Concurrently Chaotic

I was checking the reports submitted to me a few days ago. One of the reports looked pretty much professional and eloquent. So I decided to pick a sentence and put the sentence as is to Google. Then I discovered most of the contents were copied, or plagiarized, from the same Web page of a professional article. No wonder it looked professional.

I'm always telling other people that you need to describe the source of the quotations when you put them into your contents. I am pro-share, pro-remix, and pro-reuse person, and I support Creative Commons. I've never been against quotations, provided that proper and legal indication of the sources are given.

But I didn't see the source in the report. So I had to give very low evaluation to it.

Lessons:

• Your reviewer will put your documents in Google and other search engines. Plagiarism is that common, unfortunately.
• Show the sources when you quote something. Unauthorized quotations are liabilities.
• Know your legal rights and duties on quotations, and do not abuse them.

posted at: 30 Jul 2009 | path: /writing | permanent link

recent posts, categories, and monthly archives are statically generated by installing plugins of pyarchives.py, pycategories.py, and pyrecentposts.py.

Also titles are given to indivudual articles by another plugin called pytitle.py.

(So many things to do for doing a fancy stuff...)

posted at: 28 Jul 2009 | path: /admin | permanent link

ASAHI-NET, our Web service provider, now allows me to use ATOM feed, so the syndication is now ATOM-based.

Blog articles are now categorized by the subdirectory URL as "path" at the end of each article.

posted at: 28 Jul 2009 | path: /admin | permanent link

I've tried making a lot of blog sites in Hatena, Blogger, and Tumblr. Those blog service providers shared the same problem, though; they were slow over the network. Well, they exist far beyond on the other ends of networks, so I know I have to be patient, but that's not something tolerable if you really want to control the details of the HTML pages generated.

Another persistent problem: backup. Backing up blogs is not a trivial job, especially if the blog system has its own directives to quote something outside of their systems. For example, Hatena users can quote Amazon.co.jp pictures of the goods, which is obviously not trivial if the text data are extracted alone. I know those are good features, but they also impact on the consistency of the blog article integrity and consistency.

So I decided to do it again, this time with PyBlosxom. Quite a few years ago I managed to make a small blog system by Blosxom and it was easy to manage. Now PyBlosxom has many modern features including syndication, and capability to enhance by Python.

The title Concurrently Chaotic is derived from the topics I'm interested in now, namely:

• concurrent programming by Erlang
• chaotic computing environment by pervasive availability of networks and concentration of computing resources into the clouds; and
• my life, which is always in chaos, and is running many things in parallel and concurrently as well.

So I hope this blog, rants, raves, opinions, or whatever will last a little bit longer than the old ones.

posted at: 20 Jul 2009 | path: /admin | permanent link