Archive of October 2007
Lazywebbing for music
Okay, so I could probably just hit slsk for this, but does anyone know of or have a decent a live version of “Cotton Crown” by Sonic Youth?
Please contact me if so.
23:20 | 0 Comments
Stochastic frenzy
So, if you’re not among those who’re using twitter already, this isn’t a post in which I’ll try to explain it to you, or convince you to give it a try (indeed, if you’ve heard of twitter but think it silly or pointless, this post may give you more evidence to support that conclusion). Just wanted to let people know that in addition to my own main twitter account, I’ve also started another, just to play with DeWitt Clinton’s nifty python-twitter module. Over at this biz_line account, I’ve been using the twitter API to post brief snippets of text created using a Markov chain algorithm. At first, I was just feeding it the text of Robert Latta’s English translation of the Monadology, by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as input. (Perhaps somebody has already noticed that the account username, biz_line, is an anagram of Leibniz.) After I got a little more familiar and craftier with the API, I modified my script to grab the last however many posts from the twitter public timeline and randomize that and post a chunk. Now I’ve got a job set up in my crontab that runs both the Leibniz version and the public timeline once an hour, and another running less frequently that takes the timeline of the biz_line user itself and runs that through the algorithm again. (I’ve also been kicking off some of these jobs manually from time to time, mainly just to keep the flow of posts somewhat unpredictible.) Those last ones are my favorites, I think. I’m considering using a couple other sources as possible inputs, but I haven’t decided on anything in particular yet.
Anyway, all this was really just to have some practice with the API and the corresponding python module, but I also get a weird enjoyment from reading blobs of markovized text, and wanted to draw a little more attention to this admittedly sort of silly project, in case anyone else shares that predilection.
21:21 | 0 Comments