Two things this weekend:
- Port/migration/(possible downgrade) of my personal wiki to an earlier version of MoinMoin. I kept on getting a “CacheNeedsUpdating” error. Source diving and hack patching was no help. Fix was to go to “data/pages” directory, and run
find . | grep "/cache$" | xargs rm -rf
. Basically removed the outdated cache. Not sure if it was internal file format thing due to different version, or timestamp thing or what. But, it works now.
- Installed dd-wrt on my router (Belkin F5D7230-4, version 1010). There were a few bumps (the tftp copy wouldn’t take very well, I had to do it a couple times, and the router took a long while to reboot, which I mis-diagnosed as a crash). However, it all worked in the end, and I’m pretty happy with the results. Even the micro version of dd-wrt is pretty featureful, with traffic shaping, static IP address asignees for DHCP via MAC address identifiers, and other tasty bits. And a wonderful interface, compared with the factory-shipped firmware (this is, perhaps, the first instance in the history of the world when Free software has a better UI than closed software). Open source is a wonderful thing.
Also, this morning, via conversation with Hao-Chuan:
I need to think more about intellectual foraging. Metaphor of information tracking/consumption, based on food tracking/consumption.
- What are internal mental model & goal structures, instinctual to finding food gathering that we’ve now operator-overloaded to deal with information gathering, esp on the net?
- Peter Pirolli (PARK) : http://sigchi.org/chi2003/docs/t23.pdf, http://www.amazon.com/Information-Foraging-Theory-Interaction-Human-Technology/dp/0195173325
- How can we design information architecture, and web page architecture, to make information foraging more intuitive, more productive? (i.e. how can I format my stuff to be more tasty, digestible)
- Tangentially, what if we compare the “tastiness vs healthiness” of information. How do different sites (digg vs metafilter vs reddit vs slashdot vs my delicious feed vs my blog vs my reading habits) fit on this cartesian plot? Pages that are “naturally desirable” are not necessarily the best way to spend our foraging time.
(aside: It’s now August, last post in April… where has time gone? I think I was a lot more motivated to blog when i was back in Academia. The atmosphere back then was a bit… stagnating intellectually, so the internets became my vent. Now, here at Google, I’m in general more intellectually fulfilled, work around great people every day. This is so strange, I thought it was supposed to be the opposite (academia being the haven and nurturer of free thinking, and industry being the great pit of stagnation). Both, at least in my own microcosm, are anything but).