Month: September 2012

Cross-system chat log sync

Posted in Bad Ideas, Linux - September 10, 2012 - 0 Comment

I created a directory called “pidgin_logs” in my Dropbox folder, backed up my logs, removed the old log directory, and then created a link from where the log directory should have been to the Dropbox directory. Pidgin still starts up fine, and after I do this on all of my systems, they will all log chats to my Dropbox account.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the level of trust that this places in Dropbox, but it will be very convenient.

The commands to do it are:

cd ~/Dropbox/
mkdir pidgin_logs
cd ~/.purple/
mv logs logs_backup
mkdir logs
ln -sfn ~/Dropbox/pidgin_logs ~/.purple/logs
mv logs_backup/aim logs/
mv logs_backup/jabber logs/

Academic Problems in New Media Art

Posted in Art, Bad Ideas, Scripting - September 8, 2012 - 0 Comment

I’m trying to convert Deluze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus into a corpus for use by a program. Among other things, the program will break the text down into its component sentences. The text has a lot of notes, which connect the text to a lot of other sources, but are not always written in complete sentences, and so will result in odd output from the program when considered as sentences.

So I’m faced with a choice: lose the notes, and so lose the cultural context and references to stuff that went before, or keep them and suffer degraded output. Nobody warns you about the odd stuff you’ll have to decide when you start doing new media “art”.

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