How I’m managing my life with emacs org-mode (by alaric)

It's no secret that I'm a busy person; often, when I decide to do something, a few years pass before I actually get to do it. So the only way I keep afloat is by the judicious use of computers to track my task lists. I rely on automatic systems to make sure I always know what I need to do today, and what are the most important things I need to do "sometime" that I can do right now. There's no way I could keep all that in my head without forgetting about things and letting people down, or feeling stressed because I'm juggling too much in my mind, or not being able to find the best thing to do when I have a free moment.

As I've mentioned before on here, I want a personal information management system based on predicate logic, so I can express complex relationships between things easily, and tell the system how to infer knowledge automatically. However, "build one of those" has yet to hit the top of my TODO list, so for now I'm using emacs' legendary org-mode. This lacks the rich semantic power of my proposed PIM, but it's already implemented and has a nice editing interface 🙂

A few people have asked about what I've done, so here's my attempt to document it.

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12 years… (by sarah)

So today I went to the Drs to see how the weight loss was going and stuff, I was convinced I had piled it on over Christmas I felt a lot stockier than before Christmas and to be honest I ate a lot reaching 1600 on alot of the days. This is about the 1400 stable and 1200 weight loss that I sorted with the nurse. 1600 is what I was eating before I went to the Drs, the amount I was eating and wondering why my weight was creeping up as everyone knows women have 2000 calories a day - unless you are me. I am short, had a boarderline thyroid for a decade or so and as it turns out have the lighter Asian skeleton like my dad (as well as the afro-carrabean spin from my mum) - add in the low mobility and I was screwed.

But between tablets and the discovery that I can't eat wheat and sticking to the low calorie counts to loose the excess weight, I have been loosing weight but I seriously ate some food over the holiday and then my birthday and so on.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I go and find I have lost weight, not much but I have lost weight still. The key being that due to pelvis being a lot more stable I have been out doing more stuff, doing running games with the cubs and even managing a 20 minute climb. And then they said my bloods were all good, all the tests were normal!!!

That is the first time that has been said to me, no not sures, or a bit high, or oooo that's not goods or it's boarderline or here's a tablet to help control this. So amazing!

And that is the first time in about 12 years possibly more.

One of the conversations I had with the Dr recently was that I don't know what energy level I am supposed to have - I've not had "me" energy since I was 18, I don't think 30+ normally have the same the energy as a teen so I have no idea if I am back to normal or not and to a certain extent I kind of don't care either as I am so much better than I have been for so long. I feel a little bit sad that that bit of life is kind of missing for me but at the same time I have the girls and though maybe I could have taken them to more things if I'd been weller I also know they love snuggly time watching films and colouring and stuff and I still took them to parks it was just some days I couldn't and when I did it was the outing for the day.

Interestingly I came home thinking about what I was doing last time it looked like I might get better with all the back treatments and exclusion diets at Chelsea and Westminster. That was like 12 years ago as was me trying to get a PhD place, the one I really really wanted was with the Open University, but it relied on Beagle2 landing and collecting data. It didn't happen, the beagle disappeared and today I watched the press-conference live of how they've found it sitting there on the surface of Mars. It made me smile, bitter sweet and poetically lovely.

Maybe when I have a cyborg body I can fly to Mars and say hi to it 🙂

Of course with hindsight I think it was for the best for me, I became so very sick and my friend who got the PhD funding did far more with the chance than I think I would have because fundamentally I am a shyer person and just not as good at Chemistry and form filling!

And anyway I am not sure I wouldn't be in a similar place to were I am now anyway.

2015 is kind of gearing up to be an amazing year.

Day 15 – Pinterest (by sarah)

It is day 15 of Advent and so I painted an Ice Tunnel - well actually I painted it like a fortnight ago but I am putting it up now 🙂 Yes I was behind, yes I have back blogged!

I kind of got obsessed with this colour scheme.

Also I found an interesting article on what happens if you try and live by Pinterest for a week - Pinterest is an image sharing platform. I discovered it existed as people where putting my photos on there and my friend saw some cakes I'd made and nagged me (still have not blogged nor pinned the cakes).

I was a bit sad to see that there is a Pinterest stereotype - Mummy Blogger, White middle class housewife etc... and some people have found it depressing as they are not crafty enough 🙁 I'm kind of sad that I now know this. I also have a horrible feeling that this is me and yet not me. I know tattoos and nail art where on there as I like those things and occassionally look them up! I still don't know what the hell a Mason jar is and I write craft tutorials :/

I use pinterest mainly to gather inspiration for me and other writers and to discover potential artists for book covers or to post my own images or find science peeps etc.. I would not have gotten through her experiment! Well not unless someone was sponsoring me anyway!

Anyway this is my Pinterest, for those who are interested.

Advent 12 (by sarah)

This painting is of a snowman's fire place and will def. be part of a story at some point 🙂

Jean's statements about Hogwarts and LoTR

1) Hermione is only there to keep the boys safe, that is her function, to look after them and solve the problems in ALL the stories.

2) Why is everyone pale? Where are the brown people, there is snow you get brown people where there is snow but no ones even got a suntan.... later hmmmm even the people with the elephants aren't really that dark and why are they all bad?

This opened some interesting discussions about the climates and things in fantasy worlds and how we imaging things differently when we read things.

Goal-based artificial intelligence for home automation (and maybe piloting a network of autonomous killbots) (by alaric)

For a while, I've been mulling the idea of writing zmiku, a daemon that can be programmed to automatically control various kinds of systems. My application is home automation, and maybe automating the management of servers (restarting and failing over services, dealing with overload situations, gracefully handling disks being full, that sort of thing); but it occurs to me that the same basic problem also applies to controlling autonomous robots such as space probes, industrial processes, and that sort of thing. A good solution to all these problems in one would be quite useful!

You might say that this is a non-problem; normally, people would just write programs from scratch to control these kinds of things, sitting in a loop reading inputs and updating state variables and choosing what output actions to generate, but the complexity of the resulting program tends to increase rapidly as the problem complexity rises.

Rather than traditional programming languages, a better notation for such a reactive system is a state machine. The Wikipedia articles on a UML state machine diagram gives a good introduction to one version of this notation, including some discussion of ways to extend the most basic version in ways that increase its expressiveness and modularity.

I'd like to base zmiku on a textual version of the UML statecharts, but today I've had a horrible stomach ache, so been unable to do much more than lie around and think about stuff, and what my mind settled on was the interesting question of how to integrate state machines with goal-based programming, which is also useful for controlling complex systems. In a goal-based system, various goals are known to the system, each with a priority; for instance, a flying robot may have a destination demanded by the user, which the navigation system tries to fly the robot towards; but a collision-avoidance system may sometimes override the navigation system when it detect that a collision will result otherwise, with a higher-priority goal for the steering system. And when the collision has been avoided, that goal will disappear, and the earlier goal of getting to the destination will take over once more. And if the robot's batteries are running low, then flying towards a charging place (or a place where the solar panels are in sunlight) might be a higher priority than the user's chosen destination, but not a higher priority than avoiding collisions. And so on.

So I came up with a model for integrating the two, using the "scoreboard" model from artificial intelligence; giving a system a shared global state between a number of concurrent subsystems. And this blog post is the result of me writing up my scribbled notes. I'm still in a lot of stomach pain, so I'm afraid it's going to be a bit rambly 🙂

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