Some random points:

• My shitty new EEEPC arrived today. It’s a 900 with 512MB RAM and 4GB of SSD. And the GENERIC kernel panics while booting over the network (missing the ae driver? I dunno).
• I got fucking shitfaced last night and forgot to set my alarm — I subsequently woke up at 3PM and thus didn’t go to work today.
• I’m picking up the keys for my new house tomorrow. Going to spent the next four days cleaning the fuck out of it and making everything pretty.
• I haven’t had sex in over 6 weeks.
• I got fucking shitfaced tonight and somehow acquired a bunch of adderall. Amphetamines + FreeBSD + Haskell = ?

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FINALLY SOMEONE IMPLEMENTED ONE OF MY FUCKING IDEAS. It’s a generic centralized MD5 <-> metadata service, and I hope it is fucking awesome. I’m waiting for them to release an API so I can UNLEASH THE HOUNDS UPON IT — I have so much fucking metadata just waiting to be harvested (and I really fucking want to be able to benefit from providing that metadata publically).

Go go go autonomous tagging systems!!!

EDIT: Though I can’t get the damn thing to work. Maybe I should just fucking implement my own one of these fucking days. dsfargeg.

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I just found this article on Kotaku which lightly discusses the use of the Nintendo DS as an education tool — having the students play Brain Age or write stories about their Nintendogs and stupid shit like that.

Don’t get me wrong — I think using a Nintendo DS (or other handheld technology) as an educative device is fucking great. I think trying to hack a curriculum around existing games is fucking stupid.

The technology should incorporate into the existing curriculum. I remember learning multiplication tables — every day we’d have a 10-question quiz where you had 30 seconds to complete a bunch of simple multiplication problems. The teacher would then go through them and mark each sheet and record all the results.

It’s a really dead-simple use-case: write an NDS application which allows the student to authenticate and take the test on the hardware during the test period instead of taking notes on a piece of paper. This has a shitload of advantages over the low-tech version –

• Math questions can be randomly generated based on a set of rules to prevent cheating (everyone has a slightly different set of questions).
• Tests can be immediately and automatically scored to save time and improve turnaround and accuracy.
• Questions, answers and results can be stored in a centralized database for statistics and analysis on a large-scale.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a programmer and something like this would be dead-easy to do (but incredibly costly for an educational institution), but my god. Seriously.

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I like having lots of data, but I hate having it in a completely unusable mess. I have a couple of friends who have fairly massive repositories of images and video all strewn in a big pile. I’m kind of guilty of doing it myself. The problem is, these big piles are absolutely unusable because they don’t provide any means of attaching non-trivial metadata to the content.

One of my goals for the next month or so is to write a Danbooru-like system which is geared towards taxonomic categorization of a folder of shit. The idea is that you point the software (which is effectively a web application written in Haskell) at a directory. Any file in that directory can then be turned into a Danbooru-style post — a process which moves the file out of the watch directory and into the system’s internal repository and attaches some initial metadata.

Even if you just have a raw file, you can scrape quite a bit of metadata from it. I spent a bit of time tonight writing a small wrapper around mplayer which can be used to dump all the metadata from a video file and dump arbitrary screenshots from the video. Combine this with a system which has an idea of how fansubbers normally name their files and how to look up series names on AniDB/MAL and you’ve got a good amount of automatically-generated metadata right off the bat (which can be then supplemented by users).

You can do the same thing with images — there are tons of existing massive repositories for image metadata. Aside from looking at the on-file stuff, you can take the MD5 of the image and pass it to a fairly wide variety of services (4scrape, IQDB, Danbooru instances, etc) and pull back tags from any hits that you find. Sure, you won’t find stuff for every image, but you’d be surprised how many images are already posted and categorized elsewhere.

The reason I want to use a watch directory is because it makes it really easy to tie into an environment where people are uploading content via NFS/SMB. I’m most interested in good categorization of video data (since there are already good existing image repositories), and uploading 200MB+ files over anything but NFS/SMB is a massive pain in the ass.

Additionally, it makes it really easy to tie into an automated download system — hook an RSS agent up to download torrents into rtorrent‘s watch directory, then have a script to move the finished files into the repository’s watch directory and boom — your stuff automatically gets pulled and indexed. Hook it up to a twitter feed and have a monitor set up in the living room to display that feed, and you’ve got a pretty good media discovery system.

Anyway, we’ll see how it turns out. I’m hoping it’s going to be fucking awesome, but it’s going to take awhile to get everything up and running, I think. And so, art imitates life.

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I had a machine upstairs hooked up to the cable modem acting as both a wireless router and a SMB/NFS server. Yesterday, we noticed some young birds had taken up a nest on our roof and were tweeting away.

You might not think these two pieces of data are related, but they are. Those weren’t birds — the sounds were coming from the primary hard drive of our router. FUUUUUUUUUUUU. For some reason, two of the three drives in the machine failed. Sounds like some kind of mechanical failure in the primary drive, and on one of the data drives the partition table was completely screwed up (though I managed to rebuild it by hand). As I was dumping the data off this second drive, I noticed something that I had forgotten to do –

The RAID5 array that I built isn’t encrypted with GELI. So I just wiped it and layered GELI on top of the RAID5 volume — it was really incredibly easy to do. Except now I’m filling the 2.6TB volume from /dev/random before running newfs (and re-copying over all my data) and fuck this is going to take forever. But now I’ve got a secure volume for all of my totally legal material. Huzzah.

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