Activity!

[Leonard ("Lee") Pilzer]

Hark! I see activity!

Well, okay, not here -- on the OzWin Web site (http://www.ozwin.org/).

The former Home page (which, of course, is all that was there) exists no more. Instead, site visitors receive notice that "This page is hosted free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com®," together with a message that "This Web site is coming soon." I surmise that Sidney has decided (prudently, in my opinion) to move the domain to a no-cost location.

Whatever the facts, the change prompted me to post this message. I've been dropping in here every two or three months, but haven't seen any activity. Is anyone else still visiting?

-- Leonard ("Lee") Pilzer

[sidney]

I surmise that Sidney has decided (prudently, in my opinion) to move the domain to no-cost location.

Hi! Well, I'm still here :)

You are correct about what happened to the web site. I got my renewal bill from GoDaddy and couldn't justify to myself paying to have a page up that says in effect "nothing here yet". The annual fee for the domain is small enough that I'm holding on to the ozwin.org name out of nostalgia.

Thanks for reminding me about the site. I ought to put something there instead of the default home page. I had forgotten to turn off AdBlock Plus before looking at what GoDaddy puts there on free hosting sites. I'm glad it's just a few non-offensive mostly text ads from Google.

At this point there isn't anything I can do with OzWin. I had hoped to just open source it so it would live in in some form. When I started on that track I realized just how much of it depended on proprietary libraries that were sold in source code form, a strange hybrid of "open source" and proprietary that existed at the time. Steve Sneed used some packages from places like TurboPower that provided source code so he could make changes, adapt them to his needs, and integrate them closely with OzWin, but did not give what today would be called open source licenses to distribute the modified source code. I would have to rewrite OzWin from scratch using a different language and libraries. That would be fun, but not at the expense of the many other things that take more than all of my time now. Getting my PhD (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~sidney/sidneyphd.html) completed in the next two or three years, helping get an RNA virus database web site (http://bioinf.cs.auckland.ac.nz/virus/) off the ground, working (http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/spamassassin/trunk/CREDITS?root=Apache-SVN&view=markup) on the SpamAssassin (http://spamassassin.apache.org/) project, raising two young children, and building the second half of our house (http://www.sidney.com/slides/new_home/images/img_3219.jpg) in the bush (http://www.sidney.com/slides/new_home/images/img_3231.jpg) all have a higher priority to me :)

-- sidney

[Judy G. Russell]

raising two young children, and building the second half of our house (http://www.sidney.com/slides/new_home/images/img_3219.jpg) in the bush (http://www.sidney.com/slides/new_home/images/img_3231.jpg) all have a higher priority to me :)Gee, and you have such modest goals... (I still sigh with jealousy every time I see those photos...)

[jdh]

I did have a small web site hosted on netfirms at $5/mo but the size and traffic was not enough to justify even that. So I just kept the domain registration and switched the actual file hosting to google for free. So far, Google has not put any ads on the site.

I have not bothered to figure out how to switch pop mail hosting over to google yet, but IIRC they allow 25 accounts free on mydomain.com or whatever with your free small business web site.

It's been a while since I updated my site. The main thing I did not like was that at that time they did not have file folders and FTP support. File maint was by web interface.

BTW, is there much danger in the bush there from fire and poison critters ?

[jdh]

Sidney, reading the abstract of your thesis brought up a couple vague memories of mine.

Years and years ago I bought a shareware grammar checker thru an author who marketed his program thru Compuserve. The theory of his grammar checking was to make the grammtical relations analogous to chemical bonding and then specifiy the made up rules of chemical bonding for words and phrases in the form of computer software.

It also reminded me of an article I'd read many years ago about Loglan. I checked wikipedia and found out that it was originally invented to test the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. It seems to me that the types of reactions and relationships that occur in chemistry (and esp. biochemistry) and math are essentially infinite when compared to the types of linguistic entities and grammatical relationships that exist in natural languages. Which raises the question of whether it would be worthwhile to take such invented or discovered mechanisms or relationships from chemistry or math and import them into natural languages to make more baby einsteins or whatever LOL.

Perhaps the problem of the evolution of the biochemical mechanisms for coding proteins might even be somewhat analogous to the evolution of parts of speech and grammatical relationships in natural languages. How did it bootstrap itself and what was the critical point (in terms of language formulated in a rather abstract mathematical way) where all the logical building blocks were in place that would enable story telling and fiction (lying?) narration to become an art? I say "in a rather abstract mathematical way" to try to sidestep the issue of the biological evolution of the brain, etc. Perhaps there would have also been another separate critical threshold at which language arrived at which point language development began to exert a much stronger selective pressure because of the cultural successes it enabled?

[jdh]

Oh, another BTW,

I think you mentioned something about simulations in your research.

Does your simulation use pseudorandom number generators and how good are they getting? And how good are actual quantum event based real random number generators getting these day? Can they produce pretty reliable flat/uniform distributions, etc?

DH

[sidney]

I just kept the domain registration and switched the actual file hosting to google for free

I didn't know that Google has web site hosting! Ok, I just Googled for information. Are you talking about Google Page Creator? That appears to be limited to what you create using their simple page creator interface, and not for general hosting of a web site, nor for hosting a website with your own domain. Am I missing something else that they offer?

I have not bothered to figure out how to switch pop mail hosting over to google yet

That's very simple, using the free (Standard) version of Google Apps (https://www.google.com/a/).


BTW, is there much danger in the bush there from fire and poison critters?

New Zealand has remarkable lack of poisonous critters. There are no snakes of any kind. There are two spiders that are poisonous, one of which sneaked in from Australia. One is rare. The other, the Australian import, has a much worse reputation than is justified by the actual effect of its bite, and seems not to like the area we live in.

We have much more danger from flooding and mudslides than from fire here. Our house is on a stable hill. This winter's rains were unusual, but our only problems were from the effect on the road we live on with no flooding, fallen trees or mudslips less than a kilometer from our house.

[sidney]

Perhaps the problem of the evolution of the biochemical mechanisms for coding proteins might even be somewhat analogous to the evolution of parts of speech and grammatical relationships in natural languages

It's not directly related to my research, but my thesis supervisor works with Bayesian methods for deriving evolutionary trees, which is usually used to determine evolutionary relationships between species by looking at the matchups and differences in DNA sequences. He has worked with some people who are using the same software to analyze the evolution of language. They categorize similarities and differences between languages and then develop a model of the most likely possible orderings of one language evolving from another.

[sidney]

Does your simulation use pseudorandom number generators and how good are they getting? And how good are actual quantum event based real random number generators getting these day? Can they produce pretty reliable flat/uniform distributions, etc?

It is quite easy to get a statistically good prng. I use the one in the Gnu Scientific Library (gsl), which is more than enough for my purposes. I do have a background in cryptography, which has much more stringent requirements for prngs. Not only does it have to be statistically indistinguishable from random, but it has to be infeasible to predict or approximately predict its output even if you know that it is a prng and exactly how it works, and ideally even if you have some influence over its entropy input.

Some people make too big a deal over quantum event random number generators. Yes, they are really random, but if you rely only on that, then your generator is only as good as you have built the hardware. Take any source of unpredictable data and mix that into a good cryptographic pseudorandom number generator, and you will have a good source of random numbers. That data can come from radioactive decay, or thermal noise, or activity on a busy network, and the result will be just as random for any practical purpose.

[jdh]

I didn't know that Google has web site hosting! Ok, I just Googled for information. Are you talking about Google Page Creator? That appears to be limited to what you create using their simple page creator interface, and not for general hosting of a web site, nor for hosting a website with your own domain. Am I missing something else that they offer?


I go to http://www.google.com/a to give my own domain name. Then I can sign in with my user ID and pw in my own domain to check email or maintain the web site. The web creation and maint tools are very simple, BUT it is my own domain. I'm not currently interested in writing scripts or setting up database queries, etc. so it's ok for me. Plain old HTML is enuf for me. I use old 4.8 Netscape Composer for editing. Google does not serve ads on my web site, so it's better than free hosting on AOL, for example. But AOL free hosting does support SFTP, but for now I don't mind the simple web interface of Google page creation.

The first time I tried to set up the MX records or whatever, it didn't get it right and since I didn't care about the POP3 anyway, I dropped it.

But I have been using gmail for SSL POP3 for a couple years now (not the SSL POP3 that would be available in my own domain if I bothered to set it up) since when gmail was in beta (was in beta a LONG time). I only use the web view of gmail to check spam folder or when I'm not at home.

[jdh]

It is quite easy to get a statistically good prng. I use the one in the Gnu Scientific Library (gsl), which is more than enough for my purposes. I do have a background in cryptography, which has much more stringent requirements for prngs. Not only does it have to be statistically indistinguishable from random, but it has to be infeasible to predict or approximately predict its output even if you know that it is a prng and exactly how it works, and ideally even if you have some influence over its entropy input.

Some people make too big a deal over quantum event random number generators. Yes, they are really random, but if you rely only on that, then your generator is only as good as you have built the hardware. Take any source of unpredictable data and mix that into a good cryptographic pseudorandom number generator, and you will have a good source of random numbers. That data can come from radioactive decay, or thermal noise, or activity on a busy network, and the result will be just as random for any practical purpose.
The last time I had done any reading of actual papers in this area was about 35 years ago, so it looks like they've make a lot of good progress in the prng field, from what you said :)

DH

[jdh]

I forgot that you were in NZ. The word bush triggered the image of some vast emptiness in Australia or Africa in my mind. I suppose the word bush is sort of the equivalent of our American word "sticks". But I'm not sure if "sticks" is regional or nationwide in USA.

DH

[jdh]

Limitations on Google hosted web sites (with your own private domain name):

1. 100 pages (I assume that means basically 100 HTML files plus graphics.)

2. unspecified bandwidth limitation

3. no FTP (web interface only for upload)

4. no folders, I think

5. limited or no javascript

DH

[sidney]

suppose the word bush is sort of the equivalent of our American word "sticks"

No, it's more equivalent to US usage of "woods" as in "My house in the woods", a bit more remote and forested than living in the sticks.