it’s no secret that
parallax

has been withering on the vine for quiet some time. originally, i
had intended the site for “guest” bloggers. exactly one of you
might remember way back in the day when kristine posted on
environmental and sustainability issues. but unfortunately she
didn’t have the stamina for daily blogging and eventually gave up.
after collecting dust for a while,
matt

started posting on design and usability topics, but that didn’t
last long either.

so, i’ve finally taken back control of
parallax

and decided to try and experiment that i’ve been wanting to do for
a long time. the
parallax

posts are now automatically generated from text harvested from
“the vast wasteland”

. as of today, the dataset is the entire archives for
ex_machina

which go back almost 4 years. the initial results are promising and
somewhat amusing with almost no tuning of the scripts or massaging
of the generated content.

while i’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, it was
after seeing the
markov blogger
code

that i decided i should start playing around with the idea. i decided to
experiment with
colin frayn’s

excellent
random sentence
generator

because, well, i’m lazy and it required less up-front work for me to
get running. after doing more tuning, i think the next task will be
to figure out how to get it keep links, like the markov blogger.
and then i’ll fold in support for automated posting to blogger, so
i can run it in the background at random times through the day.

why do this? well, i’ve got a lot of content sitting around and
i’ve been wanting to do something with it that’s more fun than the
“on this day 3 years ago” type of stuff. and isn’t everyone
interested in

computational linguistics

?