Posted
about 1 month
ago
Lately I’ve been spending time getting rid of things that I don’t use or need. Books, toys, electronics, tools, clothing, pictures, gadgets, trinkets.
My theory is that the things that you own that you’re not using or
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don’t need aren’t just a waste of money and space: they’re draining you of your energy. Every time you walk past that cookbook that you never opened, or that model airplane kit that you meant to assemble, or the oscilloscope that you haven’t turned on in a year, a little neural pattern fires that says “Someday I should..” or “I always meant to…” or “God, I really ought to take care of that.”
Each of these tiny feelings of obligation or regret is almost imperceptible on its own, but their accumulation throughout the day is a burden that you may not even know you’re bearing until it’s gone.
I’m a pack-rat by nature. I love to own things that I think are cool or interesting. So I’m naturally collecting all kinds of junk that is neat at first but that I don’t truly need. And it’s hard to get rid of these things. The crappy video eyeglasses that plug into an iPod, the mountain bike headlamp with an enormous battery that fits into your water-bottle holder, a couple of old monitors, a broken GPS, a pile of bad books.
There’s a saying among writers about the process of copy-editing: murder your darlings. You may have crafted a beautiful phrase or metaphor in this paragraph, but if it’s not serving the whole piece, it’s got to come out. You have to murder your darlings.
So as Stephanie and I go around the house spring-cleaning, we’ll hold up this or that item, and ask “murder?” Sometimes you need to use a vicious word to make a hard decision.
It’s hard to do, but the result is a house that gives you room for the things that really matter. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Avro is my current project. It’s a slightly different take on data serialization.
Most data serialization systems, like Thrift and Protocol Buffers, rely on code generation, which can be awkward with dynamic languages and datasets. For
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example, many folks write MapReduce programs in languages like Pig and Python, and generate datasets whose schema is [...] [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Robert Love)
For users: Top 10 features you'll love about Android 1.5
For developers: Download SDK 1.5
Posted
2 months
ago
Lately I’ve been using Twitter and Google Docs to find out how I compare to my presumptive peer group with little spot polls. A few weeks ago I found out that I do, indeed, wake up later than most of you. On Tuesday I asked the Twitterati
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if they believe in God. Here are the results, based on 172 replies:
Surprised? I was. I doubt that this poll would have had the same results three years ago, before the atheist “coming out” movement had so much momentum. Three years ago, I think there would have been a lot more agnostics.
I was also surprised that there were so few animists. How many people say they are “spiritual, but not really religious?” I think a lot of that is acting out a primitive animism. A genetic ur-religion, rooted in our instinct for anthropomorphization. Scientists who refer to subatomic particles as “guys,” programmers who say their code is “unhappy,” the urge to describe a car’s “personality.”
Crickets mourn -
sing out of genetic code.
Here’s a random selection of the comments people left on the poll:
I wish there were a god, but there probably isn’t and we can’t know and oh my god this dog is so beautiful with such a shiny coat and such well-formed hears and attractive feathering on its rump, clearly there is a god
A monotheistic form of Hinduism! [ I didn't even know this existed! --Nat]
Active Atheist. Working to start my own church celebrating science and discovery.
Anyone who thinks they can argue rationally for the existence of god(s) needs to read Kant. Anyone who thinks belief has any place near things we can know needs to read Saint(sic!) Augustine’s “de utiltate credendi”.
In America, Most of the people are atheistic about gods like Thor, some daring individuals go one god (Jesus) further. — Dawkins
I believe in one God but don’t judge those that don’t
I was raised a Catholic and still consider myself a Christian. I do, however, respect everyone’s choice (or non-choice) of religion, don’t try to push my beliefs on anyone.
I was raised Jewish but became estranged when I realized that Judaism and Zionism are inextricable. Today I consider myself a sort of vaguely proto-American Buddhist, except without the theological aspects.
I’m a born again Christian although I’ve also studied Messianic Judaism. Both believe that Jesus (Yeshua) is the son of God.
I’m a reverend in Church of Sweden (lutheran, but think episcopalian).
I’m sick of being tolerant and respectful to believers. Religion has way to much power and influence in our societies. Based on crazy people hearing voices. Watch George Carlin: Religion is Bullshit
I’m too lazy to pick a side. You can’t prove that there are or are not gods, so refusing to answer seems the more prudent solution. Does it really matter, regardless? Even if there is a God, we still need to solve our own problems. We’re not children.
No god, but I do enjoy many aspects of religious culture - which is to say community culture based on groupings by religion.
You can call God in different ways but he’s always the same
if a burning bush told you to kill your son today, people would rightly think you were high…
Thanks for playing! [Less]
Posted
2 months
ago
Thought I’d outline a bit of what I did to get all my posts and tags migrated from LiveJournal to WordPress 2.7.1. Note that this information will be redundant soon enough — there’s much better LJ import support in the latest
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WordPress trunk. It’ll even pull in your ‘Current Music’ and ‘Current Mood’ fields, which I couldn’t do. :-(
Some background first. LiveJournal lets you export your blog posts one month at a time. You can feed these files to the WordPress LiveJournal importer. I’ve been blogging there since December 2003, so that was definitely not an option. Some digging around eventually brought me to ljdump. This is a really nifty tool, even if you just want to back up all your posts. It dumps your data into a large set of XML files, which you can collate with the convertdump.py script for uploading to the WordPress LiveJournal importer.
There was one hiccup here — a lot of the XML files corresponding to my earlier posts (at least) had an extraneous ASCII character 4 at the end of some lines. I had to use a simple for i in <lj-user>/*xml; do sed -i -e s:$'\004':: before using convertdump.py, and things were back on track (sed ftw!). I used the script to make one big XML file with all my posts, and fed it to the LJ importer, and all my posts were in.
But my tags, unfortunately, were not. ljdump happily pulls the tags from LiveJournal, but the importer just ignores them. I found a sort-of patch to fix this, but it seems to be quite antiquated. Based on this and the WordPress importer (that’s the importer that allows WordPress to import from another WordPress blog’s exported output), I wrote my own patch to import LJ tags (against WordPress 2.7.1). Just cd into your blog directory and do a patch -p0 < wp-livejournal-import-tags.patch to use it.
That’s it — I dropped all the old posts (requires a plugin to do it all at one shot), and then imported the big XML file again, and voila!
Trivial as it was, it was great to see how easy hacking the WordPress code was. There’s more to come in days ahead. I hope it remains this easy. :D
Update: Just noticed that the imported comments are not threaded. This kind of blows, because there have been some really long threads on some posts. I guess I’ll wait till the new WordPress goes stable and do a re-import. (file under #suckage) [Less]
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