Comments Provided by Google+

Comments have been turned off on my blogs for months, and I’ve been happy with the result. Gone were both the SPAM comments and the less than useful comments. There is a full discussion of my reasoning in a Google+ post, should anyone be interested. Recently, I learned that one could add embedded Google+ Comments on any page. Naturally, this appeals to me since I send my users to G+ to comment anyway. This...

Ingress: The Culture of Game Dynamics

For the last few months, I’ve been playing Google’s massively multi-player game called Ingress and, though it’s something of a niche topic and superficially unrelated to my normal writing, wanted to write on my thoughts about a specific aspect that is troubling me. Background For those who are unfamiliar (those who are familiar can skip down to “Culture and Nomenclature”), Ingress is a...

Introducing TeamMetta!

The waiting is over! Today– right now, in fact– as you are reading this post– TeamMetta is officially expanding. You’ve all been waiting for some time. We have too. Lovely Jessica has been waiting longer than anyone.1 A while ago, we were worried that we’d have wee small premies. More recently, we’ve been worried that we wouldn’t have babies at all. It seemed like the wee little...

Science in Corporate America

There’s a bill in Congress called “The Research Works Act”1 which threatens open access to science in a very disturbing way. The bill basically gives control of publicly funded research to private companies. There’s a petition to oppose this bill. I wanted to write up why I think we should sign it. The Research Works Act Unlike many bills, The Research Works Act has very short text: No...

A Farewell To Facebook, Reason #3: Obsession & Stupidity

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series A Farewell To FacebookThis is the last in my posts about why I left Facebook. No, really, I promise! Like many things I write, they’ve come off a bit as “explanation” and/or “justification,” but– also like many things I write– they were meant more as “exploration.” They are a personal exploration, through writing, of my own...

A Farewell to Facebook, Reason #2: Interaction

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series A Farewell To FacebookIn a previous post, I described the confusion of the term “friend” as a primary reason I left Facebook. Another reason I left was confusion over the term “interact.” It just seems that much of Facebook is not “interaction.” It’s short anecdotes that people comment on. That’s not interaction. Interaction is...

A Farewell To Facebook, Reason #1: Friends

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series A Farewell To FacebookRecently, I deleted my Facebook account. Deleted. Completely.1 When I did this, many friends and family expressed surprise, sometimes outright frustration, that I would leave Facebook. According to them, there were a number of reason I should not have left, but primary among them was that I’d be eliminating that important way to communicate with me...

Today, I Bought an iPad

I remember this day 25+ years ago, when my mother came home with it. It was a box with a silver keyboard looking thing that said “TI 99/4a.” That big, blocky hulk of a purchase that was one of the best decisions of my mother’s parenthood. She wasn’t always the best role model, my mother, but this decision was superb. It came with intent, a reason: She told us that she couldn’t afford...

Free WiFi is Dangerous

I’m gonna cut to the chase, and since this is a blog read by primarily non-technical people,1 I’ll lay this whole thing out in a non-technical way: Using your laptop, phone, or iPad with free WiFi is dangerous as hell. I know, you love your free wifi. You love being able to post your whereabouts on Facebook, and constantly connect to your email. Trust me, I do to. But all this free wifi comes with a...

Google, Fold.it, & Cyberspace: You are a computer

This is something that should scare you. This is something that should thrill you. At the very least, this is something that should make you think. It should make you think about what you do and who you are. More importantly, it should make you think about what you are, because you are certainly not what you think you are. You see, to a great extent, you are what you do- and what you do is process information. You,...

John Metta: An Intentional Brand

I recently spend some money on something frivolous. Branding. I, John Metta, a person living in a small house in Hood River, have a logo. I actually worked with a graphic artist who specializes in branding to create “The John Metta Brand” Seriously. Yes. Yes, I know. The Branding of Mettadore The obvious question, and one I would’ve asked a couple years ago is this: Why should I brand myself?...

Surface Tension, Cat Spit, & Friends

Here’s a story. It’s apropos of nothing, but I’ve been too busy to write enough here, so I thought this would make people smile. I could go on and on about how it’s a story of Social Networking, and how sometimes the world is a better place because we’re closer, or at least more able to contact people for random bits of meaningless and make friends. It could be a story about how...

The Death Of Software & Media

Here’s an announcement, for all you geeky types out there: I’m finished posting geeky stuff like mathematics, programming and social media on Positively Glorious! and phasing out the Software & Media category here. I will henceforth only post those topics on Mettadore.com. Why? Because I have a large number of people who read Positively Glorious! because of my writings on topics non-geek topics, and...

Making Sociable More… Sociable

I’ve been using the Sociable WordPress plugin for a while now. It’s a plugin that gives instant links to various social media sites, to help you spread your bloggy goodness around the world. One thing that I love about this plugin is the fact that it shows a tagline before the list of links (just look to the end of this post for what I’m talking about). For me, this tagline has become something of...

Head Smacking In Scala: XML Parsing

I program in a lot of different languages, everything from C and C++ to Awk and Sed, Visual Basic and ASP to PHP and Javascript. I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to languages, but the main one for the past 10 or so years has been Python. Python is the language that I automatically turn to when I say “I need to do ${X},” where X is any given task that does not require a UML diagram...

Reactivating Theme and Plugin Editors in WordPressMU

It’s like camping with a Therm-a-Rest. They tell you not to blow into it. They say it’s important to just let it sit and it will self-inflate. Don’t blow it up. That’s bad. But everyone does it. It’s the same with the WordPress core. They say “Don’t hack core,” but everyone does it. Well, almost everyone. Actually, maybe just one or two of us. Anyway, I’d never...

Migrating from WordPress to WordPressMU, Part II

This is the second part of a series on migrating a site from a single installation WordPress blog to a WordPressµ multi-user implementation. It assumes you have everything installed and have taken the steps in part 1 of the series. If you’re not interested in managing WordPress systems then move along. There’s nothing to see here.So, now we’ve done all of our preparatory work, we’re ready to...

Migrating From WordPress to WordPressMU (without wildcard subdomains)

Recently, Positively Glorious! had a major failure and I eventually migrated everything from one blog to a WordPressµ installation. This allows me to host multiple blogs on one installation and save the time of maintaining the 11 blogs I was previously pulling my hair out over. Later, a friend read about my experience and thought about doing the same thing and I told her I’d get details to her, and then I...

This one’s really going to get me into trouble

Okay, people. I know you have the power to change the world now, but sometimes you want to change the world into something that’s just really dumb. The current explosion of social media outlets sure has its problems. Well, more correctly, it has issues that we have not yet had time to process in such a way that those issues are truly incorporated into our culture.1 Witness, for instance, the Facebook...

Need An Open Source Programmer Or Two (Beginners Welcome)

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Rediviva Magazine on a special (somewhat secret) community project.  We’re getting closer to a possible launch and I’d like to get some more people involved so I thought I’d put the word out there to see whether there are any local programmers interested in working on it with me. Feel free to pass this around. Overview Ideally, I’d like...

Snow Leopard & AFP: Access The Volume And Files Locally

This is a quick write-up on an error I’ve been having with my MacBook and a drive connected to Airport Extreme. It’s really only here so that Google will index it and the info will hopefully be one step in a solution for others with the same problem. The issue is with my Free Agent drive when connected to an Airport Extreme via USB and accessed with my MacBook Pro, running Snow Leopard, using an AFP...

How The Web Was Won

Rant meter: HIGH This is a bit of a rant centered around a piece of recent news that seriously bugs me. Actually, it’s not the news itself that bugs me, it’s the truth that the news represents. The truth that the Web basically sucks. The news was detailed in an Opinion column in Nature about a new “Massively collaborative mathematics” project. Called “The Polymath Project,”...

Time-based Visualization With Rose Diagrams

I love my job. Not everything about it. Having my hours cut to 20/wk is hard on the finances. Working primarily in Excel is often enough to make me want to carve my eyes out with a fork. And I know that it’s likely that it’ll be gone in a year from now, since it’s a contract with The Army Corps. Sure, there are downsides. But fundamentally, it’s a really good gig. My working conditions are...

When Is An Average Meaningful?

So, as a continuation of this series on azimuths1 I offer the final question. In the original post, I mentioned that the entire purpose of my generating the rose diagrams was to visualize my data. I was exploring the averaging of angles and asking the question: “How does one do that?” and, more importantly: “Does the average mean anything?” It turns out that the second question is no easier...

Wow! Fully Functional Rose Diagrams with Google Chart!

Last week, I created an algorithm to generate a pseudo-rose diagram using Python and the Google Chart API. The diagram gave a decent “rough view” of azimuth data so that I could see at a glance the realism of my given azimuth average. Because I’m working in Python 3.0, I couldn’t use the host of great plotting libraries out there, so I had to roll my own. It worked, but I needed to make it...