Trip: 1, Tracker: 0I'm discovering that my recent trip to Massachusetts put a little more wear on my car than I had previously though.
Both interior grab handles are loose. It is due for a oil change a full two months earlier than normal. To top it all off, its exhaust pipe is about to fall off. Hooray for unexpected expenses.
Speaking of MassachusettsThe whole reason I was in Massachusetts was to
learn about starting a startup. I have been trying to work up enough courage to leave school and “just do it.” I keep finding
more ringing endorsements for that approach.
I have some commitments that I need to finish up, which is the only thing stopping me right now. Those commitments should be cleared up before the end of December. I have a few ideas that I'm mulling over. We'll see what happens.
Annoyance two turned out okay. I earned a halfway decent grade on the discrete test. Not great, but better than I expected.
New annoyance: Not getting enough done over the weekend.
Also, I'm trying to rebuild a HPUX server at school. They had a 9000/827S that had been running since the early '90s. It stopped working after a nasty power failure. I dropped in my J200 and spent the weekend getting it configured.
Two annoyances for the week
Annoyance 1: The SNMP agent on Motorola Canopy 7.2.9. In particular, it does not use a consistent data format for MAC addresses. AP MACs are sent as a DisplayString. The SM's MAC is sent as a PhysAddress (Octet Stream.)
Annoyance 2: I had to take a test for discrete math today. The test used a notation that was completely different from what we covered in class. I spoke with another student after the test. He had the same complaint.
Both of these annoyances are offset by my discovery of this great song:
Mal's Song by
Michelle Dockrey (
download)
Wow! I have users.
Aljazeera launched their
English language web site over two years ago. They did not offer any sort of
news feed, so I made
my own.
Now, I look around and notice that, wow, I have over 10 users (17.) That makes me so happy! I realize that 10 is not that many people, but it is more users that I have ever had before.
Now that it has had a while to collect data, I'd like to introduce one of my trivial little projects:
amazprice. It records and plots Amazon product price history.
All the heavy lifting is done by perl, RRDTool, Net::Amazon, Data::Dumper, and RRDTool:OO.
Get the source.
I had left a CD in my Amazon shopping cart for over a year. As months went by, I would get messages from Amazon telling me that the price of a item in my cart had changed. I realized that the price on this one CD had varied by as much as $8 at times. Being curious, I wanted a more formal way to record item prices over time. Besides, this gave me an excuse to play with
AWS.
It is worth noting that I wrote this before Amazon made their pricing data available via AWS, so I didn't reinvent the wheel out of blindness.
So, I see that Amazon launched a new web service. This service lets programs ask people questions. People are payed by the developer to answer questions for their program. Amazon profits by middleman fees.
Most of the articles I'm reading look at the
worker side of
MTurk (Amazon Mechanical Turk.) Others raise
concerns over the ethics of having people work for computers. I'm glad that MTurk is forcing people to look at the relationship between people and programs. We need to have that discussion sooner rather than later.
I'm intrigued with MTurk because Amazon has created a market for simple tasks that may be just beyond the ability of current computer systems. Set a automated task to work solving MTurk HITs. The developer would get a tidy pile if it worked. If it didn't work, it would be kicked out for erroneous work. There are other aspects that need exploring. I can't wait to see how a market based on units of microwork works.