Morning Musings and Automated Care Packages.

Yawn. I know its not technically morning anymore, but I'm only on my second cup of coffee. That's 'Morning' enough for me!

In other news, the DSL line was not working AGAIN when I woke up. A quick check of the logs showed that my firewall lost and regained connectivity a large number of times, and eventually got into a state where the link would come up, but there would be no authorization response from the other end. This made it look strongly like the other end was borked, but when I reset the firewall, everything came back up normally. Hmmm. This NOW looks like there is an error condition that my system doesn't cleanly recover from. I think I may have to ask the folks on the mailinglist for my firewall software if they have any ideas what to do about this. Once things were back up, I checked out my ISP's site and found out that they had had 30 minutes of bad connectivity to their ADSL clients, and had fixed the problem by 8:30 am. As it was 11:00 when I got up, I guess this is further confirmation that the problem was on my side.

Finally, I've been thinking more about the 'Automated Care Package' thingy. You know, I think I'm glad that my friends don't think they would have any particular use for the service. I think that says something good about them. On the other hand, I just can't see that the idea is either a) non-profitable or b) non-beneficial. I think part of the reason for this is that I've already tried something very similar once. I used to use a very nice piece of reminder software called Remind from Roaring Penguin. Its mainly designed for Linux, but it runs on Windows too. I'm not currently running it, because XP is a lot less friendly about DOS command-line programs than 98SE was. Once I've installed webmail on the Linux mail server, I'm very likely to install some collaboration and calendar software as well, and probably get Remind up and running over there.

Anyway, the point about Remind is that its quite sophisticated. You can tell it that something only happens on the third sunday of every alternate month, and if you're willing to get into the messier options, you can even say to be reminded whan a Friday the 13th is coming up which will have a full moon, and during which your biorythm should be at its peak. My use for this little system was to make sure that I got at least two weeks notice of all major events like birthdays, aniversaries and statutory hollidays ('cause its a pain to drag yourself out of bed on a monday, get to work and find the doors are locked). Once the system was working smoothly I also put in some little 'Do something nice for X' random reminders.

The result of this was that all my friends started telling me how thoughtful I was at not only remembering their birthdays, and their kids' as well, but which anniversary or birthday it was. My usual response to the praise was to tell them it wasn't a big deal, that it was all in a database that sent me regular reminders of these sorts of things. This had no noticable effect on the level of praise. As several people put it, I had gone to the effort of ensuring that I wouldn't forget important events any more, and that said I cared. Often folks said that they would do the same thing IF they knew enough about computers to set it up, and wished their other friends would use similar programs.  So, this is why I'm thinking that a) the idea would be popular and b) it would do far more good than harm.

That said, I'm not ignoring all the folks that have misgivings about the idea. It seems that there is a strong enough feeling that it may be a bad thing that I'll need to sit down with some of the doubters and work out all of the good and bad scenarios. If I can find a way to avoid the bad ones, then its probably worth doing. Otherwise, not.

Introspectator.

Well, at least I started the day with plans and ambitions. I've had a bunch of things I wanted to accomplish this week, and so far haven't gotten nearly enough done. Today though, I figured out why.

This is one of those "No shit Sherlock!" observations, but I finally noticed that there are certain tasks that, while simple in nature, are so emotionally draining that when I have one of them to tackle, it pretty much takes all of my get up and go for the entire day, even if the task only takes 10 minutes to perform.

Just about anything involving resumes or job hunting or interviews is currently in that category. So, yesterday a friend told me that there was a job openning in Ottawa that I should apply for. I updated my Resume to put it in a good light, and mailed it off. That only took an hour or so, but I didn't get another thing done all day.

Today things were going well until I got another email from my friend who essentially said: 'It will look better if your resume goes through regular channels. Could you go to the website and jump through the job application hoops?'.  That only took 30 minutes to do, but I now have lost all of my will to do the things that I was looking forward to doing today.

Maybe the urge to get something else done will come back today, maybe it won't. Now that I've realized that the main drain on my productivity at the moment is not that I'm a lazy bum (an unfortunate default assumption of mine) but that I'm in a fairly fragile emotional shape, I've decided not to beat up on myself about it. From now on I'm going to try to classify the jobs I have to do not only in terms of how long they should take, but how draining it will be to do them. This should give me a much more ballanced view of what I should be able to get done in a week.

Or so I hope.

Personal Reverse Index of the Web.

I went and upgraded to Firefox 1.0PR today. It looked like the only way to deal with some glitches in V9.3 that were bugging me. The glitches are gone alright, but so are something like 50% of the extensions that I use. It looks like the extension interface has changed (again) and most folks haven't gotten around to updating their code yet.

So far though, all of the extensions that I MUST have, seem to be available, including Deepest Sender and Tabbrowser Preferences (which is, for some reason, not on the official extensions site, despite being cruicial to happy use of tabs).

So, looking through the extensions that are (and are not) currently available, I noticed one that had caught my eye before. Its called Slogger and it can be configured to keep a permanent copy of every single webpage you ever visit. As storage gets cheaper, this starts to have more and more appeal, and if my current system wasn't already packed to the gunn'ls with files, I would install this.

When I'm doing research into a new subject, like I was so recently going with aviation, I often don't know how relevant a webpage is to my research until I've seen enough other pages to understand the first ones content. Thus, I often find myself scrambling to re-locate a page I remember a few random phrases from, but no more. If those phrases are common, or I've misremembered, it can be a very frustrating search, indeed. With something like Slogger, I could run a text search over the download cache, and if worse came to worse I could reread all of the pages I'd been to that week, in reverse order.

This has the potential to be quite useful as is, but I think I want something more. Why should I have to run a text search engine over the pages in the cache? Why couldn't it build a complete reverse index of the page contents as it stored them? That way, one could do a search for all of the pages containing a phrase or word, and get an almost instant response. Plus, if you're low on disk space like I am, you could have it just store the index. Almost as good for the kind of research that I do.

I may just suggest that to the Slogger author, now that I think about it.

DMOZ and Collaborative Filtering.

I was just reading an article about The economics of open source hijacking and was only sort-of agreeing with what it had to say.Then it came to a discussion of DMOZ, the Open Source Web Directory. DMOZ was proposed as an alternative to Yahoo, and it has failed. You can read the article if you want more of the details.

This is one of those cases where I don't think the creators of DMOZ can be blamed for the failure. The project was and is a good idea. Its just that today's web is a far different place than the system was designed to work in.

The idea of letting folks sign up and be editors was a good one. The idea of giving away the data was also good. The problem was that the organization that was decided upon does not scale, and its easily overwhelmed by spam. None of these things were easily predictable back then, but that doesn't mean we're stuck with those choices (although DMOZ acts as if it is).

To once again play one of my favorite tunes, I think the answer is in global collaboritive filtering and classification. What is needed is a useful search system that learns what things match what you are looking for, and improves with each use of the system. Strangely enough, I think that the new Search Engine from Amazon called A9, is a stab in that direction. Its not there yet, but could grow into it. The problem, of course, is that its a commercial system that doesn't give a flying fig about privacy concerns, but that's another topic.

Evolutionary Tree isn't a Tree.

In a recent article in Astrobiology, they presented a recent finding that, at its base, the evolutionary tree has branches that join. It now seems that the eukaryotes (nucleated single-celled life) was created when two unrelated prokaryotes merged and became a single species.

This is not a terribly surprising result. There is evidence that our own mitochondria were once a separate species, that somehow merged with animal life long long ago. What's nifty is that they've actually managed to gain some data about such an early merger. I think I'm going to have to see if I can get my hands on the full article to read.