Penultimate Reality

With the recent completion of distributed.net’s OGR-25 project, it’s time to look forward to their next project: OGR-NG. This project is intended to start with OGR-26, eventually moving on to OGR-27 and OGR-28.

OGR stands for Optimal Golomb Ruler, and while I’m not sure these higher-order rulers have any practical value, they are an interesting mathematical curiosity for some of us.

In any case, I’m been somewhat interested in the statistical side of it, and have thus been working on producing something of interest, so I’ve uploaded an OGR-26 statistics page. It currently only has my data on what the distribution of stub sizes is, but as time goes on, I hope to include my own estimates of when the project will complete. It’s not incredibly useful, but it might be interesting to someone.

I’m in the process of doing some migration among my servers, and I’m not being very careful to keep everything on aexoden.com intact. Some of it actually won’t be revived after the transition. I’ll manually fix things up as I notice they’re broken. Until then, I’ll at least try to keep the Custom Title MOD downloads available, since that’s pretty much the only thing external users seem to access anyway.

As a programmer and Linux user who is also a sports fan (rare combination, I know), I very often make efforts to analyze sports scores in various ways. I previously ran a site here that provided an implementation of “adjusted scoring margin”, which I originally read about on some professional sports site, but the actual ratings were for subscribers only. More recently, I’m interested in expanding my use of linear programming and statistical sampling to analyze playoff scenarios and playoff percentages.

One barrier to working on this is good access to score data for the various sports. There are a few good resources, like Massey Ratings, that can help to facilitate this, but some of the data is outdated and doesn’t necessarily have all the information I want. For my previous site, I wrote a script that parsed results from various live sources on the web, but I think we can do better than that.

To that end, I’ve launched a new project I’ve (tentatively) named the Penultimate Reality Sports Data Project, which aims to provide free and open access to sports score data for as many sports as possible and as many years as possible. The only thing real content I’ve put so far is an older draft of the specification for the data format that I originally wrote a couple of years ago. (I temporarily shelved the project after that.) That said, I’ve come to want to relaunch it, and if anyone out there is interested in helping in any way, please get in contact with me. Otherwise, I’ll press on alone and hope somebody finds my work useful. I at the very least hope to get a new draft of the specification online by this time next week. We shall see.

For those of you who primarily want to read about programming and Linux… well, uh, sorry. Maybe next post. This is my personal blog, after all.

UPDATE: I had some time to kill, so I went ahead and revised the specification. The changes weren’t incredibly substantial, but I am now actively seeking comments. Whether or not I get any is another question altogether.

I’ve gone ahead and bitten the bullet and installed a forum package. It’s beta software, so don’t be entirely surprised if I’m forced to reset the database at some point. I’ll, of course, do my best to avoid that situation, but sometimes drastic changes can happen, and if the inevitable happens, and I’m somehow unable to fix it myself, this configuration won’t be supported by the developers.

For the curious, the software is a beta phpBB3, which is a vast improvement over the very popular version 2 of the software. It’s not recommended to use it in a production environment, and that’s a risk I’m taking. That aside, I expect the forum to be a welcome addition to the site. The topics of discussion are anything related to the core topics of Penultimate Reality: science, technology, the Internet, and so on. In addition, this is where you may go for support for any of my projects, including the Custom Title MOD for phpBB, which I may eventually port for 3.0.x.

Every time I post a new article to Penultimate Reality, I feel it’s appropriate to update the world about the matter by posting here. For the first time since the last redesign, I am adding not just one, but two new articles to the site, both relating to emoticons and their use on the Internet.

The first article is one I wrote nearly five years ago, xD or XD: The Eternal Question, which makes an admittedly biased case for the use of “xD” over “XD”. When I last redesigned Penultimate Reality, I removed the article, only to learn later that it was more popular than I expected, so I’ve re-added it to the articles section of the site. However, it is quite old, and it doesn’t particularly reflect my feelings on the matter anymore. As such, I’ve revisited the subject in my new article, Exdee Revisited. This new article looks at the matter from a more enlightened perspective, at least the way I see it.

In any case, just don’t use the article as an excuse to overuse emoticons. Some people I’ve interacted with use them so frequently at the end of their sentences, they may as well be punctuation. And I really don’t need to type “. xD” at the end of every sentence—just the period (or full stop, as may be) is well enough for me. Anyway, take a look, and I hope you enjoy it.