Is the internet back yet ?

The internet came back half an hour after I left for the office but the water was gone by the time I got home again. Got a few hours kip, woke up this "morning" and my wife was gone. Got a slice of toast, the peanut butter was gone. Tried asking you but I don't think you were reddi yet.

But I keep coming back to the same old questions:

When you get right down to it, what've you got, right, down, up a bit, more, There, aaaah, ... ?
Why do my socks have big holes when I always compost them at the first tear ?
Why has my retirement-fund halved the fees today, if banks are in such shit ?
Why does the screen always go black at the start of writing a new program ?
Why am I so much better at sorting this list than most algorithms I know ?
   Wow ! That line was typed in at the best guess place, before I knew ...
How many visitors do you need to see what's going on outside the prison ?
Which of these questions will you take as the subject line of an email ?
Who is converging on The Palace of Culture, panting and slobbering ?
How do you design a brain when all you've got control of is genes ?
How many Ministers for Energy does it take to change a light bulb ?
Why is Natural Language mischaracterized as inherently ambiguous ?
How can you expect to be taken seriously (Extended Danse Mix) ?
Why do men need nipples, is it some kind of memento matris ?
When you get down to the wood today, what will you saw ?
Why is petrol back down to less than 1 euro per litre ?
How many Big Macs does it take to sink an empire ?
How does it work when you program in English ?
How can one live well in a badly-run world ?
When do the floor-cleaning robots arrive ?
Whatever will become of the likely lads ?
How many angels can be fit into a PIN ?
Where have all the children gone ?
Which are the magical languages ?
What were we wanting without W ?
Who would you like to beat (up) ? 
Does my thumb look big in text ?
Who are you talking to, inside ?
How much do you miss the goal ?
Sorry, what were you saying ?
What do you do, in the bath ? 
But I'm mumbling again't I ?
How much do I stink by now ?
Why do crocodiles crawl ?
How to get rich, slowly ?
What was I looking for ?
Have a dream on me !
Onde está o Oisín ?
Where's the craic ?
You want it when ?
Why am I here ?
Why coo ?
WTF ?

Why Ronny?

Sometimes being able to invent real email addresses while offline is worth the few measly currency units for a domain.

The email below is a straight copy and paste from just before I hit "Send".

Well, some names have been changed, obviously.
Have you seen the size of the lads at The Breezes B&B ?

Lovely scenery though. And a huge bay window to sit in and snap away. I'd recommend it if you're on The Ring of Kerry. Especially with the big bay window just across from the fire. We were there in ... probably this time last year, and I would've spent the afternoon in that chair if flowers in the garden hadn't been calling for close-ups. So I guess it was March or April because there was more colour than just daffodils. And just around the corner was one of those "tunnel photos" I love so much. Not quite as good as this one, but home was to the right of this one so I'm not being fair.

Anyway, that's not the real story. The fish in Glenbeigh was the real story of that trip ("We don't serve chips, just fish") but it was the lads in the B&B that finally found the email address this year.

---

Dear breezesbandb@eircom.net,

Please consider yourself blacklisted, for sending unsolicited commercial email to a previously unused email address.

BTW, do you know the Sneem Breezes ? I have some nice photos from when we stayed at their B&B, but I know where they are if they'd like to see them.

Dear info@spamfighter.com,

Are you aware that people are using SPAM to promote your products?

Looked like it was a good product too - helluva lot of awards on the WWW site!

Unfortunately I shall now not be able to download it and see whether it would have stopped the SPAM below. This being gmail it wouldn't've done much good anyway, but such are the sweet little ironies that get us through the day.

Bye now, gotta blog.

--
Alan

On Jan 23, 2008 8:02 AM, breezesbandb@eircom.net wrote:

I use a good spam filter, and you probably do the same.
I have whitelisted you and that means that I will receive all the emails you send to me.
I would appreciate it if you would whitelist my email address: breezesbandb@eircom.net in your spam filter.

If you don't have a spam filter, I can recommend SPAMfighter. It is a highly effective free spam filter for Outlook and Outlook Express.

You can get the free SPAMfighter here:
http://www.spamfighter.com/Pro

I hope that you will whitelist me, so we can continue to communicate safely via email in the future.

Best regards

breezesbandb@eircom.net

How to not search

While reading Mindware this evening I went to get the bottle of cider for a refill. And in turning to look for it I solved half the "problem" of reaching for it.

Andy Clark makes a persuasive case for the lack of an homunculus in elaborating on the lower level connectedness of perception and action. He argues that we do not necessarily perceive, think, act; but that the action is already part of the perception - the looking at the cider bottle is already part of / makes easier the reaching for it. Hence there is already less need for the "think" in "perceive, think, act".

There is less need to conceive of "a bottle" and "how to reach for it", because looking at it has already solved a lot of that problem, and "reach for it" becomes more of a stock action - always reach forward in the direction you are looking.

So it is also with programming:

We offer our customers support via a web site and email. It is all built on the great roundup system. One of the problems we dealt with a while back was handling "Out Of Office" replies - log them and ignore them.

Lately we've installed a new email system which handles such emails differently - it does not change the subject of the email, just the message. And, naturally, the earlier solution was based just on recognising subject lines. So, I add in a few lines to try recognising such emails by their messages too. Didn't work - my inbox is still full of the things. So I need to delve deeper, specifically I want to find out why roundup is sending me these emails, so

• cd /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/roundup
• find . -name "*mail*py" -exec grep smtp {} \; -print

And there I was reaching for the cider bottle again, by looking for it. I may not have decided yet what code to write to stop those emails being sent, but when I do decide that, I won't need to decide where.

Of course, looking for the right place in the code is rarely as simple as "cd, find, grep", but as we read through reams of code, trying to understand it, we are not seeking a general understanding of the code. Rather we are specifically sieving out the data structures and algorithms irrelevant to the problem. By the time we get to where the solution wants to be, it is no wonder we have already collected the very tools needed for the fix.

One of the reasons I was looking at copycat was that I appreciated it's "biological plausibilty". And one of the biggest caveats I had about it was the huge disconnect between its Slipnet's "perception" of concepts in a string and the "action" of its codelets on the string. It tends to follow the "perceive, think, act" cycle which is downplayed by what I was reading from Clark.

Slightly related:
How to find the most pythonic implementation of the singleton pattern? Search for not singleton !