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artistic and other frustrations

Published April 17, 2004 by lievenlb

Yesterday, PD1 exhibited some of her paintings in the Antwerp Museum for Photography. Over breakfast this morning she was in a rare angry mood.

No, she was satisfied with the responses she got on her work, the room was not ideal (lighting etc.) but that was not what mattered…

Me : So?

She : There was this other work, a video-performance. I once saw by accident on Arte a short-film and this performance stole the whole idea of that film, from start to finish! The whole idea was nicked!

Me : Wake up! That’s the majority way of creating art, or science for that matter.

She : But it is so unfair! Why do people steal ideas ?

Me : Maybe they don’t see it as stealing. Maybe they believe they do a better thing with the original idea than the person who invented it.

She : Nothing can beat the original! Anyway, I find the most rewarding thing about art to come up with an original idea and work it out. It cannot be rewarding to steal other people\’s ideas.

Me (dry) : I think such people are after other rewards…

She : The same thing happens at school. Sometimes I come up with a suggestion to use a different technique or material and then a few weeks later, half of my class seems
to have worked this out too.

Me : So ? You still had the idea.

She : Yes, but the Jury doesn’t know that!

Me : So ? After the Jury you can still be confident to come up with new ideas, these others may fear they will only be able to repeat themselves.

She : But is it so unfair!

Me : What’s the alternative ? Are you going to lock yourself up in your room to
paint and let nobody see the result?

She : No, but I prefer to do my painting here at home, on my own with nobody looking over my shoulder constantly to see whether they can use some of my ideas. I will
paint on my own and only when it is fully finished they may see the result!

Me : That’s the spirit girl! You are much cleverer than I will ever be…

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a spider for Paul Smith’s list

Published April 16, 2004 by lievenlb

One
of the best collections of links to homepages of people working in
non-commutative algebra and/or geometry is maintained by Paul Smith. At regular intervals I use it to check
up on some people, usually in vain as nobody seems to update their
homepage… So, today I wrote a simple spider to check for updates in
this list. The idea is simple : it tries to get the link (and when this
fails it reports that the link seems to be broken), it saves a text-copy
of the page (using lynx) on disc which it will check on a future
check-up for changes with diff. Btw. for OS X-people I got
lynx from the Fink Project. It then collects all data (broken
links, time of last visit and time of last change and recent updates) in
RSS-feeds for which an HTML-version is maintained at the geoMetry-site, again
using server side includes. If you see a 1970-date this means that I
have never detected a change since I let this spider loose (today).
Also, the list of pages is not alphabetic, even to me it is a surprise
how the next list will look. As I check for changes with diff the
claimed number of changed lines is by far accurate (the total of lines
from the first change made to the end of the file might be a better
approximation of reality… I will change this soon).
Clearly,
all of this is still experimental so please give me feedback if you
notice something wrong with these lists. Also I plan to extend this list
substantially over the next weeks (for example, Paul Smith himself is
not present in his own list…). So, if you want your pages to be
included, let me know at lieven.lebruyn@ua.ac.be.
For those on Paul\’s list, if you looked at your log-files today
you may have noticed a lot of traffic from www.matrix.ua.ac.be as
I was testing the script. I\’ll keep my further visits down to once a
day, at most…

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arxiv RSS feeds available

Published April 3, 2004 by lievenlb

If
you are interested in getting daily RSS-feeds of one (or more) of the
following arXiv
sections : math.RA, math.AG, math.QA and
math.RT you can point your news-aggregator to
www.matrix.ua.ac.be. Most of the solution to my first
Perl-exercise I did explain already yesterday but the current program
has a few changes. First, my idea was to scrape the recent-files
from the arXiv, for example for math.RA I would get http://www.arxiv.org/list/math.RA/recent but this
contains only titles, authors and links but no abstracts of the papers.
So I thought I had to scrape for the URLs of these papers and then
download each of the abstracts-files. Fortunately, I found a way around
this. There is a lesser known way to get at all abstracts from
math of the current day (or the few last days) by using the Catchup interface. The syntax of this interface is
as follows : for example to get all math-papers with
abstracts posted on April 2, 2004 you have to get the page with
URL

http://www.arxiv.org/catchup?smonth=04&sday=02&num=50&archive=
math&method=with&syear=2004

so in order to use it I had
to find a way to parse the present day into a numeric
day,month,year format. This is quite easy as there is the very
well documented Date::Manip-module in Perl. Another problem with
arXiv is that there are no posts in the weekend. I worked around
this by requesting the Catchup starting from the previous
business day (an option of the DateCalc-function. This means
that over the weekend I get the RSS feeds of papers posted on Friday, on
Monday I\’ll get those of Friday&Monday and for all other days I\’ll get
those of today&yesterday. But it is easy to change the script to allow
for a longer period so please tell me if you want to have RSS-feeds for
the last 3 or 4 days. Also, if you need feeds for other sections that
can easily be done, so tell me.
Here are the URLs to give to
your news-aggregator for these sections :

math.RA at
http://www.matrix.ua.ac.be/arxivRSS/mathRA/
math.QA at
http://www.matrix.ua.ac.be/arxivRSS/mathQA/
math.RT at
http://www.matrix.ua.ac.be/arxivRSS/mathRT/
math.AG at
http://www.matrix.ua.ac.be/arxivRSS/mathAG/

If
your news-aggregator is not clever then you may have to add an
additional index.xml at the end. If you like to use these feeds
on a Mac, a good free news-aggregator is NetNewsWire Lite. To get at the above feeds, click on the Subscribe
button and copy one of the above links in the pop-up window. I
don\’t think my Perl-script breaks the Robots Beware rule of the arXiv. All it does it to download one page a day
using their Catchup-Method. I still have to set up a cron-job to
do this daily, but I have to find out at which (local)time at night the
arXiv refreshes its pages…

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