Data, words, code
Kyrgyzstan has a new interior minister. Probably no bad thing, given that the accomplishments of previous acting interior minister Bolot Sher consisted of:
* pursuing Bakiyev’s relatives
* Making the supremely reassuring statement that “I am in command of 80 percent of the Ministry of Interior…The other 20 percent is still waffling.”
On the other hand his replacement, Kubat Baibolov, is coming straight from an oh-so-successful stint running things in Jalal-Abad
Ran into this who’s who of Kyrgyz politics looking up the new Interior Minister, but it seems generally pretty worth paying attention to.
Embedded in a project that’s floundering a little as it expands beyond the size that the devs can keep in their heads. So, looking for some relatively lightweight, way of visualizing the moving parts and the work that needs to be done. And, as every other time I’ve looked in this area, finding most solutions to be too feature-light, too complicated, or sometimes both.
First are the project scheduling systems. Whatever they focus on, it’s hard to think of them except as tools for generating GANTT charts. I can imagine these being useful for, say, a big construction project with complex interdependencies of people and machines. For coding, not so much. Particularly not Taskjuggler, which seems to delight in being non-user-friendly. That is , it is is complicated and does a bad job of explaining itself — but then tries to use this as evidence of how sophisticated it is. I ran away before finding out; complexity is
not
what I want!
Gnome planner is quite possibly much inferior for large projects, but at least lets me add a task without hours grepping through the docs. If I ever need a gantt chart, I’ll certainly head there rather than taskjuggler. I honestly believe that coding extra features into planner as required would be easier than making sense of taskjuggler
So, I think I’ll do without!
I often avoid certain news stories: not because they’re unimportant, but because I doubt I’ll learn much by discovering them in the day-by-day dribble of the daily press.
The BP Oil Spill is one: I’m not going to bother with short articles on it, but I’d really love to follow the long ones. I’ve idly watched the speculation ramp up to biblical proportions, but have no idea how to interpret it.
[no content here, as you can see, just a stick in the ground to note how shameful it is that I know nothing about this]
MongoDB (and nosql generally) is an appealing idea. The words written about it, though, are problematic: too much hype, too little documentation. That’ll change soon; we’re over the peak of the nosql hype cycle, into the trough. People are looking at the nosql systems they’ve eagerly implemented in recent months, noticing that they won’t solve every problem imaginable. For now, though, every blogpost with mongodb instructions is prefaced with grumbles about the lack of information.
So, i spend a ridiculous amount of time figuring out how to do grouping. Have a bunch of download logs, want to break them down by country.
The simplest way I could find of doing this is:
db.loglines.group({ ‘cond’ : {}, initial: {count: 0}, reduce: function(doc, out){out.count++;if(out[doc.country] == undefined){out[doc.country] = 0;};out[doc.country] += 1;}});
Or, the version in pymongo:
> reduce_func = """function(doc, out){
out.total++;
if(out[doc.country] == undefined){
out[doc.country] = 0;};
out[doc.country] += 1;};
"""
> l.group(key = {},
condition = {},
initial = {'total':0},
reduce = reduce_func)
[{
u'AE': 215.0,
u'AG': 23.0,
u'AM': 140.0,
u'AN': 58.0,
u'AO': 56.0,
...
u'total' : 87901;
}]
[apologies for formatting; I’ve not really figured out how to edit js within a python repl]
More on Alejandro:
– Bad Romance may have been similarly intricate
– The dreamscape reminds me strongly of Gaiman, although that probably means no more than that Gaiman’s been on my mind lately
– Everybody seems to have seen the religious elements as a homaget to Madonna, with “like a prayer”. Fair enough, but it surely also has some connection to Derek Jarman’s video for the pet shop boys’
It’s a Sin
s
It’s taken a long while, but I’m now, finally, a convert to the church of gaga. It’s all Alejandro’s fault, and more particularly in the video. It’s another epic 8-minute piece, which means there’s plenty of time to develop a good many themes. She’s doing what I like best: not making a syllogism with her music, but layering loosely-connected themes so that, if you clap your hands and try to believe, you’ll be able to weave your own meaning out of it.
It’s somehow very European, but drawn from disparate sources within that; Gaga surely deserves some EU subsidy for semiotic integration. The setting is mystical and unspecific, but in a cold and German fashion. Gaga appears as Dream or an Ice Queen, or maybe as Narnia’s White Witch. But this isn’t Narnia, with children and a christ-like lion. It’s Weimar, a collapsing world where introspectively melodramatic romance must take the place of morality. It’s intense and fearful, slightly frigid, physicality replaced by power. Even the male dance troupe are desexualised; after entering with a haka-like swagger, they retreat into stylised weirdness.
So far, we’re in a familiar aesthetic, one which runs from Rammstein to Bauhaus through the entire spectrum of goth. The equivocation between sex and violence is likewise familiar, though rebel chic rarely gets as far as a semi-automatic bra. It’s the hispanic eurodisco elements that take us away. Our tragic ice queen seems about to start singing ‘numa numa ey’. Teutonic tragic Romance meets the Romance culture — in accent, if not in much else.
Spent a chunk of the weekend with a clique of Australian travellers and party animals — who turned out to have a sweet and counter-intuitive affection for watching documentaries. Also, chess. On the documentaries, they turned me onto this giant list of of documentaries to watch online.
Neat trick from stackoverflow: the
re.DEBUG
flag for python regexes:
> re.compile('a(b+)a', re.DEBUG)
literal 97
subpattern 1
max_repeat 1 65535
literal 98
literal 97