Not too long ago I was noodling over a problem: I wanted to break up the scheduling queues in Huginn to make my fleets of agents a little more efficient when the execute. The best way I could think of was to make some of the schedules stochastic - periodically have an agent roll some dice and depending on what comes up decide whether or not to trigger the agents downstream. So, of course I started looking for a random number generator that would basically roll 1d10. However, the Liquid templating language that Huginn uses internally doesn't have any function to …
Longtime readers are aware that I've been a customer of Dreamhost for quite a few years now, and by and large they've done all right by me. They haven't complained (much) about all the stuff I have running there, and I try to keep my hosted databases in good condition. However, the server they have my stuff on is starting to act wonky. Periodic outages mostly, but when my Wallabag installation started throwing all sorts of errors and generally not working right, that got under my skin in a fairly big hurry. I reinstalled. I upgraded to the latest stable …
It seems that there is another influx of refugees from a certain social network that's turned into a never ending flood of bile, vitriol, and cortisol into what we call the Fediverse, a network of a couple of thousand websites running a number of different applications that communicate with each other over a protocol called ActivityPub. Ultimately, the Fediverse is different from Twitter and Facebook in that it's not run as a for-profit entity. There are no analytics, no suggestions of "thought leaders" you might want to follow, no automated curation of the posts you can see versus the ones …
A couple of months back I did a brief writeup of Keybase and what it's good for. I mentioned briefly that it implements a 1-to-n text chat feature, where n>=1. Yes, this means that you can use Keybase Chat to talk to yourself, which is handy for prototyping and debugging code. What does not seem to be very well known is that the Keybase command line utility has a JSON API, the documentation of which you can scan through by issuing the command keybase chat help api from a command window. I'm considering incorporating Keybase into my exocortex so …
In the last post in this series I talked about the origins of my exocortex and a few of the things I do with it. In this post I'm going to dive a little deeper into what my exocortex does for me and how it's laid out.
My agent networks ("scenarios" in the terminology of Huginn) are collections of specialized agents which each carry out one function (like requesting a web page or logging into an XMPP server to send a message). Those agents communicate by sending events to one another; those events take the form of structured, packaged pieces …
In an application development team consisting of n engineers, expect n distinct APIs or translation layers to be developed for use inside the application they are building, all of which are designed "To simplify the API of the other layers my code interfaces with."
Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that I've been playing around with the theme for my website in subtle ways (mostly so that, if I do screw something up it won't hose my entire site). This is partially due to the fact that I simply can't leave well enough alone if I can help it, and partially due to the fact that I've been forced to learn HTML by Project Byzantium. But, that's neither here nor there. A few months back, some of the agents over at Telecomix put together a side project called the Summer of Datalove to promote the …
It seems that Google has changed its mind about one of their more famous open projects, namely, allowing web developers to use the SOAP protocol to pull data from their network. They've quietly killed the Search SOAP project and pulled the developers' kit from the website. Here's the thing: Google's SOAP API is used to teach developers how to integrate other sites' functionality into their own. You might say that it's the gold standard, about which many books have been written (well, all of them, actually). An open source project called EvilAPI has arisen to provide continued accessbut it's anyone's …
