Long weekends and bike repair

Not many updates in a while, I know; it's been a busy couple of weeks, where "busy" == "Meredith writes a lot of code and solves sudoku in her spare time and thus has nothing interesting to write about."

Goddamn sudoku. I blame halax; I had successfully managed to avoid the damn things, despite watching other people get totally absorbed in them, until he gave John a collection of them for Christmas and I got the hang of them. These things are like the pure, distilled, nonverbal version of the logic puzzles that I loved when I was a kid -- the "Alice lives in the green house, Bob works for Exxon, Carol spent her summer in Amsterdam ... (&c, &c) Who lives in the purple house, works for Shell and vacationed in Jamaica?" types of puzzles. And like an idiot, I went and found websudoku.com, so now they can follow me everywhere. Kill me now and get it over with.

But productive things continue nonetheless, and so does fun. We had hukuma over for dinner one night, and went to a party where there was much hot-tubbing, plus fire-spinning and fire-juggling. (I really wanted to see enochsmiles juggle fire naked, but no such luck.) yoctohedron's sometimes-Bad Movie Nights have been great social time of late, as has hanging out with the South Bay geekchicks centred around Val (WINOLJ), and enochsmiles and I continue to make little improvements to the house. We haven't been allowed to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond unaccompanied since sometime back in March, and after a hardware store run which culminated in the acquisition of three more orchids and a small forest of herbs, I don't think we're allowed to go to the hardware store unaccompanied either. Anyone want to play chaperone? (Not you, semanticdm05 -- you're an enabler. And so are you, chocolatecoffee.)

I also filed a patent. (Okay, my lawyer filed a patent.) I know, I know, bad open-source hacker. I would like it very much if the EFF or the FSF or somebody would write a license to be used as a patent rider, which says the legalese equivalent of "Any <insert subset of OSI-compliant licenses here>-licensed implementation of the above is hereby granted a royalty-free license in perpetuity; proprietary implementors, pony up." Would one of you get on that, please? Kthxbye. Seriously, though, I'm convinced such a license would only serve to help the open-source movement; people who have written something cool and potentially profitable, but who want to see F/OSS versions available and used, could still get revenue from closed-source licensees without fucking over open-source folks. Also, unless I'm grossly misunderstanding something, patents are far more enforceable than the GPL; a closed-source project can rewrite code originally found in GPLed source, and then you get into these fuzzy questions of what constitutes "materially similar" where lines of code are concerned, whereas a method or system is rather easier to identify (modulo code obfuscation, I suppose). I mean, it's all complicated. But I still think it'd be a useful license to have.

Also also, I've been making small repairs to the bike I bought off ioerror a while back. I've ridden it around a bit, but with a leaky tire, dodgy brakes and no usable lock, its utility has been limited. I now have a lock I can actually remove from the bike -- the old one was permanently stuck in its holder thanks to a missing key. (Apparently there is a funny story behind this, but ioerror has only gotten around to saying that there is a funny story and not what that story actually is.) I've also replaced one of the tubes (for the first time ever!), and as soon as I pick up the right kind of brake pads and swap those out, I will have a much more roadworthy vehicle. Yay for learning new things.

Finally, I have awesome friends. I love the fact that I can call up mycroftxxx and grepmaster on a Sunday with a seemingly absurd request ("I need a few thousand images all taken by the same kind of camera, at least fifty per individual camera") and be rewarded with exactly what I'm looking for, no questions asked. You guys rock.

Now to read lots more articles about image denoising, and to play around in Python. Cheers, all.