Thursday, May 21, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: various lower body. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Calendar management. Investigated Wolfram|Alpha. Since its release on Friday last week there has been a lot of hype about it—perhaps too much. It's not a replacement for Google (yet), and it does some things that Google already does (but you could argue that Wolfram|Alpha does it better). It clearly does a lot of things that Google cannot do now, and although both Google and Wolfram|Alpha respond with data following a query they really can't be compared directly because they don't yet claim to solve exactly the same kinds of problems. There are other smaller sites that are doing work similar to portions of Wolfram|Alpha, but Wolfram|Alpha does lots of different things seemingly very well and ties it all together in a very tidy interface. I am certain that Wolfram|Alpha will encounter implementation problems in its future (e.g., privacy, accuracy, API), but I am optimistic about its usefulness. Things will get particularly interesting for Wolfram|Alpha as input and output hardware advances. For example, Wolfram|Alpha is ideally positioned for interfaces such as voice-only query, giant multitouch screen, data glove, any kind of 3-axis input device, or some combination of these. The beauty of Wolfram|Alpha lies in its ability to quickly and effortlessly find answers to certain questions and to present complex data in visually and informationally rich ways which we have not seen before at these speeds. Google did the same kind of thing, but for web search. Wolfram|Alpha is probably never going to supplant Google, but I think it will become an important player in the future of technology. Updated current students news. Admin work. Lunch: black forest ham and provolone sandwich from Subway. Added a new admissions calendar for JWG. Eric D and I did more work in Drupal. I wasn't satisfied with the template work that I done in our last session, so this time we tried some more edits that didn't work. I then tried using a YAML template that I had found which seemed like it would work but YAML had multiple layers of css files and required a specific directory structure which I couldn't figure out how to make with Drupal, so we abandoned the YAML template. Next we found a Drupal template called analytic that seemed to do what we wanted. Home. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly. Dinner at home with Patrick: roast duck, steamed rice, corn on the cob. Business card work for Patrick: spent most of our time trying to figure out how to enter pinyin to get traditional Chinese characters. Trashed my Time Machine sparsebundle because when attempting a restore I saw that it could not properly see back in time as far as it was supposed to. Recently I realized that having no television insulates me from certain things in the world. While others were watching TV at my sister's house I noticed a commercial selling a machine that automatically dispenses toothpaste when you hold a toothbrush under it. Another example is that when a recent office conversation turned to Snuggies I had to ask what it was. I don't feel like I'm missing out on these culturally important inventions, but I am a little surprised because these things catch me off guard in a way that doesn't happen frequently. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly. Late meal: cherries, Joe's Os. Wow, it takes a really long time to delete a sparsebundle from Time Machine. It's been going for a bunch of hours now.