Today is the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, which is important, but far too long for the post title. So instead, in the United States, I’ll point out that tomorrow is Election Day. If you’re in the United States and haven’t done so already, please vote.

People waiting to vote

Voting in the United States is plagued with difficulties that often make it seem like it’s not worth the trouble, from apportionment to party politics to overt voter suppression of all sorts to the national-level gerrymandering of the Electoral College itself. But if you don’t vote—regardless of whether you think you’re protesting or starving the system of attention—you’re giving up your voice to people who don’t have your interests at heart, so there’s no chance of getting the changes you want, period.

That said, I’m going to hope for the best over the next week and just talk about the things I’ve worked on, for a bit.

Oh, and November is apparently National Blog Posting Month. I’m not going to try to post every day, like some people do. But I will encourage readers to start your own blogs. You may not think that you have anything original to say, but you are the only person who can speak from your perspective.

Replybrary

My first Twitter-bot, @replybrary is live, after I finally added the code to extract keywords from the messages sent to it and using that to decide how to reply.

If you’re interested in hearing about the details of how it works, you might want to read my post from Wednesday on the design. But in short, the code is easy, but getting everything set up to run the code on the Twitter side can be a bit tedious.

I also modified the code slightly, specifically making sure that the bot never tries to send a message that’s longer than 280 characters minus the URLs.

Drakes

As I mentioned when I wrote about the book, I had some minor trouble with errors in the text. So, I made what obvious edits I could find and submitted a pull request.

Next

I’ll probably add logging to Replybrary before actually unleashing it on the public, and I’m sure that it’ll need a couple of adjustments after that.

Otherwise, I should really get back to work on Uxuyu and other projects.

Credits: The header image is wainting line at El mourouj (sic) by Wael Ghabara, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.