AltSci Blog

I'm headed back to São Paulo, Brasil for a month starting on January 16, 2013. See you there! If you're reading this, please visit my new website AI3 Javantea out.

Dec 24, 2012

AI3 is officially in beta. Hooray! Start testing when you get a free minute. Send any bug reports to me. I am so excited to work on them and respond to you.

What is AI3? The way that I usually describe it is like an inverse thesaurus. Instead of finding a synonym or antonym for a word, you find the most likely word to put afterward and the context of that word. You can also find sentences that use two words. If you're stuck on a word, check out a few hundred uses of that word. Unlike Google, most of the results are not sorted by popularity. They're sorted by position in the database.

Dec 13, 2012

Some of you may be excited to hear that I am finally on the brink of releasing a very interesting website. How interesting? It has kept my interest for weeks even though some of it is hard and some of it is annoying.

gzip -l ~/ai3_db_backup_20121211_ram2.gz
         compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
         1137167097           403791553 -181.6% /home/jvoss/ai3_db_backup_20121211_ram2

zcat ~/ai3_db_backup_20121211_ram2.gz | grep -e ^INSERT -e ^LOCK -e ^UNLOCK |wc
   4716  642299 4698740275

It's alright if you don't understand what the above means. The first one shows a bug I found in gzip where when you try to find out how large something is when it's bigger than 4GB uncompressed, it wraps and gives you a small number and a negative compression ratio. It's not a vulnerability so don't worry about it. The second one shows that there is about 4.7 GB of interesting data in that file.

Nov 18, 2012

Sometimes you get more done by doing nothing at all. It's pretty rare, so you always want to do something rather than nothing. But some nights just don't go the way you wanted. Tonight I woke up at 1am wanting to do a little bit of hacking on my website. Everything was going alright. I only made 5 updates to the website.

update comments set moderation=5 where id = 1507606;

update comments set moderation = 0 where moderation <= -1 and (content not like '%http:%' and posted_by not like '%http:%' and subject not like '%http:%' and content not like '%https:%' and posted_by not like '%https:%' and subject not like '%https:%');

update comments set moderation=5 where subject = 'qdoiyQEAaWd';

update comments set moderation=5 where subject = 'ZNzbBCfWReAQVApO';

update comments set moderation=5 where subject = 'CxBCrAoBcAnBXxzvJ';

It was then that I discovered that I had lost useful data before a certain date. That's alright, it was intentional but I want the data back if I have it. It turns out that I have several backups of the data I lost. So I decided to create a database and import the data and do some easy database import if the data is just there.