The Bull Og

Last night, I attended a meetup on Catalyst and am happy to have come away with a few more tips and tricks. Always learning something new.

Check out this presentation by Alex Payne on the Twitter API.

The reason I’ve chosen to share it is because of a little insight I had, assisted by a question from the audience. Pay particular attention to what Prof. Winograd says towards the end (paraphrased) about inanimate objects being able to tweet and what that could mean for the scalability of Twitter.

If the Internet is the operating system, I think Twitter will be its message queue.

A concert I attended last week stirred something deep within.

My wife performed as part of a final project for her class entitled, “Compositional Algorithms, Psychoacoustics, and Spatial Processing.” The video is (unfortunately) not ready but had you been there, you would have been fascinated by the blend of music (acoustic and electronic) performance and computer science. Oh, to have the skills of a keyboardist, a network admin, a drummer, a software engineer, *AND* a DJ.

Last night, I had the pleasure of dining with a friend who’s in town from Austria; someone I met years ago there in my very first programming class. He’s visiting the area for a conference (one of the best things about living in the bay area - since it’s the center of the tech universe and such a fantastic place to visit/live - all of your contacts come to visit sooner or later.) One of the many topics that came up was the role of theory and practice in education, particularly for computer science. His argument was that a CS education should consist of a bit of theory, then a bit of practice, then deeper theory, then deeper practice, etc.; an argument I agree with for the most part.

After we talked, I had to reflect: if my education had been like that, would I have been able to enjoy the interconnections I experienced at my wife’s concert? If I only would have known how useful B-trees, relational algebra, and IPC would be, I would have studied more and probably harder! But then, if I would have followed a strict diet of CS schooling and working, I wouldn’t have the appreciation I do for aural skills, polyrhythm, form, and counterpoint, the sum of all of which - computer science and music - made it possible to appreciate the art my wife was/is creating.

Speaking of polyrhythm, this morning, I had some Groove Armada playing when there was some polyrhythmic action (6 over 4, nothing crazy) going on when I thought of Peter Magadini, a master of polyrhythm, from whom I bought a video at the 1995 PASIC. I looked him up and guess where he teaches? Haight Ashbury! Reason enough to take up drumming again?

Don’t have time to really research this any further, but I think I found out why I couldn’t start Selenium today using my normal command line invocation. I was getting this when I tried to start it:

java.net.BindException: Address already in use

Hmmm… hadn’t started it before sitting down for work…. so…. what could be the issue? How did port 4444 get bound already? A little…

"nmap locahost"

…yields:


PORT STATE SERVICE
4444/tcp open krb524

krb524?!? I don’t remember firing that up. What is it? Well, if you do a search for “krb524 4444,” you’ll quickly see that “krb524″ has to do with Kerberos and it seems that Kerberos is using port 4444.

I’m on a Cisco VPN. Does the Cisco VPN use Kerberos? I don’t know, but it’s plausible enough for me to chalk it up to that and pass a new port (something clever like -p 4445) to the Selenium JAR and whoomp - as they say - there it is.

In my early 20s, my father and I traveled from Michigan to the west for a combo train/bus ride. We landed in Spokane, WA, and rode a train to Bozeman, Montana. Along the way, we made a stop in Missoula and took a spin on the merry-go-round with both of us being on horses on the outside of the ride.

As we spun around, he would occasionally reach up and grab a white, plastic ring from a dispenser shaped like a dragon’s mouth. That was fairly entertaining and I tried it a couple of times; the dispenser was just high enough and offset from the ride to require a good sense of timing and a good stretch to get the ring.

At some point, my father sensed that the ride was coming to an end and said “go for the brass ring!” I was a bit confused; the brass ring? What did he mean?

After one or two more turns, I could see him going for the dispenser again but this time, there wasn’t a white ring in the dragon’s mouth but rather something darker. As I watched from behind, he reached up and snagged the darker, brownish ring and let out a laugh. He shook it all about and sported a big, Cheshire grin on his face.

“Go for the brass ring!” has become my mantra as a result; I thought it when I moved to Vienna after grad school instead of moving to California, when I eventually moved to California after living and working in Vienna, when I took a job with Yahoo, and when I moved to SOMA.