ongoingongoing fragmented essay by Tim BrayNot Much- June 13, 2008 Two photos of not much in particular, but with explanations.http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/13/Not-Much Main Art- June 11, 2008 Our house is near, and my office on, Main Street, which despite its name is not, nor has it ever been, the main street of anything. These days The Main is starting to be hip and fashionable, but the process is hampered by the fact that the buildings are, on average, old, and mostly werent very good when they were built. So it was kind of nice when some street art popped up on one that I walk by every day.http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/11/On-Main Cottagers!- June 11, 2008 Now were real Canadians. As of June 11th, Lauren and I own a cottage on Keats Island (Wikipedia, map, keatsisland.net). The consequences include a sudden interest in remote-area Internet options.http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/11/Keats-Island RX and 1.9 and Pain- June 10, 2008 This fragment is mostly a note to myself and placeholder and might prove useful to someone slashing through the XML undergrowth with bleeding-edge Ruby. Briefly: I revived my RX Ruby tokenizer (see here, here, and here) to contribute to Antonio Cangianos proposed Ruby benchmark suite, which I think is a Really Good Idea. I had a bit of pain getting the code to run on both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9, and then when I tried sanity-checking the output by comparing it to REXML on 1.9, REXML blew chunks. ...http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/10/RX-Work Flamenco Sketches- June 8, 2008 Photographic sketches, I mean. Earlier this month, Eve and Eli were up from Seattle to visit and after dinner, we all dropped by the Kino Caf to take in the flamenco. It was passionate and sexy and fun.http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/08/Flamenco-Sketches WF2: Early Results- June 8, 2008 This is part of the Wide Finder 2 series. The first serious results are in, and theyre eye-opening. The naive Ruby approach, remember, burned some 25 hours. There are now four other results posted, with elapsed times of 8, 9, 15, and 17 minutes. The write-ups are already full of surprises, and Im expecting more.http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/08/WF-Early-Results WF2: Start Your Engines!- June 5, 2008 This is part of the Wide Finder 2 series. I have now done the first official run of the naive Ruby implementation of the benchmark. There is some discussion of the code here. The benchmark is described, and the naive Ruby code provided, here. Ive started a results page here. There are already ten eleven other people now with accounts on the Wide Finder machine, and I know thereve been results that are hugely better than this first cut. Read on for a couple of notes on this first run.http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/05/WF-Start-Me-Up Everything On-Line- June 5, 2008 Recently I read The Rebellion Within by Lawrence Wright, a long, erudite, immensely informative New Yorker piece about the internal dynamics of Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad: Who are these people, anyhow, where did they come from, and where are they going I entirely recommend it. Theres a problem, though: I read it on-line.http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/05/New-Yorker San Fran Shadows- June 4, 2008 Last week I took a brief trip to San Francisco, and managed to escape for a walk. Lots of buildings had interesting shadows on them.http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/04/San-Fran-Shadows |