00pd

These are the things I have been working on recently:

This project is meant to be a programmaitcally supported, and live-updating research paper. The concept is to create a metric for assessing the relative "occupied-ness" of the web. This project takes its main inspiration from Borges. In his story, The Library of Babel, Borges imagines a library that contains a huge set of identically long books. The books iterate through all possible arrangements of letters and spaces. So there’s theoretically a book that is all "a"...a book with all "a" except one "b" somewhere inside, a book that is the exact text of Macbeth, and book that is Macbeth with one word changed, one that switches to gibberish half way through...

The library is a huge labyrinthine construct and represents the whole of human understanding, but embedded within a signal to noise ratio that approximates the internet. You can apply the concept of permutation to calculate the finite yet unfathomably large totality to the URLs that make up the web. For instance, there are around 1300 legal two-letter URLs. There are around 50,000 three-letter ones. And over 1.8 million four-letter URLs. Considering that the longest possible .com is sixty-three letters long. About 37^63 possibles there...

The second inspiration comes from Hilary Mason. She was quick to point out that a computer program that tried to assess the registered state of every possible URL would inevitably fail; there are just too many possible values. But, being a statistician at heart, she said that failure was okay as long as it was a predictable failure. The process that Hilary helped theorize was tp randomly query X URLs at each namespace-N, and whenever the probability of hitting 0 registered domains <= Y then, that is the Z index. Calculating the Z-index of the web at large is kind of impossible. Really, this whole time I had been assuming that I would only perform this search on .com URLs. But I realized the potential of performing a Z-index test for MULTIPLE top-level domains. The comparison of which spaces “fill-up” the fastest provides more fuel for interesting comparisons.

Made with Google Charts

For a while now I have thought that certain mythical creatures possess similarities to actual people. To the end, then, of better understanding ourselves and the people around us, I think it wise to compile a list of creatures, and the kind of people they actually are. For great justice.

Illustration by the illustrious Dylan Thuras

I am most excited about writing the entry for Leprechaun, which is what I believe myself to be. Kind of.

I would like to interview ladies about the Male Gaze.

The tumblr feed of: Ne Te Promené Donc Pas Toute Nue - one of the biggest reasons I have been thinking about this.

It seems every year that I fixate on a new reason to re-design my web-presence, whether it be technological, existential, or...lady-al.

The break-through I had at the end of 2009 was thinking about the way in which I work on projects, and this methods appropriateness for a blog. I find that I am often in progress on numerous projects, randomly updating one, or putting another on hold. What I thought would be best would be to have a blog like structure, that, instead of always posting the most recent posts, instead prioritized the most recently altered posts. So that I could start something quickly, without worrying about it being done, and then update it later to have it pop to the top. This idea of a persistent, update-rather-than-post based model was what drove me to abandon WordPress and instead brew my own PHP and mysql CMS.

All of the above combined with my desire to move my site over to the shorter 00pd. I have come to realize how valuable the short address is, and have had enough of the joke that has been whereikeepmythingsontheinternet.com. As charming as that might be...

If, for whatever reason you are reading this, and would like to use something custom made to run your website in a way similar to but different from WordPress or other blog software, let me know.

mysql references I make frequent use of:

the actual mysql site

the other site I use all the time