#code musings

Turns out SF’s MUNI system dispenses passes that use NFC. Modern Android phones have NFC reading capabilities. Played a hacker for one of my Intercon games and therefor decided to actually hack together a program in a couple of spare hours. Had 3 cards (hot glue kanji, “gun metal” acrylic painted) that I rigged up to perform different tasks when tapped (flashlight on/off, timer start/stop). For some reason I find this to be incredibly cool, no doubt far more so than it actually is. 

It’s 12:30am and my brain feels like a tiger pacing in a cage. I want an interesting coding project... just went through the Android Open GL ES tutorial and I’m sure I’m biting off more than I can chew but I’m excited.  I have no specific goal in mind (vague Expanse-esque terminal designs perhaps) but I’m excited to challenge myself, get back into graphics, and also somehow roll in more real work integrations. 

Do thing. I can do the thing.

It’s been approx 166 hours and 15 min since we got stoned last week (I always start a timer) and I’m happy that I have achieved the thing that I randomly thought would be a good idea.  Today is my birthday and, like usual, I have taken the day off. Only a couple hours of coding and some smarter Googling this time and I’ve found what I wanted/needed.  

Turns out Carnegie Mellon University has a Pronunciation Dictionary, although it’s annotated in the ARPABET style.  There’s a very helpful github repo that does most off the translation (though I had to tweak it to honor the ʌ sound). There’s also a list of word hyphenations in a book on Gutenberg (I feel like I should be able to resolve those word-breaks myself programatically...)

I’ve also found a dictionary and have read up on my verb conjugations (and more importantly found other github repos) so there’s still better/smarter work to do... but I’m happy that I have been able to start testing the idea out a bit. 

This weekend’s delightful high was the product of Goodship’s “Coffee & Dark” chocolate bar. Fantastic chocolate, fantastic time. 

Recently my manion* and I have embraced the idea of “why not just order the weird pizza we think sounds good when stoned?” as opposed to the  “stay with our regular order” plan of attack we’ve been following for years, stoned or not. Last time I went for cherry tomatoes, potatoes, and feta. Yep, good. 

This weekend was apple, cheddar cheese, basil, and white onions. Also good, but for some reason I got hung up on the “apple and cheese” pairing. Like... visually. The relationship between the cheese and the cow and the apple and the tree and how you could further entwine/unify them... 

Forever circling and skittering around similar ideas it seems, I was also back to IPA and math this weekend.  I wanted to phonetically transcribe poems and song lyrics and then distill them to an algorithm. Trying to use math to understand poetry. Fucking poetry... If I can conquer it with math, trivialize it, can we all agree it’s dumb? 

I realized that to do this, I’d need to have the English language at my coding fingertips and phonetically broken down (also by part of language and by syllable count... but focusing on MVP here) How big is the English language?

Go ahead, guess. How many words? My manion guessed some large... like, 20 million. I think my gut was sitting around a million? Many hundreds of thousands at least.  Oxford dictionaries says... 

there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

“Well that’s totally query-able!” I think to myself! So 2 hours into my high I’m happily looking into the Merriam-Webster’s  API (free, rate limit 1k calls a day), Oxford Dictionary’s API (free, rate limit 3k calls a day), potential libraries available for download/use (holy fuck- side tangent: try looking up a programming database for a dictionary? for words or languages? Talk about word collision- all these terms mean something different/specific when it comes to programming), and ponder if the right solution is to just scrape the pages myself....

tldr; got stoned and thought about apples and cows. Came up with next app idea to work on: the poetry assistant. (of which, of course, there are already many). Had a good time.

[Bonus Content: last time we somehow were talking about least weasels (My manion’s spirit animal) and the absurdity of it attacking a goose. And then about three tiny hyenas also attacking a goose (hyena being my spirit animal, but unclear on why there were 3...) I asked my manion what the goose represented and he said “the middle class” which is either totally random or maybe worrying? (Asked about it this morning he agrees “that’s kind of disturbing.”)  And then the hyena and the least weasel walk off into the sunset, because I love my manion]

I am super fortunate that my work sent me to Google IO this year. Twas my first one and OMG it was intense and amazing and fabulous. I, sadly, don’t do well with podcasts or videos when it comes to learning new/technical things. Being able to squeeze (and jesus christ, I do mean squeeze given those seats...) into the second row of talk after talk and soak up in person all this great new info was just... super helpful. 

I took pages and pages of notes. Pages! To be fair, the pages were rather small, but then so was my handwriting! I write... in all directions. So the following notes are likely not legible by anyone but myself. But posting here for safe keeping! 

Not that anyone reading this Tumblr probably cares, but my fav take aways were:

Android Studio 3 new tooling, especially in regards to proguard

Lifecycle aware objects and the sweet new DAO/Room stuff (and the fact that stuff is rxjava2 compatible!) 

Physics animations (aka now we can input force!)

Actually being able to sit down with someone from the Google Accessibility team and ask some questions 1:1

That one VR talk I managed to fit in amongst all the “work” relevant talks I went to... the idea of “dmm”s (Distance Independent Millimeter) was a new and helpful way to think about things... very “ah ha!” like

(below the cut are the 15 scans of my notebook, same as the animated gif above but actually maybe readable. maybe) 

Sometimes a fever comes over me where I want to build something for fun (small & trivial as it may be) and I fucking build it and then I’m, like, fuck yeah I just engineered that solution. Pow!  

Unstoppable failure.  I knew the whole time I was drawing her face that it wasn't working... but erase and retry as I like I apparently cannot "see" the correct distance between nose and eyes... only afterwards with the power of Photoshop's Distort, Transform & Move was I able to nudge her face into the shape I could clearly see it needed to be.  Odd....