Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Wanderers 2010.4.27

Completely packed house tonight, with some of the rare birds. I'm ensconced in my blogging area, ready to poke my head in, take notes. Something about psychokenisis (am I spelling that correctly?). We have an out of town expert. Already the coat hanger is buckling under the weight, given our double the usual number.

Earlier today: a good meeting with Dr. B. Fuller, University of Nebraska emeritus, busy with his grandchildren, studying Alexander Calder with one of them. We met at Lyrik, formerly Fine Grind. I took these cool pictures of Bob signing the book he edited, writings by one of his mentors, Robert Karplus.

Allen Taylor and I read each other's blogs.

I spent the last few hours dumping FoxPro data through a converter program I found on the Internet, but needed to patch. It uses AFIELDS to get data about table columns, and does a fairly good job of creating a MySQL table, then populating it with data.

I'm doing the dumping on the Win7 host, then gmailing to myself on a Sun Virtualbox guesting Ubuntu (I should use a shared folder but haven't figured that out yet). There I populate the ktraks database in the MySQL installation, point to it from settings.py in Django project /home/projects/ktraks/. I'm using virtualenv...

These were all just demo fragments, as I'm hoping to gel a proposal. The actual project would need more than one solo coder/developer. In fact, I'm already one of a dynamic duo, or trio if you count the author of the framework (based in Tampa).

Actually, there's a vast army behind every project in IT world, it's just that we don't always know in advance for what purposes our tools will be used. Consider TCP/IP. Some use it to provide medical care while others use it to spread damaging misinformation calculated to inspire fear.

Tele-kenesis, not psycho-kinesis. Applause. I should get a picture.

033

She speaks in Russian and this young guy follows in English, line by line. She's talking about levels of consciousness. This gets me thinking of those Jungian talks again.

Jon Bunce bailed early. Apparently our guest requested no wine drinking in her presence. Probably a good idea to keep us sobered up. We weren't allowed to eat our cake either, nor interrupt much. Seemed pretty telekinetic to me, in that respect -- knocked 'em off balance.

Given I'm sequestered in the blogging area, I'm able to sip on the sly. Is that why the disk didn't turn? Later some said that it did, so I'm confused about whether this was an experiment. We got together and hit off each other, an exercise in re-vectoring with the "tele" part not that easy to see, though we have our models (great circle railroad tracks through points of inter-tangency etc.).

I'm missing most of the content I must confess, staying occupied talking to my on-line critic and posting to Math Forum some more.

Good seeing Rhett Savage again.

I'll put some more polish on this tomorrow.