Computation, Caffeination, and Conflagration

"The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology" is Ray Kurzweil's new tome on exponential rate of human technological progress and speculation on the nature of biological and non-biological intelligence "post-singularity." As a technophile, avowed futurist, and longtime fan of post-singularity science fiction, I gotta say this book is brilliant.

Only problem is, its sitting on the shelf in my bathroom, and I'm reading it at a constant rate of two pages per sitting. The book weighs in at 650 dense pages. My predicament is summed up in the following diagram:

Posted by eric at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The 2006 International Whistlers Convention has been cancelled! Competition will resume in 2007.

That sucks! No, really. Stop laughing. Yes, I was seriously planning to go to the 2006 International Whistling Convention. I learned about it from a friend who had seen the film Pucker Up, a documentary about the event and its participants. I was struck with a sick fascination at the prospect of attending this event. Like crucifying stuffed animals, or stepping frame by frame through "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" looking for nudity. Its just one of those things that sounds lame initially, but has elements of the strange to be spun into a really funny story.

Then in October, the event received some press on NPR and a number of friends exhorted me to sign up. And then I found I was actually looking forward to it.

But hey, here's some news... while I was clicking around the Internet getting links for this post, I came upon the website for The Whistling Festival held in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, May 25-28.

If you too would like to gaze in slack-jawed amazement:

• Whistling Tom
• The Happy Whistler
• The Whistler

In order to compile that short list, I ran a web search, and followed someone's links page. One of the tabs I loaded played music. I frantically tried to shut down the volume on my Mac, but it was too late; my wife sleeping next to me had already been awoken by the sound whistling (accompanied by a full MIDI orchestra). I closed the lid of my laptop in embarrassment, but Firefox insisted on playing the whole clip before letting the computer go to sleep.

Finally, from the website of the IWC:

To the International Whistlers Convention (IWC), held annually the third or fourth week of April in the historic town of Louisburg, North Carolina, USA, the world's whistling capital. The Convention, Music Festival, International School for Whistlers, and International Whistlers Museum are all sponsored by the Franklin County Arts Council, an honored member of the State of North Carolina Arts Council System, and officially supported by the County of Franklin, the town of Louisburg, and Louisburg College (founded in 1779). Governor Mike Easley has declared a "Happy Whistlers Week" for citizens and visitors to honor the art of whistling by participating in the scheduled events.

Posted by eric at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I find myself posting XML documents to REST service endpoints often. I wrote the following little shell script to make things easy.

S=`basename $0`
curl -D - -X POST -H 'Content-type: text/xml' -d @$2 http://$1/$S

I call this script curl-post.sh. Now, all I have to do is symlink curl-post.sh to a more descriptive name (generally the name of the REST service endpoint I'm using). Then I type serviceName hostname/path filename to post data to that endpoint and see the results (incl. headers) on the commandline.

Posted by eric at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)