Ralph Embree

Many people consider it a no-brainer that a higher minimum wage is a boon to all those at the lower end of economic productivity. But is this truly the case? If all raises are a gain, why not raise the minimum wage to higher than even a CEO; splendor and prosperity to all! Well, no, of course not. We all know that wouldn’t work. What, then, can we determine is a reasonable wage for these workers? [Read More]

Feminism has been presented as an uprising against the tyrannical forces of male domination. Indeed, little else can seemingly be expected from putting a naturally more powerful and forceful sex in the positions of familial and political authority. It is an oft-repeated maxim that power corrupts and those that seek power degrade more easily. How then can the “weak” be protected? 1 This is an extremely important question. Many women fear even to walk alone at night. [Read More]

My website is live. I have https; I have e-mail. It wasn’t simple, though. I started out probably almost a year ago with Tumblr. I had the domain https://ralphembree.tumblr.com which worked fine, but that isn’t a very nice name. I looked up how to get a free domain name and soon discovered http://dot.tk. I had a little trouble with that one; I accidentally registered http://ralphembree.tk without actually setting it to Tumblr’s servers. [Read More]

About a month and a half ago, I started work on a chat bot for Stack Overflow. The name was chosen by looking up Latin words related to chat. I wanted to get a Latin word for chat bot, but I guess the language went stale before such things existed. Loquitor is command-based. One can’t do something like @Loquitor: help because it isn’t smart enough to figure out when a ping is meant as a ping or just a mention, like @zondo: You should add blah blah to @Loquitor. [Read More]

Running Loquitor on Heroku isn’t really hard. I created a Github repository that makes it relatively easy (forked from xrisks’s repository). That repository includes runner.py, which is the file that sets all the Loquitor instances in motion. To interact with Heroku from your computer, you will need to install the Heroku CLI. The official instructions are here. Once that is installed, give it your credentials with heroku login. The first thing to be done is to create a Heroku application (You must be logged in. [Read More]

A few years ago, my brother had running on his computer what is called a VNC server. A VNC server is a Linux program that sends graphics to a port on the computer. That way, another computer can access that port in a VNC client and see whatever graphics you put there. Usually, the VNC server gives a whole desktop session. Now I have my own desktop computer that I like to access remotely, but I don’t like the idea that anyone on the network can access it. [Read More]

When I run Loquitor, I use a server that I access with SSH (http://bitcoinshell.mooo.com). On that page, it says to use screen to get something to keep running after the SSH session ends. I had never before used screen, but I found it to be quite useful - so useful, in fact, that I installed it on my own computer and made it run automatically in my .bashrc. Well, it runs only when the shell is from SSH, not a normal terminal. [Read More]

At the heart of Loquitor, it runs by signals. When a message is posted, a signal is sent which runs a function. If that function determines that the text in the message is a command, that’s another event. The Command signal is sent and also a more specific signal such as Command-test. It’s usually the more specific one that has a function attached to it which handles the command. The original ChatExchange library has only one function to handle signals: Room. [Read More]

Born at the turn of the millenium, I am definitely a young buck. But as a homeschooler and a (previously) avid reader, I’ve had a larger than usual exposure to philosophical topics that interest me. Having worked at an equestrian facility since the age of 11 and then in HVAC since the age of 17, I’ve had a strangely broad experience in manual labour. Programming since 14 with a fascination for networking and software development, my “handy” side can also be foreshadowed by the nerd in me. [Read More]