on slashdot?

Screenshot of Slashdot on April 1 2006.

Since you mentioned architecture - a project I did when I was in grad school for an HCI class, called ArchiTech. You might find the section on aDesk to be of interest. :)

> For one, getting X to work at a good resolution was hard (I've a widescreen notebook).
> In fact, until a recent upgrade, I could only get it to work at a much lower resolution.

Please, go and bitch at the manufacturers. They are the only ones with the specs. Without the specs, all the driver developer can do is guess.

Umm, the manufacturers (Intel) have drivers - the install still expects customization from the user end (and I am not talking point-and-click customization, either).

> Secondly, getting the WiFi to work wasn't a cakewalk, either.

Details? Driver problems, installation problems, configuration problems, connectivity problems?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=25683 - there, knock yourself out.

> And during the whole messing around with install process, I had to restart the system at least a few times.

Let's be clear on a couple of things - upgrading a kernel will require a reboot. Upgrading X will require a restart of X. What can be avoided under Linux is the situation where you upgrade one driver, reboot, upgrade another driver, reboot, ad infinitum.

Really? I'd never have guessed. Psst - I've given talks on writing Linux device drivers, I'm not totally ignorant of what is needed. Obviously I was talking about the need to unnecessarily restart X or reboot the box. For instance, there was a clash between xorg and libgl libraries which took me forever to figure out, and had the system go totally unresponsive (could not even go to the CUIs - frozen stiff). A hard reboot was the solution, which happened enough times to annoy me.

> And oh, I've had hell trying to get files on a USB thumb drive --
> for whatever reason, the files are simply not accessible from a Windows box.

That's the fault of Linux? Did you format the drive correctly? Try mounting it on a different Windows box?

Obviously, it is something that works well on Windows. All I wanted to do was transfer two files on the USB drive for a friend - and after struggling for about fifteen minutes, I gave up. And oh, treating someone complaining about the problems like an idiot is a great way to get things done.

> And I still can't get my printer and scanner to play nicely with Linux.

Again, please bitch to the manufacturers.

Oh, sure. Nice answer.

> Half the time, the box ends going bonkers.

Details?

Where do you want me to begin? The fact that Firefox magically stopped going to https websites after I upgraded? Or the fact that Gnome would refuse to restart every once in a while, and I'd have to manually do a killall of the gnome-panel process? No, you'll end up coming with an excuse for every point rather than admitting that the system is unstable.

> Its support for other things (e.g. Indic language support, accessibility etc.) is also nowhere near Windows.

Really? The why do I still have to buy two separate versions of Windows if I want both English and Japanese versions? Why do some apps on Windows insist that they cannot be installed on anything except {English|Japanese} Windows? You can switch Ubuntu between dozens of languages in minutes.

So what? I'll pay for Ubuntu if I get the level of Indic support that Windows gives. And FYI - Indic language support is free in Windows (http://www.bhashaindia.com/).

> And the reason it is hell to install is because you have to go hunting for drivers, appropriate fixes etc.

And you don't have to do the same thing with Windows? Then why do I have to go trawling through half a dozen websites looking for the right drivers for my chipset/network card/sound card? All those come with the default distribution in Linux.

When did you last use Windows?

The last time I went hunting for something in Windows was i

Actually, it is a little more complex than that.

The problem is that Yahoo! has a nasty habit of deleting accounts for a number of reasons, and there have been several instances of this happening.

I've had my Yahoo! account disappearing, my mails disappearing etc. I guess when you've paid for the service (some of us Pro users) and have put in several years of effort uploading thousands of photographs (a lot of the pro users in Flickr are professional photographers), you are a little worried about your photos disappearing overnight.

I wrote a detailed rant about it, The Flickr Fiasco - Why Yahoo! Should Learn to Listen to Its Customers.

I guess it boils down to the fact that as paying customers, we thought our opinions would have a say in the matter. But it turns out that it does not, and they are going to go ahead and do something that almost the entire Old Skool userbase of Flickr is against. I do not know, I guess maybe I am being naive in some ways.

*shrug*

Personally, I thought that it looked like the armour Aris Boch wears in one of the Stargate SG-1 episodes.

Georgia Tech was wonderful, although UGA and GSU had all the chicks. :)

Oh, I'll bet you bedded a bunch of them by taking them back to your place and showing them the rendering of a Riemann Sphere that's on your website. Chicks are so turned on by that sort of thing. After all, what woman wants a handsome guy with great abs when they can see a Riemann Sphere.

For a graduate class at Georgia Tech, we built a system called ScheduleNanny that used a combination of GPS + user schedule to build an adaptive correlation.

The system could learn and adapt to a user's schedule and build a mapping of that with the user's location using the GPS.

We also saw some funky emergent behaviour, where the system would build its own internal mapping as a function of where you were (e.g. the bathroom or the bus-stop got tagged as a destination to be at, during certain time-frames).

And if you're interested, here's a formal paper on it.

For a graduate class at Georgia Tech, we built a system called ScheduleNanny that used a combination of GPS + user schedule to build an adaptive correlation.

The system could learn and adapt to a user's schedule and build a mapping of that with the user's location using the GPS.

We also saw some funky emergent behaviour, where the system would build its own internal mapping as a function of where you were (e.g. the bathroom or the bus-stop got tagged as a destination to be at, during certain time-frames).

And if you're interested, here's a formal paper on it.

For one, I could not even find the option that you mentioned. This is the screen that I get.

The worst experience was when I lost a lot of music after a HDD crash and the only source was on my iPod - plugging it into another system (for the first time) just wiped out the contents of my iPod. I wonder what the hell Apple engineers were thinking, really.

Well, at last some valid comments other than j00 l0S3R! :)

I'm not sure that I follow you - when you say "putting music from various artists in folders" are you talking about the file system (e.g. /Myfolder/Music/Beatnuts/watch_out_now.mp3)? iTunes does that, provided the files are properly tagged, and you can select the location of the library. Or are you talking about making folders (or playlists) in iTunes? There is no good way to do that, but you can sort by artist (or any one of many items) and/or create smart playlists.

I was referring to the file system - although, I would accept a similar functionality on the playlists, but iTunes does not support either. I know that I can add music from a path onto the library, but you're missing the point - I have a lot of music that is not necessarily tagged, but is otherwise well organized by file name and path.

Having to re-tag them just so that I can use iTunes is a pain. For instance, try Winamp - it does a search and categorization not just based on the tags, but also based on the file and path names. If I had a directory called Jethro Tull and mp3 files inside that had no tags, merely names like Track XXX, searching for Jethro Tull turns up nothing.

My music is already categorized into the folders over the years, why should I put in extra effort to let iTunes categorize it even more?

Are you using a Mac or Windows? One the Mac, you can move the files anywhere on the same volume and iTunes won't care. I'm too lazy to boot up my Tablet PC, but I don't recall having issues moving files on Windows machines. Can you be specific about your problem

I'm on Windows. And oh it does not care when you are on the same volume. Get on the network drives, and iTunes barfs.

You can rearrange files within a playlist and copy files between playlists. Do you want to copy a file from playlist 1 to playlist 2 and have it delete the file from playlist 1? IMO, that would be a bad thing.

I ought to have been clearer - I was talking about ordering the files within a playlist. There is no way for me to move Track Foo on top of Track Bar.

Another example - I was ripping a two volume CD, and I had the names as Track 1 - 01 - Foo Bar, Track 1 - 02 - FuBar, etc. for CD1 and Track 2 - 01 - Foo Bar, Track 2 - 02 - FuBar for CD2. iTunes just messes up the order - there is no way for me to get it to SORT right, without resorting to some really complex naming conventions.

? Are you talking about a change inside iTunes or on the file system?

In the file system. If I add a song to a folder, I have to delete the playlist and update it.

For ripped CD's, it most certainly does. For imported files, it doesn't, but there are plugins you can use to do that.

No it does not. I have several playlists full of ripped CD contents that's on my iTunes right at the moment with no tags. Check this out - the tags (artist, album and genre) are those that I put in there manually.

Valid criticism, but as long as the RIAA is calling the shots, that behavior won't change.

Easy to blame someone else, isn't it?

Hmm, not entirely the same thing, but I'd worked on a project called ScheduleNanny, where we used people's PDAs coupled with GPSes to predict where they will be.

There were some interesting emergent behaviors - for instance, the system would know that I have to go to the bank later in the day and I would drive by the bank in the morning, so it would indicate that I could save time by going to the bank then. Or for instance, it would beep in the morning that it was time for me to go shower or go to the train station.

Details can be found here.

All in all, it was pretty good - after some amount of initial bootload information, you can take away the GPS and quite accurately predict where people are likely to be. This looks fairly similar, in some ways.

Maybe they missed the one about Canada Arresting Bush? ;-)

quit watching movies and read a godamn book

Really?

As a matter of fact, I do.

ARGHHHHHHHH!

Not my fucking day.

http://www.metlin.org/temp_dir/LunarEclipse-10-200 4.wmv

*YES I PREVIEWED IT*

I think my servers have some sense of the future, they don't want to BURNNNN.

And man, I wish Slashdot didn't have the bloody two minute posting limit.

Bzzt!

I had posted this in my journal a while back.

Basically, when you search for Tetris, you get some friendly information on how they had removed the link because of DMCA. They give you more information here.

And here is a screenshot of the said search.

I had written a paper on this of the application of N-gram technique with statistical methods for use in CBR a long time ago.

You can find the paper here (PDF) and the presentation here. ;-)

I had written a paper on this of the application of N-gram technique with statistical methods for use in CBR a long time ago.

You can find the paper here (PDF) and the presentation here. ;-)

You mean something like this? :-)

Talking of manufactured words, there are a lot of such words which float around, some of which are created ones, like Medireview or common mistakes, like anyways as well as lingos like wanna/gonna which are part of the langauge.

It gets particularly interesting after a while to watch the stats. I'd infact written a primitive paper on such behaviour long ago, it can be found here at my site. I'd also written an agent based on this, details of the agent can be found here.

Talking of manufactured words, there are a lot of such words which float around, some of which are created ones, like Medireview or common mistakes, like anyways as well as lingos like wanna/gonna which are part of the langauge.

It gets particularly interesting after a while to watch the stats. I'd infact written a primitive paper on such behaviour long ago, it can be found here at my site. I'd also written an agent based on this, details of the agent can be found here.

I'd written an essay on something similar to this, of using DNA Mapping long ago when I'd just started doing AI. You can find the essay here.

Ofcourse, once you start working on it, you just realise how damn tough it is, and although it sounds easy on paper, it's just not that simple. Simulated environments are just too complex.

And it's also interesting that David Zindell has written some interesting stuff on this in his series Requiem for Homo Sapiens, on simulated /virtual humans/ and so on.