Easily Browseable DARPA Open-Source Catalog

This week, DARPA released the DARPA Open Catalog directory of open-source projects. The site will offer not only links to open-source software projects, but also publications and experimental data that may be of benefit to the public. http://www.darpa.mil/OpenCatalog/index.html

Of course, all things aren't equal. False messages are often funnier, scarier, easier to understand, more shocking than true messages.

And there are many more potential false messages than true ones. Nearly all of the potential best propagating messages must be false. Why then does one ever encounter a true message? Because mining the pool of potential false messages is expensive, and miners cannot tax copiers of their valuable memes^wmessages. Clearly we suffer from underproduction of falsity. To obtain the utopia where nothing is true and everything is permitted, copying novel false messages without permission must be prohibited.

One of the biggest requests I get right now on pump.io is "Can you delete my account?"

The answer is no. Not because I hate your freedom or because I don't want to let you leave, but because I haven't programmed the functionality to delete users into pump.io.

There's an open issue for it here:

https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/issues/347

If you want your account deleted from one of the E14N systems, send me an email at admin@e14n.com and I'll put you on the list of accounts to get deleted when I have this functionality in place.

And, yes: I know that when you've decided to stop using pump.io, there is exactly one piece of functionality that matters to you. But there are thousands of other users who have other priorities. I'm sorry for the delay, and I will get it working for you at some point.

I'm going to the XOXO Festival this weekend. I feel kind of bad when I travel to events like this, because I usually just want to spend time with people I don't see that often, and I usually completely fail to do it.

The XOXO event has an attendees list, so here's what I did:

1. I downloaded that page (one big page) and scraped out the attendee Twitter handles with a couple of lines of Perl. The results are in a gist.
2. I then spent a lot of time fiddling with Twitter API stuff to extract the list of screen names of people I follow. It was annoyingly hard.
3. Instead, I installed the nice t utility. "t following" did exactly what I wanted.
4. I then used comm to figure out which of the people I follow on Twitter are going to be at the event.
5. I started contacting them one-by-one.

Next time, I'll use their pump handles, of course. But it was an interesting exercise.

My files

So, I have 4 laptops that I've used at various times over the last 5 years. I want to sell off most of them, but I want to make sure I don't have any files on any of them that I lose.

I've got backups of each, but I don't want to keep around hundreds of gigs of backup for a computer I haven't used in years, just so 5 unique files are still around. I only backup volatile files in /var/ /etc/ /usr/local/ /opt/ and of course /home/, but it's still a lot of data.

So I'd like to identify files that are unique to each computer. Here's how I'm doing it:

1. For each host, I create a file of SHA2 sums. I'm trying to move away from MD5 sums, although they're probably fine for this application. I use GNU Parallel to keep things going quickly; I think for compute-intensive jobs like crypto sums this makes sense.
   
   find $BACKUPDIR -type f -print0 | parallel -q0 --gnu sha224sum > ~/tmp/${HOSTNAME}_sha224sums.txt
   
   
2. For each host, I make a sorted, uniq'd file of just the sums:
   
   cut -f1 -d" " ~/tmp/${HOSTNAME}_sha224sums.txt | sort | uniq > ~/tmp/${HOSTNAME}_justsums.txt
   
   
3. I have one computer that's my most recent that I want to keep. So I use "comm" to find checksums that are on other computers that aren't available on that computer:
   
   comm -13 ${KEEPER}_justsums.txt ${HOSTNAME}_justsums.txt > ${HOSTNAME}_uniquesums.txt
   
   Technically these aren't actually unique; they're just not on the keeper computer.
   
   
4. Finally, I convert the unique sums into filenames by referencing the original sums file:
   
   for cs in `<~/tmp/${HOSTNAME}_uniquesums.txt`; do grep -m1 $cs ~/tmp/${HOSTNAME}_sha224sums.txt | cut -f3 -d" " >> ~/tmp/${HOSTNAME}_uniquefilenames.txt; done
   
   
5. From there, I sort the unique filenames and then manually (!!) decide what to copy to the "keeper" computer. The signal-to-noise ratio is too low for me to do much automation, except for when I have a directory that I can rsync over in total.
   
   There are just a ton of files that are too useless to copy - temp files, dot files, etc.

I'd like to get to the point where I keep most of my stuff on sync'd storage using SparkleShare or git-annex, and most other stuff on hosted git servers like gitorious.org or github.com.

How do you keep multiple laptops in sync?

If we let go of our fears and ego before getting on with our work, we might accidentally move faster.

Tomorrow evening I will learn how to become a dictator. http://is.gd/L3PM2y This world needs a responsible person to take control. Trust me.

Heard: "He does try very hard." So do I when I relieve myself. The result is shit.

On the Internet no-one knows you're a dog. Or your true location.

“blah blah blah Use our API blah blah blah”

If #copyright #bs is any barrier for human's access to #knowledge & #creativity, we're psychologically unfit for survival @GoogleBooks

History shows us that humans defend the right to question authority and to remove it from power if it is #bullshit. #ResistanceIsFutile

“Lisa's newspaper is the only media in town not owned by Burns, which inspires the town..to create their own newspapers” http://ur1.ca/2l8dr

I propose the TRI currency code for RDF triples data exchange ;) #economics #technology

Anyone who has seen this pattern before? http://bit.ly/cor6dg It's a visually ambiguous tesselation. #art #help

I have to train myself not to hit 'Reply All' by default :S #email #facepalm

Real-time #Montreal !Bixi bike map: http://oobrien.com/vis/bikes/?city=montreal !YUL #data #visualization See also: http://ur1.ca/2bzvv

@twitter I'm constantly amused by your user interface decisions. "Hello Scrollbars!" !ux http://ur1.ca/2bq7g

Mistakenly clicked onto @fabsh and @tedks lengthy 'conversation' and blew my monthly ISP download limit. And it's only November 3rd. Sigh.

You can't have your girlfriend and eat it.