Current areas of interest

Here's what I'm up to at the moment:

• Doing Open University Tutor Marked Assignments in "Data, Computing, and Information" and "Engineering the Future" courses.
• Learning how to program Python using Diving into Python and Thinking Like a Computer Scientist.
• Applying to go to university.
• Looking for a job.
• Creating a lengthy webcomic narrative.
• Blogging extensively.
• Reading The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker.
• Reading Four Laws that Drive the Universe by Peter Atkins.
• Reading Feersum Endjinn's by Iain M Banks.
  

Black swans and Google failure {Ramble}

Re-reading this article from last year in the Times (via George Dvosrky and BoingBoing) concerning Nassim Nicholas Taleb and black swans.

As I write Google seems to be going through a bit of a crisis, flagging all sites it's searches return with "this site may harm your computer" (it even spawned a Twitter hashtag #googmayharm) and redirecting you to an interstitial site:


Anyway it occurs to me that Google going bankrupt or suffering some huge failure that wipes out all the data stored in, say, blogger would be a black swan event. High impact and widely unpredicted.

This is exactly why I've taken to making local backups of my blog with this software using Blogger Backup. In the event of Google getting fubared I can be back up and running within two shakes of a Wordpress template.

I've also been doing something similar with my Delicious account, by using this website to create a local xml copy of all my Delicious bookmarks.

Incidentally Delicious is now becoming really useful: it's got to the stage (with 2096 tags and 2009 saved URLs) where it acts as a sort of private search engine of stuff I know I'll already be interested in.

But my obsession with long term data storage (and I mean for Long Now values of long term) has since been piqued by this article by Charles Stross. Stoss is talking about data formats being essentially forgotten after a few decades and data stored in those formats becoming inaccessible.

But the value of something like my Delicious xml backups may change for me because those websites might drop off the web.

So I'm currently looking for some software that will save all the pages associated with the URLs in my Delicious account as local html files.

LATER: Well Google is working properly and I found something like what I just described (a means to acquire local copies of all my Delicious sites) using the wget tool on UNIX based systems.

wget actually looks really awesome.

I know I should bite the bullet and switch to either Apple or Linux but I haven't got round to it yet, so in the meantime I'm looking for something similar to wget but for Windows...

Which programming language am I?

For years now I've been tinkering around with computer programming languages.

Back when I was thirteen I bought a copy of C for Dummies in my local Oxfam shop. I learned a little but gave up half way through.

More recently I've been reading Sams Teach Yourself Java 6 by Rogers Cadenhead and Laura Lemay. I also have an up-t0-date copy of Sams Teach Yourself C++ Liberty Jones on my desk.

Another textbook that's floating around somewhere is PHP 6 and MySQL 5 Visual Quickpro Guide by Larry Ullman.

I'm also learning Javascript for one of my OU courses at the moment.

In short I've made my usual mistake of not focusing on one language and letting myself get distracted by other projects.

The motivation behind my interest has always been my desire to more fully understand the computer I use so much.

Cory Doctorow commented, in this review of his recent book, that:

"Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code."

Which is good advice, I guess. Chris Applegate has written a brief guide as to how you might start off, and recommends Python as a good place to start:

If you work in any information industry, or are thinking about a career in it, learn to code. And by code I don’t mean learn something hardcore like Java or C++, or even learn a full programming language (as you’ll see below). But it means getting above the usual abstractions you see - your web browser, Word, Excel - and getting involved at a deeper level, get to appreciate what the data it is you’re reading and realise it’s not just something to look at.

Python (along with Perl) is one of the few languages I haven't dickered around with at some stage.

I think that the important thing is that I focus on one language at a time.

R programming language

A new programming language, R, designed specifically for data mining and statistics is discussed in the New York Times:

“R has really become the second language for people coming out of grad school now, and there’s an amazing amount of code being written for it,” said Max Kuhn, associate director of nonclinical statistics at Pfizer. “You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional downturn in traffic.”

[via Slashdot][image from R Project Website]