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Some loyal readers might be wondering about the other child. Well, he turns out to be a privacy-loving child in some ways, so I'm not sure how much I should write about him on this public page. He is a phenomenal reader. So good, fact, that if you send e-mail to him care of me he can probably read it with little or no help.
Elliot has suddenly started picking up sign language. He produces lots of signs. He doesn't produce much vocal language (although he still sings beautifully -- preternaturally beautifully, in fact). Pam asked, with perhaps a touch of concern, whether his signing would interfere with him gaining the power of speech. The answer is that hearing children who learn sign in addition to a spoken language are exactly like children who are bilingual in two spoken languages -- their acquisition is sometimes delayed by a few months, but they quickly catch up. It's probably good for them, too.
Elliot loves books. He even loves American Sign Language The Easy Way, which is surprising since it doesn't contain any story and only a few black and white sketch pictures (of people making signs). Nevertheless, he has several times picked it up (with effort) and carried it to a parent and given it to them, then climbed up on their lap and settled in to learn some signs.
(This blog entry brought to you thanks to Olene Harris, who sent e-mail asking for a new blog entry, and who suggested the topic of "Irby and Elliot".)
Occasionally I mention to people that every scientific study that I have heard of which examines the low-carb diet (also known as the ketogenic diet) shows that the low-carb diet is healthy and good for you in various specific ways. These people to whom I mention this are usually skeptical. utoca... maybe someday I'll add refs here...
Paul Crowley wrote to me and commented about something I had said on this blog, so I am motivated to update it.
We're going to the San Francisco Bay Area, November 8 through November 18. Amber and the boys will need things to do and people to visit while I'm at work during the day.
For Irby School this morning we read from wikipedia on Sinterklaas.
As usual I have a half-a-dozen exciting hacks in mind which I'm not actually making progress on. On the other hand, I seem to be doing acceptably well at spending time with my family and improving the commercial product of the company that I work for: http://allmydata.com. There is one particular hack that I feel is somewhat urgent -- the Time Limited Transitive Public Licence. I have set myself a goal to write a reasonable web page for it by November 8 so that I can reference that web page in conversation in SFBA.
I've been wanting to spend an hour a day on Irby School, but haven't figured out how to make the time. I've finally decided to start doing Irby School from 9 to 10 AM, even though that is cutting into my 9 to 5 work day, and see how that worked, while trying to figure out how to make up the five hours a week for work. So today Irby and I did one sheet from three different workbooks (tracing lowercase letters, mazes, and rhyming words), then went on a nature walk where we collected rocks, bugs, and garbage. I've realized that one hour is hardly enough time to do Irby School. We didn't, for example, have any time to examine the samples we collected from nature. Maybe at the next Irby School session we can do that. I guess I need to spend some extra time "outside of class" to do things like clean up and organize the Irby School Shelf, and find some printed or Internet resources to help us identify this bug.
Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies
Of course, the popular alternative of simply dismissing commercially funded medical research a priori isn't better.
Most Published Research Findings May Be False
This kind of thing is important. Our culture currently places faith in the consensus opinions from scientific communities, but the scientific consensus is often wrong.
George Danezis, Chris Lesniewski-Lass, M. Frans Kaashoek, Ross Anderson: Sybil-resistant DHT routing .
My mom is visiting. She has a digital camera so maybe this blog will get a picture.
I bought a Sleeptracker watch. When trying to set it, I accidentally poked it into testing mode. It was fun to see the readout change in response to acceleration, although I couldn't quite decode what the readout meant. However, I couldn't get it back into normal mode, so rather than showing me the time, it continued to show me the current acceleration in a format that I didn't understand. I sent e-mail to info@sleeptracker.com and was promptly contacted by the inventor and CEO, Lee Loree, who asked for my number, called me, and explained how to get it back into normal mode.
I've been maintaining a couple of libraries which I have often re-used: pyutil, libzutil, and libzstr.
I updated my licence_quick_ref.html document to cut down the number of licenses and the number of features. The resulting table is extremely simple. This makes it less interesting as a diversion but hopefully more useful as a decision tool.
After a half-a-year hiatus, I've finally updated my reading.html page.
Also, I've been updating my revision_control_quick_ref.html page.
darcs is more than a revision control tool. It is a Unix tool, like grep, tar or rsync. If I start doing some work in Unix (such as editing web sites, writing source code, managing system configuration files, editing text documents, ...), and I don't have darcs at hand, I get this feeling of discomfort as though I've started driving without a seatbelt. I find myself strongly wanting to use darcs even when nobody is going to share the results of my work, or when they are going to share it through some other revision control system and they are never going to learn that I used darcs. I also use it even when I don't particularly care to keep history beyond a couple of weeks worth or a few revisions worth.
This is something that you are unlikely to understand unless you've used darcs enough to become familiar with it. (Which only takes a couple of hours.)
I've been talking to the authors of various cool new revision control systems, especially Ross Cohen, author of Codeville, and I want Ross to understand that I use darcs for things that I wouldn't use Codeville for, even if Codeville worked completely and perfectly as Ross currently envisions it. Even if I would use Codeville in place of darcs for all of the standard "revision control system" tasks, such as sharing source code with other developers.
The reason darcs is so good for this is a combination of its innovative, lightweight user interface, and its support for "cherry-picking". Indeed, in darcs all replication, branching, merging, and reverting to earlier states is implemented in terms of cherry-picking. Cherry-picking is primary. (This may or may not be due to darcs's "Theory of Patches". I don't understand that theory in its fullness.) Ross pointed out to me that it could be simply the metaphor that makes me feel so at ease: the metaphor that there are persistent objects called "patches", and when I create a new patch, I don't lose it by updating the data and forgetting the patch, but instead I keep the patch itself.
I'm up to exercises 1.2 in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I keep my study notes in darcs.
Okay, now I'll push this blog entry onto my web site (using darcs).
Update: no word yet on what Ross Cohen thinks of this blog entry, but my mom says my blog was 'a bit disappointing today'.
Newsflash: Elliot can stand up for many seconds -- possibly for as long as he likes. He can also move himself a few feet across the floor. I'm not sure how he did it because I wasn't looking. Irby likes to read words that he sees and to play with numbers. He also likes to break things in the backyard, such as shards of pottery or concrete. Oh, and Elliot's first word is definitely "cat". He said it many times, very decisively, when looking at one of the cats. He also attempted to make the sign for it at least once. Amber is working on her research again, and this makes her happy. I'm getting started on my new job. Oh, and I've decided to read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs again. This time I'm reading it in concert with someone else, which I anticipate will help me tremendously in my quest to fully understand it.
Amber: "A triangle that's the same on both sides, like this one, is called an isoceles triangle. And one like this is called a scalene triangle."
Irby: "Now show me all kinds of every shape."
Amber: laugh
Irby: "Well, just the ones you know about."
I've given notice to my boss, P.Z. that the end of this month will be my last day on the job. I have a new job lined up that is a very good one. I'll still be working in my workshop in my backyard. I hope P.Z. will go ahead and make the product that we've built into a success without me -- it is a worthy cause.
I'm looking forward to working on the product in the next company. It is intimately related to something I've done in the past, and that I really enjoyed. I'm not sure what I'm allowed to say about it yet.
Elliot has three teeth (approximate).
Irby attends a gymnastics class every Thursday morning.
Amber works all day on homemaking. She's exhausted! Maybe this new job, with its higher salary and more regular hours, will help us manage the family more easily.
Time for the monthly blog update. Mom: I'm really sorry I haven't been keeping you informed about grandchildren details. Elliot has two teeth. He still screams and cries half the time. Irby is growing into an amazing young person. He helps with Elliot, and his help is actually helpful. (Mostly because Elliot is so in love with Irby that whenever Irby comes around Elliot stops crying and gazes at Irby instead.) Amber loves math and language, and under her tutelage Irby has developed an excellent facility with numbers, addition and subtraction, letters, spelling and a little bit of reading. Amber doesn't have a lot of time to spend on structured, directed teaching of Irby, but fortunately he really likes games with numbers and with letters, and has caught on quickly. Last night was the first solid night's sleep that I've had since one week ago. (First I was working to prepare a demo, then I was demoing and partying, then I was flying home, then I was dealing with screaming Elliot at night.) Amber is having a hard time dealing with all of the demands placed on her. I'm hoping that things will get more organized and easier because (a) I'm not making any more 11-day long business trips in the near future, (b) I'm going to cut back from 65 hours of work per week to maybe only 50 or so, (c) we've organized some regularly scheduled events, such as Doug and Matthew coming over to play every Wednesday morning, and Irby attending gymnastics class every Thursday. Last Thursday was Irby's first gymnastics lesson, and it was hilarious to see the extreme high-energy excitement. I was almost afraid he was going to hurt himself with the effort he put into hopping in a circle behind the teacher. I don't have time to insert paragraph breaks in this blog entry.
Oh, one more thing: Irby dictates a journal entry every evening which we inscribe in a dead-tree notebook that is kept in his room. Want to know what he says? Then e-mail me and ask. :-)
I fixed the thumbnails in the recent pictures. Compare to the house pictures from November, when we moved in. (Click pic to get page of pictures.)
I'll fix the thumbnails next time I get a chance to tie my shoes. Meanwhile, here's the weather report , which predicts that you can look forward to even more impressive pictures this week.
The temperature has shot up above freezing and the snow is melting, so I'd better get a picture of it while it lasts.
"House In Winter" page of pictures
Hey Sunah! Look what you're missing!
In other news, I'm going to CodeCon 2005! :-)