Monthly Archives: February 2006

Book: In the Palaces of Memory – Good look at formation of memories and of theories

My bocce crew, the Old Dirty Barristers, played this weekend and while I was in Floyd’s I found this book. I nearly forgot to keep playing.

The book has plenty of good non-scientist explanations of theories about how memories form. That’s a really important topic. If there is no biological meat mechanism where memories are stored, then our consciousness is not a part of our biology. We would have to have something supernatural like a soul to explain our thought. If, however, memory storage and formation can be found in the body, then perhaps we can replicate that same sort of pattern in computers or other simulations.

Apart from a great explanation of competing theories on memory formation and storage, there are also some glimpses into the personalities behind them and the political nature of theory formation, defense and evolution.

I’m trying to get this one finished before I bolt off to Carnival. If you read this one and like it, I also recommend Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine
Holy crap. This seems to be so awesome.
It uses yahoo’s engine to search your terms at a specific number of websites. You can have topic specific search from sources you trust – it would be nice if OutFoxed linked in with this.
Seems like this is sort of OPML like – I can trust Debra Messing to be concerned with online shopping for hoity toity clothes and let her maintain her list of great places to search for clothes.

I can create a list of places that sell computer bits, and aggregate searches here.

What other things do you search for at multiple places? Is google the end of the search for you always?

I’ll be going to brazil next week.

Sam and I are going with friends to the carnival in Brazil. We’ll be in Rio and someplace in Bahia. I’ll be offline and without cellphone. If you know of some great thing in Brazil to check out, or if there is something legal you want me to bring back, please let me know before friday.
I’ll be gone Friday, Feb 24th and back Monday, March 5th.
Burglars, please note: I don’t have much valuable stuff and our attack cats will be on patrol. You’ve been warned.

Programming: The standard treeview doesn’t really support xml

I’m putting together a utility at work that generates stylesheets given the output of a stored procedure in xml. There are a lot of choices on how to represent this.
I thought a tree-view would be nice (like the left hand side of windows explorer), but it looks like there is no good way to bind a tree view to the contents of an xml document without changing that document. Very odd, since a tree is the most natural way to present an XML document.

So for now, I’m going with a list of fields available and adding them to a datagrid view. All of this would be easier with .net 2.0, but it’s politically unsound to be playing with the new toys if you are as junior as I am.

fallenidol: How to download trailers from the Apple site WITHOUT Quicktime PRO

fallenidol: How to download trailers from the Apple site WITHOUT Quicktime PRO
I saw this in my delicious feed. It looks similar to what I did for my This Mobile Life greasemonkey script.

Perhaps I can automate this a little for people. It may be possible to make a GM_XmlHttpRequest on the file linked, determine if it has a *.mov string in it and then change the link. What you want to avoid is downloading a whole .mov file just to check it! Not sure if greasemonkey can do that.
If you want me to look into it, let me know.