The Singularity Summit 2010

15/08/2010

—not ready for others to read, but making public anyway —

A collection of the faithful gathered in one large room. Among the believers were those seeking healing. They did not reach out the touch the robe of Kurtzweil, not only because he only appeared over the net, but they instead sought the empowerment provided by the most far out boundaries of what is know.

The good news is that frontiers are being forged, primarily the brain sciences. The search for AI seemed to have morphed into a quest to reverse engineer the brain. To learn from Biology. However, the quest seeks to enhance what biology has to offer.

No advances in AI, or even close to it seem to have been presented. Only a uniformed concession that the old way of thinking as is a dead end.

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massif-visualizer Ubuntu Install Notes

29/07/2010

Here are the partial instructions for Ubuntu 10.04 with branch 8f84a30 from July 29, 2010

Get the depends:
#sudo aptitude install kdelibs
#sudo aptitude install cmake
#sudo aptitude install kdelibs4-dev
#sudo aptitude install kdebase
#sudo apt-get install libphonon-dev build-essential
#sudo aptitude install kde-devel

get kgraphviewer:

#sudo aptitude install graphviz-dev graphviz
#sudo aptitude install kdepimlibs5-dev
#sudo aptitude install boost-build libboost-all-dev

#mkdir kgraphviewer
#cd kgraphviewer/

#svn co svn://websvn.kde.org:443/home/kde/trunk/extragear/graphics/kgraphviewer/ .

Then follow their README and install

Then Get git:
#sudo aptitude install git-core

get the Massif-Visualizer from http://gitorious.org/massif-visualizer:

#git clone git://gitorious.org/massif-visualizer/massif-visualizer.git

Then you can follow the massif-visualizer readme

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Simple Graphical Python Profiling with RunSnakeRun

26/07/2010

sudo aptitude install python-wxtools

sudo easy_install runsnakerun

sudo aptitude install python-profiler

(If you are using Debian check this out : http://www.cherrypy.org/wiki/ProfilingOnDebian
)

run with:

python -m cProfile -o barbazzr.profile barbazzr.py

Check out the output with:
runsnake name.profilepython -m cProfile -o barbazzr.profile barbazzr.py

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Django 1.2 CSRF verification failed

17/02/2010

Are you updating an old Django  project to use Django 1.2, and getting this error message when you try to login to the Django admin page?

403 Forbidden

CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.
Help

Reason given for failure:

CSRF cookie not set.

Then you need to add  ‘django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware’, and  ‘django.middleware.csrf.CsrfResponseMiddleware’ your settings.py file. Mine looks like this:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
‘django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware’,
‘django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware’,
‘django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware’,
‘django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware’,
‘django.middleware.csrf.CsrfResponseMiddleware’,
)

Thanks to the Django docs http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/csrf/#how-to-use-it

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Set the default GRUB entry to boot from GRUB menu

19/06/2009

You easily set the default GRUB entry to boot to in in Debian or Ubuntu by editing

/boot/grub/menu.lst

and changing ‘default’ to the number of the record you want to boot from by default.  (Note: It is 0 indexed.)

# You can specify ’saved’ instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
# is the entry saved with the command ’savedefault’.
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not change this entry to ’saved’ or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
default        2

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Find the path of a Python module

19/06/2009

The builtin inspect module makes it easy to find out information about the modules you are loading. Just ‘import inspect’ and use inspect.getfile

Python 2.6.2 (r262:71605, Apr 14 2009, 22:40:02) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import inspect
>>> import random
>>> inspect.getfile(random)
‘c:\\Python26\\lib\\random.pyc’

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Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

19/04/2009

Now again, emotional commitment is not enough. It is a necessary condition apparently. And I think I can tell you the reason why. Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, “creativity comes out of your subconscious.” Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

from Richard Hamming: You and Your Research , maybe listen to this in the background

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