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 …
I've been promising myself that I'd do a series of articles about tools that I've incorporated into my exocortex over the years, and now's as good a time as any to start. Rather than jump right into the crunchy stuff I thought I'd start with something that's fairly simple to use, straightforward, and endlessly useful for many purposes - a wiki.
Usually, when somebody brings up the topic of wikis one either immediately thinks of Wikipedia or one of the godsawful corporate wikis that one might be forced to use on a daily basis. And you're not that off the mark …
EDIT - 20171011 - Added a bit about getting real login shells inside of this Screen session, which fixes a remarkable number of bugs. Also cleaned up formatting a bit.
To keep the complexity of parts of my exocortex down I've opted to not separate everything into larger chunks using popular technologies these days, such as Linux containers (though I did Dockerize the XMPP bridge as an experiment) because there are already quite a few moving parts, and increasing complexity does not make for a more secure or stable system. However, this brings up a valid and important question, which is "How …
As I've mentioned a few times in the past, diverse parts of my exocortex monitor many different aspects of the world. One of them, called Ironmonger, constantly data mines the global stock markets looking for anomalies. Ordinarily, Ironmonger only triggers when stock trading events greater than three standard deviations hit the market. On Monday, 6 Feb at 14:50:38 hours UTC-0800 (PST), Ironmonger did an acrobatic pirouette off the fucking handle. Massive trades of three different tech companies (Intel, Apple, and Facebook) his the US stock market within the same thirty second period. By "massive," I mean that 3 …
A couple of weeks ago I ran into some of the functional limits of my web search bot, a bot that I wrote for my exocortex which accepts English-like commands ("Send me top 15 hits for HAL 9000 quotes.") and runs web searches in response using the Searxmeta-search engine on the back end. This is to say that I gave my bot a broken command ("Send hits for HAL 9000 quotes.") and the parser got into a state where it couldn't cope, threw an exception, and crashed. To be fair, my command parser was very brittle and it was …
EDIT: 20170123 - My reviewers have suggested some edits to the article, many of which I've applied.
It's been a while since I wrote a Huginn tutorial, so let's start with a basic one to get you comfortable with the idea of building an agent network. This agent network will run every half hour, poll a REST API endpoint, and e-mail you what it gets. You'll have to have access to an already running Huginn instance that can send outbound e-mail. This post is going to be kind of lengthy, but that's because I'm laying out some fundamentals. Once you understand …
You've already read my opinion of the 2016 election's outcome so I'll not subject you to it again. However, I would like to talk about some weird stuff I (we, really) kept noticing on Twitter in the days and weeks leading up to Election Day.
As I've often spoken of in the past, a nontrivial portion of my exocortex is tasked with monitoring global activity on Twitter by hooking into the back-end API service and pulling raw data out to analyze. Those agents fire on a stagged schedule, anywhere from every 30 minutes to every two hours; a couple of …
A couple of days ago I got it into my head to upgrade one of my Exocortex servers from Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS, the latest stable release. While Ubuntu long-term support releases are good for a couple of years (14.04 LTS would be supported until at least 2020) I had some concerns about the packages themselves being too stale to run the later releases of much of my software. To be more specific, I could continue to hope that the Ruby and Python interpreters I have installed could be upgraded as necessary but at …
In my last post I said that I'd describe in greater detail how to set up the software that I use as the core of my exocortex, called Huginn.
First, you need someplace for the software to live. I'll say up front that you can happily run Huginn on your laptop, desktop workstation, or server so long as it's not running Windows. Huginn is developed under Linux; it might run under one of the BSDs but I've never tried. I don't know if it'll run as expected in MacOSX because I don't have a Mac. If you want to give …
