Now that NaBloPoMo is over, what does someone who's successfully completed the thirty posts in thirty days challenge do next? No, not Disneyland, although that's not out of the question. One might turn around and sign up for another post-every-day challenge, the Holidailies. The rules of this challenge are slightly different. One must "try really hard" to post once per day from December 1st through January 1st, although with "holiday obligations, this realistically means you might post a minimum of 20 entries for the month." Each post must be at least fifty words in length, and there may be no one-liners and no memes.

Why do this? Well, a number of reasons. I think if I were to take a break from daily posting now, I'd almost instantly end up back at the lazy once-a-week schedule. If I were to restrict myself to writing quality posts, then I'd probably write more about robots and science projects, and less about favorite colors and what sorts of beverages I may have had that day. If I were to write more about robots and science projects, then I'd have to work more on these projects so that I'd have more to post about. And that would be a very good thing.

So without further ado, I'd like to list some of the projects I'm currently working on, or planning to work on.

• Three-axis fabricator.
• Converting Mobile Armatron into an autonomous (or at least wireless) mobile robot.
• Cataloging all scavengeable parts in all devices flagged for cannibalization.
• Reverse engineering the Markov chain generator used in the Megahal chat program and reimplementing it in PHP and MySQL.
• An automatic pantoum generator.
• A new template for The Electronic Replicant.

So, to my utter lack of surprise, building the fabricator is turning out to be just a wee tiny bit more troublesome than I'd hoped. The easy part's done: I managed to screw together a few pipe fittings before being confounded yet again by details and more details. The wheels are too small, the motor shafts and threaded rods are different sizes, there were no nuts to match the rods, my hacksaw broke, and one of the pipe segments is too short. Can you guess which one?

  

In my opinion, it's the segment leading from the uppermost elbow to the floor flange (the disc with four small holes.) Since the tool of the day will be attached to the floor flange and the work surface will move around beneath it, then unless I'm mistaken, the machine will be unable to fabricate anything longer than this segment.

Well, you know what they say: Never use a "point zero" release of anything.

Q. There is this one query that I need to stop from going to the default page on my website (index.php). It doesn't do anything but I have my reasons! I have looked everywhere and no example I found has worked for me. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi!

A. Obi-Wan? That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. As it turns out, one way that you can accomplish this is with Apache's mod_rewrite. If one wishes to entirely remove the query string "plugh=xyzzy" from queries to "http://www.example.com/index.php" this technique seems to work:

# match the forbidden query
rewriteCond %{query_string} plugh=xyzzy
# redirect without the query string
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.com/? [R,L]


Nothing exciting to report today.

On the fabricator, I briefly considered trashing the idea of wheels and channels in favor of rods and bearings to be salvaged from a few old inkjet printers. Two problems, though. One, I don't have enough printers to get parts for both the X-axis and the Y-axis, and two, even if I had one more printer, the rods wouldn't match in diameter or length. Thus the work platform would probably never be level, assuming I could even fasten the things securely to the base. I have another idea, a slight variation of the wheels-and-channels idea. Let's hope that works.

The Kite Runner

RaJ brought up a good point with his recent comment. Most people probably don't know what a pantoum is, nor why it might be interesting to write an automatic pantoum generator. So, today, I'll try and explain what a pantoum is (with my Wikipedia tied behind my back!).

A pantoum is one of many forms that a poem can take. Some other forms that you probably have heard of are the limerick, the haiku, and the sestina. Like the haiku, the pantoum needn't rhyme, although it certainly can. Each verse of a pantoum consists of four lines of more or less equal length. The second and fourth lines of each verse then appear as the first and third lines of the next verse. Optionally, the first and third lines from the first verse can reappear as the second and fourth lines of the last verse.

Perhaps an example will more fully illustrate this form. Here's a pantoum I wrote a long time ago (during a tragic and meaningful phase) as an assignment for a creative writing class:

I play the piano of good and evil
My fingers bring notes of joy and sorrow
White keys, sunny days. Black keys,
Nights in which voices disappear

My fingers bring notes of joy and sorrow
All my melodies use both keys
Nights in which voices disappear
Lost chords into the void

All my melodies use both keys
And you will all dance to my tune
Lost chords into the void
Shadows with daggers

And you will all dance to my tune
Young then old; living then dead
Shadows with daggers
To take you into the night

Young then old; living then dead
White keys, sunny days, black keys
To take you into the night
I play the piano of good and evil

And that is a pantoum. Why not try writing one yourself? It can be quite fun.

First up is a collection of retrofuturisitic artwork from Eastern Bloc popular science magazines. Even though I don't believe I've seen any of these pieces before, many of them seem strangely familiar. The sensor antenna or weapon aimed at a distant galaxy, the tree within a bubble within a frozen waste, the astronaut with the raygun.

Next, we have a cartoon that I think about now and then. I first encountered a slightly different version of in an old computer science textbook. (How old? It had a few pages on core memory.) Some of the artist's embellishments are good additions, particularly the easy chair suspended from the tree, and some I agree with a bit less (perhaps I'd switch "as documented" and "as supported".) But the lesson remains the same: the customer wants a tire swing. She wants to go forward, backward, left, right, and around in circles. She does not want to hold the swing and run back and forth, no matter how many seats it has. And while a stationary seat beneath a moving tree may be a clever solution and an impressive engineering feat, it's kind of like a whistling dog story. Like a whistling dog, it's astonishing that the thing can whistle -- but it doesn't actually whistle very well.

And speaking of which, Toyota has unveiled a violin-playing robot. Does it, I wonder, have a MIDI interface?

Today, I'll continue my discussion of poetic forms. A few days ago, I described the pantoum, a poetic structure based on repetition of alternating lines. I also mentioned the limerick, which most of you are no-doubt familiar. A limerick is a five-line poem, in which the first two and last lines rhyme with one another, and the third and fourth lines rhyme with each other. Here's an example which most of us have heard:

  Hickory dickory dock
  The mouse ran up the clock
  The clock struck ten
  He ran down agan 
  Hickory dickory dock

I'd say that my formal introduction to the limerick happened when I was given a copy of the book Limer-Wrecks, a Mad Libs type of book. In it were a number of famous limericks with a few key words missing from each. The book then prompted one for such things as adjective and verbs rhyming with "get." One would then pester one's parents and siblings for such words and then torment reward them with jewels not unlike this one:

 There was a Young Lady of Flushing
 Who bought a large muffler for walking;
 But its weight and size,
 So petrified her eyes,
 That she very soon went back to bowling
 

A little progress was at last made on the fabricator. The X-axis platform is coming along nicely. The drive screw is connected to the platform. A motor/screw coupling still needs to be made and the X-axis rails still need to be attached to the base.

The Mobile Armatron upgrade is also coming along nicely. The Armatron has a surprising amount of empty space in its base and shoulder, and a small amount in its head. We'll fix that!

Although little postworthy has happened today, it occurs to me that it would make things a bit more interesting if I were to dub each of my projects in progress with a mysterious and evocative code name. I found a really excellent project code name generator on the Web once, but it now seems to be out of commission. It did generate the name "Project Frenzied Gecko" which I always hoped to find a use for someday. The question is, should such a great name be applied to a real project, which may not live up to expectations? Or should it be used as an umbrella project title for "other stuff we're working on but can't tell you much about yet"? (I used to like to insist, correctly or not, that "Duke Nukem Forever" was an example of the latter option.)

So, since I don't want to be disappointed by Project Frenzied Gecko, I'll name my projects in progress thusly:

1. Three-Axis Fabricator: Project Nonrelated Fortress
2. Mobile Armatron Retrofit: Project Flaming Pincer
3. Automatic Pantoum Generator: Project Ionic Flamingo
4. Parts Catalogue: Operation Vector Wombat
5. New Random Project Name Generator: Project Pickled Lizard

As hard as I tried to post yesterday, I just couldn't. I'm going to count it as a Holiday Obligation, although it was mostly spent making soup and buying cold medicine for someone who was feeling most unwell. Today, someone was feeling much better and even managed to make it to Fry's and then to swap out a motherboard (while your humble author was laboring away at drawing confusing charts and trying to convince primeval databases to mirror one another.) So since someone was obviously feeling much better, I returned my attention to Project Flaming Pincer.

It may not look like much, but the glowing eyes mean that there's now a regulated power supply for logic.

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in the blogosphere that's not quite convergent behaviour, but is probably a bit more than coincidence. Given a large enough pool of feeds, one may notice that occasionally two people will post almost the same thing at almost the same time. I'm not talking about the replication of news, or of the old "I'm standing in the midnight line for [xBox|iPhone|Harry Potter]" type of post. Rather, it's that two people seem to have almost the same idea at almost the same time. For example, today I noticed two posts complaining about the word meme (not the word meme, or even worse, the Word® meme)

He tagged me for this meme... and will somebody PLEASE tell me what the Hell a "meme" is? Why do we call it that? I just understood why we call them "blogs" a little while ago. I'm slow. I need help... [Here]

I've seen this little survey (I refuse to call it a "meme"--"meme," to me, is one of those new made-up words that some kid from the popular clique made up and forced everyone to use--I hope he's like all the other popular kids in high school and goes bald and sells insurance, cheats on his wife and she takes him to the cleaners. Where was I? Oh yeah, the meme) [Here]

I, too, have been a bit annoyed by the use of the word meme to mean a chain questionnaire. A group of questions to be shared is not really a meme, that is, it's not a unit of thought or of culture. The idea of passing along a questionnaire is a meme. Therefore, if both of the quoted posters have read an earlier third post, in which someone might have made a similar comment, this post may contain a word meme meme.

I'm a do-it-yourself kind of guy, except when I'm feeling just lazy enough to want something done, but not so lazy as to not bother. This here blog is a good example. I didn't want to be bound to a particular blogging service or even to a particular hosting provider, for various boring reasons. That's why I'm using a client-side application to generate and upload my posts. Just a bit 1990's, to be sure, but I could pack up my site and move it elsewhere in a handclap. I only bring this up because of Blogger. In the past, they've let me post comments (when a blog author allows it) under my name and URL. Now, this option has been removed in favor of OpenID:

We apologize for removing the URL field from the comments form prematurely two weeks ago. That was a mistake on our part that came from launching OpenID support on Blogger in draft. Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. [Source]

As previously mentioned, in an attempt to avoid opening an account at Blogger* I instead took the OpenID fork in the road. I chose an OpenID provider and then delegated the ID to my domain. That was all relatively easy. Unfortunately, something doesn't seem to be working as it should. When I do post a comment as an OpenID claimant, it appears that my domain name is shown as the author of the comment, not my username at the OpenID provider, and not the allegedly real name that I provided to them.

I'm not sure where the actual problem lay. Is the OpenID provider that I chose simply not responding in the desired fashion? Are the OpenID clients misinterpreting the returned data? Is this humble user completely misinterpreting the OpenID standard, and thus expecting an unlikely result?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I opened accounts at Blogger and LiveJournal so that I could post a number of test comments without disturbing anybody else. It appears that when placing comments at Blogger using OpenID, when my delegated URL is entered into the OpenID field, my domain name is displayed as the comment author. This is consistent with what the Blogger developers showed in their own blog. However, when I used the OpenID URL that was provided to me by ClaimID, the author of the comment was shown as the ClaimID username. While not exactly ideal, since anyone clicking the link would be taken to ClaimID rather than directly to here, this result was a bit more like what I'd been led to expect.

As for the LiveJournal experiment, using either of the OpenID URLs resulted in the URL entered being shown as the comment author, rather than any sort of friendly name. That just Doesn't Work for me.

Take a look at the blog post linked to by the Blogger blog, OpenID For Non Superusers. Many, if not all, of the OpenID commenters have friendly names showing, not URLs. Admittedly, it appears that the majority of them appear to be using MyOpenID, AOL's OpenID, or their own PHP OpenID servers. It also seems unlikely to me that interwiningly.net is a Blogger site. (BTW, I think I'd go crazy if I had to use Blogger. Even though it's a little quirky sometimes, I heart Thingamablog.)

The next step in this experiment, then, is to repeat the above tests with a different OpenID provider and compare the results. I should also, perhaps, locate another OpenID client and test that with my existing provider to see if a friendly name is shown.

Whee! :-P

Since I apparently believe that beating my head against a brick wall is a perfect evening's entertainment, I continued yesterday's experiments with OpenID. Today, I decided to start out by installing my own OpenID server.

Enter phpMyID, two PHP scripts that, once uploaded, provide identity service for one. "It can't possibly be that easy!" you may protest. True, you do have to run some text through a commandline utility and then edit a file. The enire procedure took all of about ten minutes, and that included the reading of the entire README file.

Unfortunately, I had a problem. phpMyID worked as advertised until it actually came time for it to do something useful. Then all it would say was, "Missing expected authorization header." Apparently, this was a problem with the Web server itself. The scripts came with an .htaccess file that had three suggestions to solve this problem, but needless to say, none of them worked. While I'd like to experiment with this program a bit more on a Web server that I actually control, until then, it's time for plan B C D.

I signed up with another OpenID provider, myOpenID. While lacking some of the features that made ClaimID interesting, this service does allow users to create multiple "personas," which allow the user to present a different face to different online services. For example, I can choose to show the "Cosmic Flurk" persona to Blogger, and voila, my comments are signed as Cosmic Flurk, and point back here. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work with LiveJournal, which still insists on printing the OpenID URL as entered.

Just for information's sake, then, I delegated the LiveJournal OpenID to a page on my site and tried using that as an ID. Perhaps not surprisingly, even that showed up as the full URL on LiveJournal, and as the filename of the page on Blogger. And of course when delegated to the main page, the domain was again used instead of a friendly name by both services. Tsk.

This all seems like an awful lot of work to have gone through to remain just this side of anonymous, but without coming off as some sort of impersonal self-promoter when commenting. On the other hand, it's always early adopters that get bitten. But then again, it's hardly early any more.

Toyota recently unveiled its robotic violinist. Like many commercial Japanese robots, the violinist is designed to be clean and friendly in appearance, the better to project the image of a helper and friend.