According to this comp.lang.py thread, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a jolly good read, the spiritual predecessor of Concepts Techniques And Models Of Computer Programming. The advantage of SICP over CTAMCP is that whilst the latter is on my Amazon wishlist, the former is freeeeeeeeeeeee!
Also, Python is now available on Nokia S60 phones. And so it begins.
By the way, Gimboland got hit by comment spammers yesterday – I noticed about 20 minutes before going out for the evening. D’oh. Anyway, was a cool night but I haven’t fixed fings yet, so comments, like risoles, is orf.
And a little later… Right, comments are back on, but I have to approve them – what a drag. Had to upgrade to the latest MT to make this worthwhile but hey ho, hopefully that’s it for the spammers.
Yo. It is 2005. Welcome. I trust that you all had a suitably adequate, if not positively acceptable, Christmas break. Ours was excellent – relaxed and peaceful, and the vegetarianism was not an issue, although Mum’s classic meat & potato patties were sorely tempting. In the end I decided, in the spirit of my esteemed friend and teacher Markus, to make a Christmas Eve exception for this one traditional treat.
We returned to Swansea in time for New Year’s Eve, which I usually find singularly disappointing. Lots of build-up and expectation of a good time but in the end, I’ve tended to find myself feeling flat, let down with the whole thing and melancholy at what was missed in the previous year. However, my life has changed a lot of late, and 2004 was, quite frankly, my best year yet. I got married, had a fantastic 30th birthday, found a wonderful yoga teacher, and many other great things happened too, some of which were so long anticipated that it’s fair to say I feel different: reborn. So melancholy was not an issue, and in the end we had a really good night by just chilling out and “being fabulous” with friends. A little make up may have helped too. Photos are here (taken with my shiny new hand-me-down digital camera), with selected highlights below. Since I haven’t sorted out a better gallery system yet, if anyone wants to comment on any of these photos, do so here, I’d say. Ta.
So there we have it. Back to work tomorrow – I still have a shedload of marking to catch up on before the year’s fun begins, but I think I’m recharged and ready. Resolutions: get that MPhil in the bag, keep up the yoga and start doing it at home from time to time, and spend more quality time in the kitchen. In other words, I’m looking for a year of continued growth. What a hippy.
Beyond that, let’s get on with it. As Simon said, and the Maya before him, may your shoes be forever full of maize.
The Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam, from the good folks who brought you (and more importantly, me) Movable Type.
Given my limited knowledge of the subject, this seems to be a fairly thoughtful and useful survey, and following its advice I’ve installed a number of anti-spam measures on Gimboland. I won’t go into details, but the upshot is that my loyal readership should now be able to comment freely once again, without having to leap through the Hoop of Moderation or to walk the Hot Coals of Registration. All hail.
Here’s an article with lots of interesting things to say about data communication, system testing, and the way modern space exploration works. I may recommend it during CS-244 Data Communication & Computer Networks… Titan Calling – how a Swedish engineer saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Saturn’s mysterious moon [risks].
In short: Cassini is at Saturn, and about to launch the Huygens probe into Titan’s atmosphere (splashdown 14th January 2005). The communication link between Huygens and Cassini was not thoroughly tested before launch. Some thoughtful engineer realised this might be a problem, and after some pushing against resistance, managed to test Cassini’s response to how they expect the signal from Huygens to look. Surprise suprise, Houston we have a problem. Turns out, the original engineers took account of doppler shift in the carrier wave, but not in the encoded data. D’oh! Problem is encoded in firmware, can’t be fixed after launch. Double d’oh! So instead, they’ve altered Cassini’s trajectory to eliminate the doppler shift. Hurrah for Boris Smeds!
TR just put some shelves up in his room. I asked him how they were. His reply:
[18:05] [TR] They still exist, and they still don't have very much on them.
[18:05] [TR] It's like having loads of RAM, but with shelves instead of RAM.
I’m sitting here watching Napoleon Dynamite. It rules. See it. Geektastic and cheesilicious.
A little later… Oh, wow. Don’t miss the bit after the credits. Wow. (And apparently, it cost half of what the rest of the film cost to make…)
The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software [lambda].
Even if this article happens to not be on the money (only time will tell, and figure 1 looks dodgy if you ask me), it’s got lots of interesting things to say about hardware. The “space is speed” anecdote about the compiler is particularly cool and bears waffling about in a lecture some time.
We desperately need a higher-level programming model for concurrency than languages offer today.
Over the last year or so I’ve had a growing feeling that this might be the case. Not because of hardware, but because of my teaching and research experiences. On one hand I’ve been teaching Java, and realised that while multi-thread programming is easier than ever in mainstream languages (basically thanks to Java and C#’s built-in support for monitors), it’s still pretty clunky, and harder than is truly useful, because ultimately these languages still come from the sequential world. On the other hand, I’ve seen that plenty of people in the CS community have put a lot of thought into concurrency over the last 30 years, and it’s a field which isn’t running out of problems to be solved/ideas to be had. On the contrary, it seems we’re only now starting to get to grips with it. I’m not talking about our understanding of mechanisms such as threads, semaphores, and the aforementioned monitors, but rather the nuttier mathematical details of “what happens if…”, when multiple processes communicate. For example and in particular, process algebra… Now, this is a world I wasn’t aware of before I returned to academia, but it seems it’s starting to permeate into “the real world” – see the article above.
And then, mainly through reading lambda, I’ve learnt of the existence of languages (e.g. Erlang, Oz) where it’s is a (the) central concept. Admittedly, these languages look rather strange to my imperative eyes, but maybe this is the kind of thing we’ll be teaching in the years to come, which should add another interesting dimension to the perennial “discussions” on which language to teach first. Can’t wait. :-)
Swansea University gets “the most powerful computer in UK”. At least, that’s what the Vice Chancellor called it in his email to all staff yesterday. If that’s really true then it boggles my mind that the University’s own announcement is only three paragraphs long, and finishes with “For further information on the launch, click on the banner on the homepage” with no indication as to which banner, or indeed homepage, is being talked about.
Update: the Clinical School’s announcement has much more detail.
The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages by Simon Peyton Jones is now available for download, about a month after I spent a good half a day photocopying Markus’ copy (mainly for chapter 5). :-) Great book, with the sweetest introduction to the lambda calculus I’ve yet come across in for the bargain. [lambda]
Any of my students considering a career in the games programming industry should read this to get an idea of what we mean when we say to them that “it’s very competetive” [null]. Admittedly this account refers to just one company, but there’s a reason why this company operates in this manner. :-)
Andy’s amusing statement of the day (though “Cover me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians” comes a close second) is “Love burns like laser death rays. Of love.” I seem to have difficulty saying it out loud, however. The pic’s quite nice, too.
I’ve been putting off doing this until we were sure we were getting her, but we finally got the letter from the landlords and it looks fairly certain we’ll be bringing Fudge home later this week. Thus, pictures – all at the RSPCA shelter so far, of course.
Green Eggs and Hamlet, featuring “SamIamlet”.
The lost quarto of Hamlet. My scheme blinded them all, as if by fog; But for these medd’ling kids and this their dog.
Hamlet in prose.
All via Ed Friedlander’s “Enjoying Hamlet” page, which also tells us that an anagram of “To be or not to be: that is the question; Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…” is “In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.”
Why the sudden interest in Hamlet, I hear you ask? Well, I just borrowed Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead from Will and thought I’d like to find out about the background since (tragically) I somehow reached 30 years of age without ever seeing, reading, studying, or having any familiarity at all with it. Now that is moderately fixed, but only moderately.
The Rise of American Fascism [rivets].
Looks like quite interesting stuff, with some nice imagery – kids saluting the flag of course, and a 1925 KKK rally in Washington with 400,000 in attendance. But what particularly made me want to link through was the appearance on this Ku Klux Klan poster of that favourite lie of authoritarians everywhere that “No law abiding citizen need fear…”.
A couple of things I had bookmarked elsewhere but wish to bring over here (so I can delete the elsewhere): Spiral Synthesis, Evolution UC-16 knob box, notes on using USB memory devices with Linux, er, that’s it.
This is worrying: an 11-year employee of Waterstone’s is fired because of blogging about the company [lambda]. Ehud at lambda suggests a boycott.
That a book company thinks so little of the primacy of freedom of expression is alarming. I pointed out that Waterstone.s has stated publicly several times in the past that as a bookseller they believe in the freedom of expression and not in censorship. In fact a campaign was mounted a few years back which had banners along the lines of “what did Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot have in common? They feared the power of the written word. Celebrate Freedom of expression with us.” Some folks may recall it. I asked if this was actually meant or was it simply cynical marketing? I was not answered.
Paranoia in Python. No, not the irrational feeling that just because python is dynamically typed it is to be feared – in fact, it’s a port from C of a text adventure game based on the beloved RPG of the same name. Remember, The Computer is your friend.
Andy’s neato app of the day is Unison, for bidirectional cross-platform directory synchronisation. I’ve always used rsync until now, but that’s a big pain if you want to be able to modify both versions of the data. So this is nice.
Found mentioned in the lifehacks log via www.lifehacks.com via Oblomovka via found43. Too much good stuff on the interweb today.
Oh wow… It’s written in Ocaml! w00t!
As of 2pm today, we are sharing our house with a Small Furry Person. She seems very calm about the whole thing, travelled well in the car, has had her first meal, and has designated “under the bed” as her safe spot, perhaps predictably. No vomit so far. She really likes having her head scratched, and seems to purr and chirrup more than miaow.
More on that story later. In the mean time, Simon need not fear, however, for the camera’s battery packed in just in time, and there are no more photos. Yet…
“What’s on my USB?” – super nifty Windows apps you can’t live without, unless you’re a smug French-coffee-drinking Mac User, of course, in which case maybe Bash can tell you what’s cool some time [gamma].
About to publish your next super-marvy kick-ass utility written, of course, in python? Can’t think of a good name for the project? Then you need pyname – a list (three lists, in fact) of English words containing “py”.
Just so I can throw away the bit of paper with their address on it, which has been hanging around since we saw their stall in Rosebank flea market on our honeymoon… Fancy Feet – South African beaded foot adornments.
The ‘Ask Tog’ Bughouse, a list of the most common/persistent/annoying bugs bugs in computing [risks].
In particular, we have The 10 Most Persistent Bugs (with “The macintosh dock”, listed as “confusing a demo with a product – more here) and the pandemic bugs (including, for example, “Double clicking”, “Non-resizable text boxes”, and “‘Please wait’ messages”, which comes under the principle “Thou shalt not bore the user”).
Fom the same RISKS post, we also have the following:
Security D’ohLTs
I’ve been watching security people for years as they’ve slowly increased the security of everything they can get their hands on until any idiot can wander in.
This must be borne in mind if they ever let me loose on teaching a security module:
The goal of security is not to build a system that is theoretically securable, but to actually make it secure! The universities, at least as evidenced by their graduates, are only interested in theory. That needs to change, and change now.
Also, The Airport Experience, written in October 2001 on the confusion of “inconvenience” with “security”.
I particularly liked:
A steel door with a kill zone behind it will stop this latest escalation in its tracks. Even the occasion crazy who manages to sneak aboard a knife is going to be in real trouble. The pilot, from the safety of the cockpit, will simply ask everyone to put on their seatbelt. Then the pilot will do a little flying like back when he or she was in the Navy. A few barrel rolls and the crazy will be on the ceiling, begging for the handcuffs.
Finally, I should perhaps mention that TR, whose opinion I respect, thinks this guy is an idiot. :-)
The Ice Dance Commences – the further adventures of B15A, neatly packaged for your viewing pleasure by Jason Coleman. Nice.
“Prepare to lose your mind” – The Hasselhof Recursion. Marvellous and utterly horrible, all at the same time. Via, of course, popbitch.
(Smug power users may need to reactivate animated gifs in their browsers for full Hof impact.)
Developers have much to learn from Hackers & Painters, a review of Paul Graham‘s book “Hackers and Painters”. Sounds like there’s lots of functional programming evangelism going on here, and it’s interesting to read that Graham asserts:
The programmers you’ll be able to hire to work on a Java project wont be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python.
… particularly because I’ve heard that quote before, but it was Haskell that was being bigged up, not Python. All the same, it’s nice to have my status as a cognoscenti reaffirmed in public. ;-)
Lisp in Web-based Applications sees Graham expanding on what makes Lisp great, if you don’t want to buy the book just yet… There’s a particularly interesting bit about using closures to elegantly solve the problem of HTTP’s statelessness. Quote: “by using closures, we could make it look to the user, and to ourselves, as if we were just doing a subroutine call.” I’ve bolded the important bit: all web apps these days make it look to the user like you’re just doing a subroutine call, but to make it look like that to the developer is much more impressive. Sure, there are mechanisms in Java or whatever, but I love this idea of using closures: so much simpler and more elegant. (Here’s a nice explanation of closures, for the unsure.)
Finally, I disagree that “its hard to find successful adults now who don’t claim to have been nerds in high school”. For my whole life the world has seemed to be full of successful ignorant bullies and deceivers, and I don’t really see any signs of that changing. It’s a nice dream for a geek to have, I guess, and I can see how rising to the top during the dotcom bubble would surround you by enough successful nerds that you might think it was even true.
But who cares about the iniquities of the world when we’ve got shiny shinies like Haskell and Python to play with, eh? :-)
Q: How many Bush Administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?
CVS Branch and Tag Primer, which I think will be an occasionally useful reference until I persuade certain people round here that subversion is better…
I’ve just delivered the first lecture in this year’s CS-228 Operating Systems module, which makes today my kinda second anniversary as a lecturer.
Today was definitely smoother than that first time and was also (I hope) better than last year, too (though I had other things on my mind then, to be fair…). It was certainly more fun and relaxed, which always helps.
I am celebrating by drinking coffee and feeling knackered, probably because yesterday I worked from 06:30 to 12:30 and was then kept awake by overloud purring.
Nice overview of cellular automata, via Will.
That’s just one tasty nugget from Cosma Shalizi‘s extensive and apparently ever-growing list of notebooks on various topics (complete with RSS feed).
What is this Linux thing? – TR sorts the odds from the ends. One for me to print for my Operating Systems class, I reckon, assuming I can persuade the person who owns the copyright. Oh, wait.
Bit of a profile of Chris Morris in The Observer – apparently he’s involved in the long-awaited Nathan Barley series.
On Tuesday, Fudge will have been with us for three weeks. She seems to have spent most of the intervening time trying to stop people using their laptops, killing dangerous pieces of string, having her head scratched, pretending she wants to go outside, not going outside, coughing up the occasional hairball, ignoring the water in her bowl, drinking water from taps, chirruping, meeping, and even, when absolutely necessary, miaowing.
Very occasionally she freaks out completely on catnip and bombs around the place at 90mph, growling like the little girl in The Exorcist. This is particularly impressive given her gammy back leg. To think that for a while we weren’t sure if she was even capable of jumping up onto the sofa…
Anyway, here are some photos, just for Simon. Favourites below.
More iceberg news, with an update from the horse’s mouth.
Today I managed to use the word “defenestrated” in casual conversation over coffee. Gladly, I was with people who appreciated just what an unusual opportunity this is, and there was much rejoicing.
Mozilla Calendar in Firefox continues to be rubbish. I’ve been (reasonably) happily using Firefox quite some time now, and have been generally happy with it. I’ve also been using the Mozilla Calendar plugin for quite a while to keep track of my day to day activities. It’s almost usable. Sure, the rendering is pig ugly, and sure, it’s unresponsively slow, and sure, there’s no easy way to change which calendar file an event lives in (cut-and-paste seems to be the way to go, except when it decides not to work). But hey, it’s free, it’s early days and I guess I could live with those peccadillos.
Lately, however, I’ve wanted to share calendars with Bash, who joyously delights in the smooth love that is iCal under OS X every day. Cue research into setting up a WebDAV server and setting up remote calendars. It is, of course, easy to do in iCal and just works. It is, of course, a complete pain in the arse to do in Firefox and (so far) just doesn’t work.
There are pages online which tell you what to do. Their instructions don’t work, and in fact don’t match my experienced reality. Some of them tell you the subscription URL should start with “http://” not “webdav://” – wtf? Most of them tell you you’ll need to enter a username and password, but I never get prompted for one – wtf?
But the cardinal sin, the Unforgivable that is committed by Firefox’s Mozilla Calendar plugin, is this: it fails silently.
Here ye, students of code: failure must never be silent.
It is stupid and baffling that my experience is as follows: a) tell Firefox I want to subscribe to a remote calendar; b) give it a name and type in the URL of the calendar (eg webdav://server.example.com:portno/path/foo.ics); c) click OK; d) there is no further feedback, but I get a new calendar in my list – a calendar which contains no data; e) if I open that calendar’s settings, the remote URL is blank. In the words of “Jerry Springer: The Opera”, WTF? WTF? WTFFF?
OK, so I just upgraded both Firefox and the Calendar plugin to the latest version. The only change I see is that everything’s running even slower.
Why is it the fate of web browsers to bloat until useless? I thought Firefox was supposed to be lightweight? What reason is there for its terrible performance? How is it supposed to take over the world on that basis?
If anyone can tell me what I’m doing wrong, I’d love to hear it. Otherwise, I’m going to give the ludicrously pre-alpha Sunbird a try, but I don’t hold out much hope that it will be better, or indeed any different at all. :-/
Wow. I’ve just worked out that I’ve done an 84 hour week during the last seven days. No wonder I have a cold.
This rolling total may have increased by Wednesday: watch this space!
Holy crap on toast – once again, Google rules the world. [null]
w00t… I’ve been at work solidly for the last 24 hours, and counting. Probably won’t be able to stop until about 5pm, which would make a 32 hour day, bringing my total for the last week to the big ton: a 100 hour working week, ladies and gentlemen.
Shame I don’t get overtime, isn’t it?
XTC Radio kept me going through the night – it rawks, but y’know, in a ravey way.
Underwater gnomes considered harmful (also here) [null].
Wastwater’s a really beautiful but incredibly imposing place. And I am reminded that I have a couple of films of Lake District photos I really should upload some time…
File under “could be useful to me some time”: python wrapper for TCL’s Tablewidget.
Looking back over my diary, I’ve just noticed something my Mum said on Boxing Day while we were staying with them:
“… like you get if you go swimming in chloroform.”
A parent’s primer to computer slang – Micro$oft kindly bringing the cliched “is your kid acting strangely? MAYBE THEY’RE ON DRUGS!” school of parenting into the Internet age.
… information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short
Well it’s sure as hell not commonly referred to as “information-age slang”, that’s for sure.
Rules of grammar are rarely obeyed… Mistakes are often uncorrected
Well durrr. We are talking about teenagers here, after all. :-)
Interestingly, no mention of pr0n, however – which seems odd given that (as everyone knows) it’s what the Internet is best at, and WE’RE TALKING ABOUT TEENAGERS HERE!
Update 2005-02-19: Hmmm, pr0n is there now (misspelt), but I’m fairly convinced it wasn’t there before, and Bash (who sent me the link) agrees. Either I am/we are a numpty and missed it first time round, or someone at M$ reads Gimboland. Come on readers, which do you think is more likely? ;-)
Update 2005-02-22: I’m informed (see the comments!) that they’ve corrected the spelling mistake. Gimboland clearly rules the waves. :-)
Here’s an interesting Guardian story about an autistic savant who’s unusually able to discuss, analyse, and explain his worldview. Fascinating.
The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”
Zoomdemo – a large (8Mb) Flash demonstration of (part of) how THE, The Humane Environment should work. THE, now renamed “Archy” is Jeff Raskin‘s answer to all our HCI woes. Interesting stuff: no tabbing or linking, but lots and lots of zooming in and out. It’s not as smooth an experience as it should be because of limitations of Flash (it is just a demo, after all), but I like the way you zoom in on something then discover, sat next to it, a tiny something else to zoom in on later… [risks]
Discussion of/tips on imaplib, Python’s IMAP handling library.
Two goodies via popbitch: Hunter S Thompson’s last column, on the joys of “shotgun golf” with Bill Murray, and (don’t miss this) a teaser trailer for A Scanner Darkly.
I read the book for the second time lately and it was every bit as good as I remember – especially the end. Judging by the trailer (which is always a bad idea), they might not have screwed it up too much here… I was dubious when I saw the word “Keanu” (surely Johnny Depp would have been better), but at least he’s genuinely animated in this setting. ;-) And Robert Downey Jr as Barris, Woody Harrelson as Luckman, and (yay) Winona Ryder as Donna – that could work. The scramble suit looks pretty cool, too. So: so far so good. The only thing I didn’t like was that tagline: “In seven years, everything you do will be recorded.” Well, no, see, only if you’re under observation by narcs. Anyway, we’ll see.
It’s about time someone did this [null]. Think it’s a bit late for me: I might have actually bought/built one five years ago but now I don’t have time for making music, and if I do have time, can’t be arsed with soldering irons any more… Still, I must admit, I am drooling just looking at it. Very sexy box.
365 days ago today…
Only three more years to go until our first anniversary. ;-) If they’re anything like the last year, well, they’ll be great. Thanks again, Bash – you r0x0r d00d.
calc2latex – OpenOffice macro for turning macros into LaTeX tables. Makes creating LaTeX tables a snap, apparently. Only one problem: you have to use OpenOffice. ;-)
In other news, Jorn is back.
In other other news, I have a strange urge to put a “Do Not Resuscitate” sign on my door.
More big news from the Gimblett family… Just under a fortnight ago, Amelia Elizabeth landed on planet Earth. Big Bro Col sent some photos through, and it’s high time I uploaded them. Thus, ladies and gentlemen, meet my niece. Now cue the cheerleaders, or to put it another way, congratulations Colin & Caitlin!
I wear the Möbius belt!!! [tr]
Reminds me of the time when I was undergrad (doing joint computing/pure maths), and our geometry lecturer turned up wearing this most outlanding waistcoat, light blue with enormous lapels which reached right across the collar, and tapered all the way down to the bottom of the waistcoat. It was, we all agreed, a rather odd style statement for an otherwise extremely tweedy lecturer.
However, all became clear near the end of the lecture, when he explained that this particular garment had been lovingly crafted to order by his wife, and consisted of two Möbius strips stiched together in such a way as to create a garment with only one surface and only one edge. Yes indeed, the man was wearing a (very seventies) Möbius waistcoat.
I’ve been meaning to put this on the front page for a few weeks now… As pointed out by Krag Wad, if you’re in the UK (or Europe in general), then map24.com is a darn nifty map site a la google maps only different. In particular it’s got a very nifty zoomy-inny-outy interface, and does fun thinks like temporarily zooming out if you hold down an arrow key to scroll, which gives you a nice “whooooaaaah, I’m flyyyyyyyiiiiing” kinda experience. You usually overshoot your goal when doing this, however – they should stop and drop as soon as you release, if you ask me. Anyway, it rocks – check it out.
Looks like it’s time I started following Bruce Schneier’s weblog…
Outsourcing goes to the next level: research & design – suddenly the west does not, in fact, lead the world, technologically?[robot]
Business Week reports that practically overnight large percentages of cell phones, notebook PCs, digital cameras, MP3 players, and personal digital assistants are produced by original-design manufacturers. Business Week quotes an executive of a Taiwanese ODM: “Customers used to participate in design two or three years back. But starting last year, many just take our product.”
… The design and engineering teams of Asian ODMs are expanding rapidly, while those of major US corporations are shrinking. Business Week reports that R&D budgets at such technology companies as Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, Ericsson, and Nokia are being scaled back.
Bad news for the future, if you ask me.
Update 2005-03-20: though of course, consumer electronics isn’t the only metric of an economy’s health or a country’s ability to dominate, and I’m sure the US hi-tech weapons industry ain’t outsourcing so enthusiastically… ;-)
Gimboland may be quiet for the next two weeks. I’ll be spending most of this week at BCTCS 2005 in Nottingham (speaking at 2:50pm on Wednesday: wish me luck), then I’m off to China from Saturday to Saturday, persuading people to come do Comp Sci at Swansea ‘cos it’s great. I’ll probably have net access at BCTCS, though not much time; in China I doubt I’ll have enough of either.
Today was nice. We went to Rhossili for a while, confused 5 and 6pm (mistakenly thinking the clocks had gone forward without us noticing), then went and saw Constantine at the flicks. It was jolly good fun, and an absolute delight to see Tilda Swinton looking foxy as ever in another sexually ambiguous role, which was cool, having happened to watch Orlando the night before.
On Friday night, a group of us went to eat at a restaurant called 698, here in Mumbles. The food was good, but with annoyingly trendily small portions, and it was pretty expensive. We could have lived with that but the service was atrocious. I mean, I understand that there is a school of thought which says waiting staff should be low key and not bug you too much, but I think the idea is that they keep an eye on you and you ignore them. Unfortunately at 698, unless you wanted to shout “oy! garcon!” (which I didn’t), it was a case of desperately watching them, trying to catch their eye, while they ignored you with quite admirable resolution, even while walking close by. The no tip numpties.
Well, BCTCS 2005 was fun. An entirely positive experience in fact, I would say. I met lots of interesting people, staff and students alike, heard lots of interesting and mind-bending papers, and ate some great food. I made it to breakfast every day, miraculously. Oh yes, and I gave a short talk on my current research, and wasn’t booed off the stage or anything, despite being thin on theoretical content.
Will will, of course, have some marvellous photos. Until then, here are some blurry snapshots of a few of the participants.
(Update 2005-04-28: Will has published.)
What the World Bank is for and why Wolfowitz is the natural choice to head it. [robot]
you_smell.py, and other programming for kids links [python-daily].
Interesting observation: tinyurl considered harmful, at least if you care about URL-based phising attacks.
I’m a little late on the uptake here – didn’t read RISKS while at BCTCS or in China.
How can Smile call themselves “The Internet Bank” but not provide any facility for downloading electronic copies of your statements?
In fact, even worse, the statements don’t even have a running balance on them, and old statements have a different format from the latest statement!
Yes, I’ve complained about this to them. They said thanks. Bet it doesn’t change by the end of the year…
Lib Dem This Time – Brian Eno argues (as he has for the last ten years) that it’s time for the Lib Dems to take over from the Conservatives as the opposition in the UK.
Powered by Mambo, I note.
It was nice to see that the government’s plans for ID cards have been dropped, but if you want another reason not to vote Labour, it’s that they plan to reintroduce the plans should (when?) they win the election in May.
It’s not that I’m ideologically opposed to ID cards: in an ideal world, yes, they’d be a good thing and ordinary people would have nothing to fear. However, this is not an ideal world, and I have zero faith in the government’s ability to implement them properly. The IT infrastructure will be critical and as identify fraud becomes more and more popular, a single ID card is an obvious target. The UK has an appalling track record when it comes to large public sector IT projects – whether developed in-house or outsourced to the so-called experts, who then deliver late, over budget, or not at all. It’s just a recipe for disaster.
But don’t believe me: believe the London School Of Economics [schneier].
The Report concludes that the establishment of a secure national identity system has the potential to create significant, though limited, benefits for society. However, the proposals currently being considered by Parliament are neither safe nor appropriate. There was an overwhelming view expressed by stakeholders involved in this Report that the proposals are too complex, technically unsafe, overly prescriptive and lack a foundation of public trust and confidence. The current proposals miss key opportunities to establish a secure, trusted and cost-effective identity system and the Report therefore considers alternative models for an identity card scheme that may achieve the goals of the legislation more effectively. The concept of a national identity system is supportable, but the current proposals are not feasible.
Via Will, a Guardian article on Hans-Joachim Roedelius, one time Cluster member and jamming buddy of His Enoship. Having spent this morning lounging in bed soaking up Music For Airports and Neroli as I lounged around in bed this morning, this is all very timely. I haven’t heard any Cluster, but may have to now.
Update 2005-04-10: Just in case the reader missed it, I was lounging around in bed yesterday morning.
In November 2001, I went to China and walked on the Great Wall. On Easter Saturday this year, I flew out there again, to spend a week visiting Universities telling the students there that Computer Science in Swansea rocks, which of course it does.
It was a very busy trip: lots of travelling, lots of public speaking, lots of meeting Important People, and lots and lots of Chinese food – w00t. Donkey was eaten at one point. Specifically, it was the donkey from Shrek. Very tasty, and my chopstick fu is now at level five.
It was very much a Work trip; there wasn’t much time for sightseeing or recreation, but we squeezed in a bit: on the Sunday we arrived, we saw the Summer Palace and the China National Acrobatic Circus, and on the last day I was taken to the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, which I’d highly recommend if only for the chance to make a huge bell go CLONNNNGGGGGG!
I took 350 photos, the best 94 of which are here. And here are my personal faves:
Python course in Bioinformatics – an introduction to Python and Biopython with biological examples.
www.picturesofwalls.com – in fact seems to be mainly concerned with graffiti on walls rather than just being pictures of the walls themselves, which I found slightly disappointing; gladly, the graffiti is good [rivets].
Good.
NetworkX — graph creation, manipulation, rendering, and other funky stuff in Python. Looks like a nice toolkit for working with graphs, basically. Check the screenshots for “mmmm” and tutorial for “ooooh”.
(By the way, this is graphs in the “nodes and edges” sense, not the “plot y vs x” sense, for which, see gnuplot/gnuplot.py or (looks much better!) the pure python and very funkilicious matplotlib.)
Strange things apparently happening with broadband provision in the Land Of The Free – ISPs and monopoly interests buying legislation to prevent cheap local community wireless networks undercutting them [robot].
Interesting, isn’t it…? If market forces were the only factors at play here, the telcos and ISPs would be losing this battle. But instead, the market is self aware, and sufficiently successful companies can modify the environment in which they must operate. Time to ask again, if aliens arrived tomorrow, what would they consider to be the dominant life form on the planet? People? Cars? Or companies?
For reading text documents on my shiny newly-acquired Palm Tungsten C, CSpotRun, which seems really good, and notes/utility for converting to the right format.
Also, Coldsync Conduits, for syncing from Unix.
Mentat Wiki – “exploring ways to become a better thinker” [43folders]. Looks like a treasure trove of mental mental stuff.
Who would want to teach in a UK school today? [robot]. Channel Five documentary on Wednesday…
‘The way teachers’ authority has been eroded is key,’ she said. ‘It is not simply that there is no respect for teachers or authority but that the children are actually in control of the schools. They own them and the teachers have no power to take that control back.’
Thomas illustrates her point with an incident when a boy walked out of her class during a lesson. ‘If I tried to stop him leaving by taking his arm, it would have been his word against mine that I hadn’t abused him and I would be suspended while the incident was investigated, which could take three years. My name would be in the local press and my reputation as a teacher would be destroyed. The children are very worldly-wise: they know they have this power.’
You and Your Research by Richard Hamming – I should read this [lambda].
CS-238 students take note: this is Hamming as in Hamming Distance, Hamming Single Bit Code, etc.
Update 2005-05-02: Yep, read it, very inspiring and intersting.
I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Post a secret – another secrets confession site, but this time with postcards, some beautiful, some funny, mostly touching.
Wow – great story, wonder if it’s true.
Wow… CASL gets mentioned on Slashdot, albeit in a comment attached to a predictably religious thread on commenting your code.
Will’s photos from BCTCS 2005 are now online, and as predicted (and predicated), much better than mine.
Wow… I’m just going through some old stuff, folders, notebooks etc. in my office and I discovered some notes from my first attempt to install Linux. The date? 26th August 1999. Crikey, there’s nostalgia. I was working at STS, and had been trapped in Windows Programming Hell since leaving university (in fact, the first few years were DOS Programming Hell, but that’s another story). Knowing there was more to life than this, I bought a terribly underspecced used PC and downloaded Debian (it was Slink, I think). I didn’t do anything useful with it, but it gave me enough knowledge & enthusiasm to land a Linux programming/sysadmin job with Frontier a few months later.
Five years on, I’m back in academia, and Unix is my bread and butter. These days I use gentoo, and I’m thinking it’s about time I gave one of the BSDs a shot, but Debian will always have a special place in my heart, as my first step towards freedom… ;-)
Cheers!
Python notes on statistics, parsing, and screen scraping. Ah, the hell with it: lots more good notes in the diary – something I should watch.
One for the low-level junkies (and yes, you are junkies): the Tory programming language [simon].
The following example loops endlessly, outputting the ascii values 0 to 255:
We will spend more on hospitals!
We will jail anyone not in jail already!
We will spend billions limiting immigration!
We will deport anyone we can deport!
We will abolish schools!
Fantastic.
The definitive Oolong collection – classic. Ooh, and thanks to Rich for the link!
(Oolong has appeared on Gimboland twice before.)
Simon PJ‘s win32 cheat sheet and tips on how to write a good research paper, and give a good research talk.
I note with interest that the tips on giving a talk say “use handwritten OHP slides”, but the tips on writing a good research paper, themselves from a talk, are Powerpoint slides. ;-) I suppose the excuse is, that wasn’t a research talk – it was a research meta talk. Or a meta(research talk). Or something.
An important aspect of security is, of course, physical security. So note ye well these notes on hacking proximity cards [robot]. It’s worrying how simple all this stuff is… Once again we see that just because some technology is widespread or ubiquitous, that doesn’t mean it’s actually at all secure. Sure, a certain amount of effort is required to break these mechanisms, but someone will go to that effort. The trick is to design systems where the amount of effort is astronomical and uneconomical.
My life in one sentence: I would like to be Snufkin, but deep down I know I’m Moomintroll, going on Moominpappa.
Should I be worried that I find the lioness wife in Father Of The Pride attractive?
Via Bash, a slightly long and not-quite-safe-for-work, but really rather good French advert for AIDS awareness.
Quite a good weekend in Gimboville… Excellent company throughout, and rather productive: I spent most of Saturday working on Superstring Sister – have now got more of an idea on how to carry it forward, though of course it probably needs about five more sessions like this before it’s perfick. :) To offset that, I then spent most of Sunday on my MPhil: deconstructing & documenting a Parsec-based parser for a toy “while” language, then starting to work on a prototypical CSP parser. No great shakes, but it’s something, and that’s better than nothing.
Then I arrived at work this morning to find that my 9 o’clock appointment wanted to reschedule, so I now have an unexpected hour in which I can do Something Useful before my 10 o’clock research meeting. Score!
Encryption with Python, including a nice little bit of flamage, and a link to the Cryptography FAQ.
Also interesting: Beautiful Soup, a Python HTML/XML parser which “won’t choke if you give it bad markup. It yields a parse tree that makes approximately as much sense as your original document. This is usually good enough to collect the data you need and then run away.” Nice.
Yet another interesting-looking python project I don’t have time to get into: Solipsis – “a peer-to-peer system for a massively multi-participant virtual world“.
It seems to be pretty much “framework” status, however, so I wonder how much lifting would be required to do anything useful or impressive with it. “ Solipsis is a public virtual territory. The world is initially empty and only users will fill it by creating and running entities. No pre-existing cities, habitants nor scenario to respect…” Ah well, one to file away for possible future student project material, anyway…
The War on Rationality – brought to you by a stork in a messenger cap [null].
Teaching is over, exams are happening, and the office is quiet of students – except for the occasional past paper question from some enthusiastic reviser. As a consequence it’s time to catch up with coursework marking, and start cracking on with whipping systems into shape in preparation for the flood of exam marks which will hit my desk soonish… Avid readers will remember that this was fun in February, and lots of late nights are clearly on the cards. Once that’s over, it’s research-agogo for the summer, hopefully.
Musically, it’s XTC Radio, the mighty Groove Salad, and Cryosleep once again, but also – thanks to Bash’s keen ear – the delightfully named Bobby Friction and Nihal on Radio One. Gawd help me, they call it “urban”. The hell with that, what it is is rawkin’, Mother.
Not much time for blogging lately (working til 2am last night!), but here’s a round up of some crunchy bits from Robot Wisdom of late:
Alan Moore distancing himself from Hollywood adaptations of his works (and DC), click here if you want to know who dies in the next Harry Potter, Javascript myth roundup, nifty favicon tool, piracy on the high seas in 2004, and finally, are the US directly responsible for car bombs in Iraq, in classic Brazil style?
Simon‘s also had some good stuff of late, especially point 1 of this post.
Ho hum, back to it, see you in July or something…
So I guess everyone else has seen this already, but (for reasons stated in my previous post) I missed it until the latest RISKS Digest dropped onto my doormat. Anyway, it’s a nice example of a covert channel, and I was flailing around unsuccessfully for a nice example when I spoke about them in one of my Operating Systems lectures this year (poor preparation on my part), so I should bear this in mind for the future.
Security researcher Colin Percival recently (13 May) announced a security vulnerability caused by the combination of the Hyperthreading and shared cache features of Intel Pentium 4 processors. By carefully measuring the time required for instructions to execute in one thread while the other thread is performing a cryptographic calculation, the secret key can be determined.
(My emphasis.)
Here’s the paper (PDF).
Insightful comment at the end of the RISKS post:
The RISK here is a classic example of relying on underlying abstractions (the hardware memory model) to behave in an ideal manner, rather than understanding their implementations. Many security flaws result from the adversary breaking the veil of abstraction to look at the soft, juicy parts inside. Even when the higher-level model is perfect (or formally verified), the mapping to implementation can hide a multitude of sins.
Indeed. We computer scientists just love abstraction – it’s a powerful conceptual tool which allows us to build very powerful; but when you actually have to deal with reality, rather than some mathematically ideal space, everything suddenly gets very messy and the thick straight lines you drew between the layers turn into fuzzy fractals instead. Or something.
Also interesting, also in RISKS: EEPI 2005, Conference on Electronic Entertainment Policies, Problems, Solutions, held where else but Los Angeles? The call is very carefully worded and I particularly enjoyed “This will not be a place for finger-pointing or name-calling.” I guess the organisers know just how contentious this whole issue is.
Here’s the RISKS post, which is basically the same announcement from the conference web page.
Via smallcool, What is Your World View?
You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.
Cultural Creative 81% · Idealist 69% · Modernist 50% · Existentialist 50% · Postmodernist 44% · Fundamentalist 31% · Materialist 25% · Romanticist 25%
Nice.
While googling for something to do with the unison file synchronizer, I was distracted by The Seymour Skinner page at The Simpsons Archive. Was particularly amused by P.A. announcements. Tee hee, etc.
Alas, no time to linger – I gots coding to do.
In other news, the cat is running around the house like a lunatic.
“Attention everyone, this is principal Skinner. I trust you all remembered to bring in your implements of destruction. Now let’s trash this dump.”
Well, it’s midnight which means today’s been a 16 hour day so far. Must be something about Wednesdays: last week I was here all night, and didn’t go home until about 4 the next day (then watched the best Shakespeare I’ve ever seen: The Comedy Of Errors in the open air in front of Oystermouth Castle with a cast of five – very manic).
Certainly a few hours’ more work to do tonight, but it shouldn’t be an all nighter. You never know, though.
Oh, how I love working on the exam team…
Meanwhile, via Simon, how to de-flea your cat.
Update: going home at 02:34 – an 18.5 hour shift. And no overtime! Yay!
Revenge of the Sith: The Abridged Script [simon]. Who cares about the frickin’ spoilers, this is just as enjoyable as the movie’s gonna be…
I definitely want to learn Ruby this summer, starting as soon as I get this exam team stuff out of the way (or possibly sooner). Here, then, is a collection of resources which I might find useful. I might revisit this post and expand it later as I find new stuff or add thoughts on what’s here. If anyone has anything to add, feel free.
I have already mentioned why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby.
The first edition of Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide is available free online.
Later, like the world and his wife right now, I want to be Rolling with Ruby on Rails. More at the Ruby On Rails homepage.
Then, learn some Javascript and tackle Ajax on Rails.
In terms of reference material…
The Ruby home page.
Ruby Central and the library reference.
RubyGems – CPAN for Ruby, I think?
Ruby Garden looks worth watching and has the Ruby FAQ.
And ooh, RubyForge.
That should be enough to keep me going for a while.
The Google Maps satellite picture of the UWS campus predates the Digital Technium (for now).
Intersting also that we have higher-res of Swansea than of Cardiff. So I can see where I live quite clearly, but not where I used to live. Also managed to clearly pick out the Eiffel Tower (nice shadow!), the Vatican, and the Palace of Westminster fairly easily. Not in Swansea, though. K2 and Everest more elusive, particularly the former. Singapore still at lo-res (nice clouds, however!), but Beijing central high enough for a very clear shot of the Forbidden City. The Summer Palace is still hazy, however.
Simon‘s a cartophile in the true sense but me, I just love maps because of the imaginary journeys they take me on. As such, I’ve been waiting for this all my life. It’s just gonna keep getting better, with more detail, more 3-d, more up-to-date imagery, and better navigation. What an amazing age to live in.
Javascript – LISP with a different syntax?
I’ve been hearing murmurings along these lines from People Who Know, particularly PhD Student People I Know Who Know, one of whom was apparently writing a Tetris clone in Javascript recently. So yeah, this could be good.
Blimey, the Thimblebys are in New Scientist – and where do I spot it byt Robot Wisdom? Jorn, apparently, is unconvinced. On the other hand Andy, who’s seen it up close and played with it, is very impressed.
As it happens, I’ll be in London next week at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, helping demo this very software to the masses. Come and see! (Map here.)
Emergent Chaos – a weblog on “security, privacy, and economics” (via risks). To pick but three consecutive good examples: Equifax CEO says identify theft is epidemic, fingerprint privacy is rubbish (as any fule kno), and the UK government does plan to sell your ID card information. One to watch.
Another one to watch, though less frequent, is Ross Anderson at Cambridge. In particular, check out Chip & Spin to find out why Chip & Pin is increasing fraud, not decreasing it.
On subject of which… Bash & I went out for dinner last night, and we noticed they were taking card payments using a wireless terminal. So out came my Palm Tungsten, and up was fired wiffi, which duly reported no 802.11 signal in the area. “In that case, ” asked Bash, “what’s the terminal doing?”. Answer at Chip & Spin, although you can guess a lot of it.. Obviously without a network connection, it wasn’tt performing any online back-end checks that, for example, I had enough money in my account to cover the bill. So it’s basically the card authenticating itself to the terminal, and authenticating me via the PIN I entered. But what suprised her most was this: if the chip happens to be broken (eg fried), the system should fall back to magstripe – which this particular terminal happened not to support. So what happens then? Answer: no authentication whatsoever. Zero. Nada.
Go read the paper. Seriously. It’s great.
Well, Bash and I are in London for her birthday – lovely day for it.
First we heard of the explosions was at about 10:15, waiting for the lift to arrive in the hotel, when my parents rang. “Are you OK?” “Er, yeah, fine thanks. Whhhyyyyy…?”
The hotel’s on The Strand. Five minutes walk to Trafalgar Square, strangely quiet (especially after yesterdays Olympic crowds), with sirens zooming past constantly. We’re now at the Royal Society, which was our intended first stop on a day to also include St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tate Modern, Tate Britain (via the Tate-2-Tate boat), maybe a shufti at Parliament, and then birthday dinner with London friends in Earl’s Court. Needless to say, most of these plans are on hold just now. St Paul’s to Tate to Tate is all do-able on foot/boat, but to get to St Paul’s we have to get to The City, which might not be a good idea assuming these explosions have an economically motivated component.
It’s been a good week, up to now, though. The show’s going very well and everybody loves the calculator. Having now used it quite a bit, I can definitely say it’s Way Cool and very impressive.
I went to the Science Museum for a bit on Tuesday, mainly checking out the Computer Science, Maths, and Telecoms Displays. I found it very disappointing. The best part is easily the Babbage stuff – difference engines, and his brain – but the rest seemed like it hadn’t been updated for 20 years. The CS stuff was also disappointingly focussed on machinery, but there’s so much more to computing than that, and increasingly so. The computers themselves are far less interesting than what you do with them and how (IMHO) but there was almost nothing on that. There was a fifteen-foot wide display on the history of the British Punched Card Calculator industry (not even general purpose computers!), but only a small card with about fifteen lines of text for Alan Turing! A travesty! Telecoms was not much better, and didn’t seem to have changed at all since I visited it with my eldest brother Mike back when I was eleven. Actually, that’s not true, it had changed: most of it had stopped working.
The bookshop was quite good, though.
Tuesday evening I headed to Greenwich to visit Rich and Em, and meet with a couple of the old Frontier possee, viz Jon and Mark F. This took place in a superb pub in Greenwich – The Union, with a microbrewery and some excellent excellent beers. The “chocolate beer” (stout) was particularly fine.
I spent yesterday afternoon planning what to do for the next three days (now out the window, it seems), then met Bash at Paddington at 7:30, and whisked her to the National Film Theatre for Antenna – a bi-monthly showcase of music videos. Some really good stuff, in particular “Sentimental Journey” by Yuki – very thoughtful and gentle. The place was, of course, full of achingly cool people. :-)
Anyway, think we’re going to have a look round the exhibition now, and I don’t know, maybe stay here all day. Hope everyone reading this is OK and your loved ones are accounted for…
I’m still here, I’ve just been too busy to blog. However, while I’m waiting for ghc-6.4 to compile (that’s my excuse anyway), I thought I’d do a quick blogdump…
I was going to write about my week in London, and a bit about what I’ve been reading lately, but I started by writing the stuff below instead, and now I think that’s enough for one post, so I’ll publish this and follow up with the rest maybe tomorrow or Sunday. (Short version: London fun except bombs, Quicksilver OK, Accelerando completely barmy but getting a bit dull at 40%). Colin, I should warn you that the rest of this post is of the kind you don’t like. The London diary thing might be better. Sorry!
Work’s been truly excellent this week. No students so no teaching, and also no admin for a while too. Some time I need to do some preparation for next year’s teaching, but for the next two months I’m mainly going to be focussing on research at last, aiming to break the back of my MPhil. I made a breakthrough on the parsing side last Sunday (or rather, I cleared up a misconception I’d been harbouring), but have spent this week on a different tack, learning about operational semantics through the magical medium of Python. Specifically, Markus gave me a toy process algebra and its semantics, and outlined the algorithm for turning expressions in the PA into their labelled transition systems, then I went away and programmed it.
It’s been excellent fun, and I got it basically done in no time at all, mainly because I chose to do it in Python. It’s quite remarkable, in fact… For months I’ve been struggling to get anywhere with my research, and it’s been very depressing and making me feel like I can’t hack this stuff. Now I realise it’s just that I’m a complete Haskell newbie. If I was doing my research in Python, I’d probably have finished by now. Alas, I have to do it in Haskell, because of the system we’re interacting with, but it’s encouraging to realise my problems relate to the language/paradigm I’m working in, not some basic failing on my part to understand what the heck I’m trying to do.
Anyway, I’m writing up an article explaining what I’ve done, and either later today or early next week I’ll publish it and my code, so anyone who reads the above and says “huh?” can take a look if they want. (JOn? You reading this? ;-))
Next week is graduation week at Swansea University and I’m acting as a marshall on Monday, which is Science day. So I get to see all this year’s third years do their stuff. With luck and effort, I should be there myself this time next year.
What else is new? I recently made the shift from ion to ion3. Ion’s been by window manager of choice for about three years now, mainly because I can’t be bothered with all that tedious point-and-click move-and-resize nonsense you have to do with windows in most WMs. TR occasionally moans at me that it’s modal but I don’t see it as a problem, it works for me and is extremely keyboard friendly and fast, so I’m happy. But I’ve been feeling behind the curve, and in particular some apps (eg the Gimp) don’t play well with the tiled model – which is why ion3 is nice because it adds optional “float workspaces” which act more like a conventional tedious point-and-click point-and-resize window manager if and when that’s what you need. Making the move was non-trivial because my config files had to be ported to Lua, but now it’s done and I’m very happy with my window manager indeed. Once again, I’d recommend looking at Ion if you’re getting dissatisfied with your Gnome/KDE experience and want to strip things down.
Finally, a couple of Python goodies via the Python-URL: try/except vs if/else in terms of speed (an oldie but a goodie, especially when advocating Python to curmudgeons), and Sparklines, which are kinda weird and kinda cool, but I’ve no idea if they’d actually be useful.
There’s a bit in Brian Eno’s A Year With Swollen Appendices where he’s in Egypt, and a boy rides past on a bike shouting “I am here! I am here!” repeatedly, and Eno dubs this “perhaps the single and central message of humanity”. I’ve always really liked that.
As I sat in the lobby of our hotel in London last week, I mused on the feeling of obscelescence and redundancy. There’s a moment in Accelerando where one of the central characters loses all the computational stuff that augments his senses and mental faculties – he’s reduced to bare meat and a comparatively sluggish consciousness. This leads him (even after he’s fully restored to bright shining augmented posthumanism) to worry a lot about how long he can remain on the bleeding edge. Now, everyone feels this at some point, I believe: the horror (or at least angst) of realising that What Once Was has passed, never to be surpassed or even attained again. The loss of the intellect, the passing of the peak, the fading of the beauty, whatever it is. The fear that all that lies ahead is swimming ever harder, if one can even manage that, only to drift inexorably downstream.
So, a fundamental question is how to deal with this? If all my best lies behind, then what of the future? Naturally, having hit my early thirties, I have somewhat irrationally started to worry at this question myself. It’s absurd I know, but there you go.
The answer, it seems, is just this: to have hope and not worry about it. Nothing more that. For one thing, your best days may actually lie ahead. However, a stronger statement is the following: now is what matters – the past is gone and cannot be changed, and the future is yet to arrive, if at all. The question is not “what have you done?” or even “what would you do?”, but simply “what are you doing?“
As such, I contend that just as “I am here” is the single and central message of humanity, so is “What are you doing?” the single and central question. (Not “where are you?”, I note.)
Of course, the real question is what do I have to do to discuss this with Brian over a glass of wine some time? ;-)
(Aside: it’s so hard to find anything specific in Eno’s book, because you just keep getting distracted – there’s an interesting idea or fact or insight on every page. Given that I’m reading Quicksilver at the mo, this one particularly caught my eye: 16 October. I also asked Anthea how many mature oaks she thought it would have taken to build a top-of-the-line ship in Nelson’s day. She guessed ten. The anstonishing answer (from Brewer’s) is about 3,500 – 900 acres of oak forest. She said, “I wonder what we’re doing now that’s as wasteful as that”. I said it’s still called Defence.)
50 Eno Moments, which I don’t have time to read right now.
Oh my yummy yum yum yummy… [bash]
About time somebody did this. I will, of course, wait for the split/ergonomic version, if only because it confuses and annoys people who try to use my computer.
[robot]
More Robot Wisdom goodies: Feynman/von Neumann US postage stamps, future windfarms (“twelve [offshore] wind farms of 100 units would meet the UK government’s 10% target for renewable sources” – so let’s build 120?), and finally short excerpts from Rwanda genocide accounts book, eg:
Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away. They were killed more quickly, because of their small size and because their suffering was of no use. The babies could not understand the why of the suffering; it was not worth lingering over them.
Chilling. We saw Hotel Rwanda last week, and I gotta say, it was one of the hardest films I’ve ever watched – up there with Threads in terms of visceral human horror, made worse by its reality. Highly recommended.
I’ve got two books on the go at the moment (Potter can wait): Neal Stephenson‘s Quicksilver, and Charlie Stross‘ Accelerando. I’ve just about finished the former, and according to Plucker, I’m 46% of the way through the latter – so perhaps some of the opinions expressed below will change…
These are both science fiction works. The first is unusual for sci-fi in that it’s set (mainly) in the seventeenth century; Newton and Liebniz are key (though secondary) characters, and it seems mainly to be about religious tensions (as you’d expect from the setting), the nascent scientific movement, the nature of money and markets, and a very nascent anti-slavery movement, though I’m not sure where that’s going to go. The second is based around the futurism idea of the Singularity, a supposed point in the future where the rate of change of scientific knowledge and human ability goes nonlinear, basically.
Read the rest of this entry »
As promised, though I’m still working on the shiny LaTeX article which actually explains all this stuff…
From the README:
This is an investigative/learning exercise in transforming process algebraic expressions into labelled transition systems according to their operational semantics, using Python and Haskell.
It started out just as an exercise in operational semantics, using Python because it’s the language I get things done fastest in. That proved interesting enough that I wanted to re-do it in Haskell, which I’m learning and which arguably handles this sort of thing better.
The Python version is more advanced. It includes mu-recursion, which the Haskell doesn’t, and is quite tidy IMHO. OTOH the Haskell is less developed, and in particular the functions for actually creating the graphs could, I’m sure, be improved. Always nice to have some future work to do…
I’m publishing this in case anyone is interested in the code. In particular, it is perhaps useful as an example of:
I’m working on a paper describing the problem, the semantics, and the approaches taken in the two languages, but it’s very much an ongoing WIP and isn’t ready to publish yet.
Homepage for this work: http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~csandy/research/op_sem_py_hs/
Thirty years of research on query languages can be summarized by “we have moved from SQL to XQuery.” At best, we have moved from one declarative language to a second declarative language with roughly the same level of expressiveness.
From The Lowell Database Research Self-Assessment [spotted in Communications of the ACM]
Ad Hoc, Self-Supervising Peer-to-Peer Search Networks – nice paper on a proposed architecture for p2p networks, built on primitives which are so simple they’re obviously right. :-) Abstract:
Peer-to-peer search networks are a popular and widely deployed means of searching massively distributed digital object repositories. Unfortunately, as such networks grow, they place an increasingly overwhelming load on some or all of the participating nodes. We examine how to reduce the load on nodes by allowing them to self-organize into a relatively efficient network, and then self-tune to make the network even more efficient. Unlike previously studied architectures, our “ad hoc, self-supervising” networks avoid restrictions on who a node can connect to or what information can be exchanged. This makes the network topology quite flexible and tuneable. Our results indicate that our ad hoc networks are more efficient than popular supernode topologies for several important scenarios.
The blog of Tim Worstall, who happens to be Will‘s “Uncle Tim”. :-) “Knows economics and can write”, apparently.
The Commentator – super stuff. Thanks, TR.
LOL at Si’s “filmic internal monologue” on Moorland Sheep Hazards – scroll down, or read the whole thing if you have any sense of south-east Wales’ geography, and an appreciation for Si in semigrump mode (mathematicians, that’s like a semigroup, but in steaming blue latex shorts).
Also via Si, some fantastic lateral thinking puzzles.
One of our ex students has created a Javascript VI clone. Well, sorta. I’m not quite sure why, however… :-)
The UKUUG Linux 2005 Conference is taking place right now here at Swansea University. Naturally, I’ve been taking a look.
I skipped the tutorials yesterday, although it sounds like the one on Zsh was quite interesting and in particular showed off lots of shiny things you can do with that. One of the reasons I didn’t go is because, well, I really can’t swap from Bash can I? What would the wife think? Well, it turns out she’s clued in enough that apparently, if Zsh really is that good, she’ll consider changing her name. ;-)
I’m currently missing some talks, but this morning there was a really good one on “Experiences of a large linux deployment in education“. It seems that schools in this country waste shedloads of (taxpayers’) money on IT, paying and re-paying for proprietary software licenses, constantly churning hardware (eg 3 year cycles are typical), usually without real in-house IT expertise. The government’s target is a 1:4 ratio of computers to pupils, which 33% of schools had met last year, but that number is going to decrease not increase because many of those schools have now run out of budget for upgrades they’ll need over the next couple of years. Their installations are expensive, complicated, fragile in the face of “improperly-motivated” students, and require lots of time-consuming installation and maintenance.
The guys speaking this morning went into a school in Felixstowe last September and installed IBM Blade application servers and loads of thin clients running Linux and KDE. They have a Windows 2003 Terminal Server for their legacy Windows stuff. The students don’t resist using Linux – they don’t care, they pick it up in no time – but there’s been resistance from staff, who are only just dealing with Windows. So the staff continue using Windows laptops to admin this stuff, with NX bridging the gap. KDE’s a win for them because it looks like Windows, but also because it’s apparently got a very tight and manageable “kiosk mode” in which it’s completely locked down. Over the 12 months since rollout, the school has had one “tampering” incident to deal with, as opposed to the previous situation of having to rebuild/reinstall one or two boxes per week because of malware or general student breakage. Win.
The thin clients can run on old boxes people are giving away. They heard about someone giving away 40 PIIIs, spent 47 quid hiring a minibus, and went and collected them. A classroom of PCs for 47 quid. The school in question has smashed the 1:4 ratio, and slashed their IT budget by about 30 grand per annum. Using thin clients really has made the system trivial to maintain (they’ve only returned to the school for upgrades and development, not maintenance – the school has an IT guy, but he’s not a Linux guy… It just works.) and easy to expand.
Sounds good to me. Only shame is they’ve only done this on the educational/pedagogical side, not the schools admin/office side, which is apparently much hairier and where fat clients are still, realistically, necessary. Cutter Project for more info.
After that I went to hear about “Adopting a driver – from fixing typos to breaking thousands of machines worldwide” which was a bit more technical (though not hugely), and mainly about the woes of freeform open source development. Interesting, but less of a jaw-dropper than the first.
Then coffee in the Digital Technium atrium – a woefully small space for nigh-on a hundred geeks to drink coffee, talk, and (largely) sit around tapping away at laptops. Shame.
I decided to skip the current session and come here for some work. So I should really do some now, I guess. :-)
/me LOL at the OpenBSD yp(8) man page:
If ypbind cannot find a server, the system behaves the same way as Sun’s code does: it hangs.
Also, /me was very impressed by Tom Cosgrove’s talk earlier on Exploit Mitigation Techniques, describing some of the Cunning Stuff which OpenBSD does to make Mr Script Kiddie’s (or even Mr Mafia Funded Russian Hacker’s) life less fruitful. 2 second summary: Much good use of randomisation, basically… :-)
About a year or so ago, Bash and I opened a joint account with Smile, who call themselves “the internet bank”. Now, perhaps there was a time, long ago, where Smile were ahead of the pack and could justify calling themselves that. Unfortunately, it looks to me like that time (if it ever existed) is long gone, and the only justification for the moniker is that they don’t have any actual physical presence (apart from call centres, of which more later).
Allow me to explain. First, however, I’d like to solicit suggestions about alternatives. Specifically, does anyone know of a UK bank with a decent online service (not suffering from the problems outlined below) but which has an ethical investment policy? Smile is part of the Co-operative Bank, and as such makes that claim, which appeals to us. However, the warm fuzzies are being nullified by their poor service, so if anyone can suggest where to move, I’m all ears.
OK, so: for anyone without the benefit of a year of Smile, allow me to explain why I think they Could Do Better.
Weak authentication upon login.
The login procedure is as follows: you enter your sort code and account number, you enter a secret four-digit code, and finally you’re asked one of about five personal questions (eg “Please enter your significant date”).
The first observation is that only one of these things can really be called “secret”. The sort code/account number are easily found out (eg if I give you a cheque, or want you to transfer money to my account), and the personal questions are obviously only weakly secret. Many people in the world know what the last school I attended was. Many know the first. Other items (memorable names, memorable dates) are the kinds of things that can be guessed.
The second observation is that the secret code is only four digits long. Four digits (0 to 9), not four characters.
I was on the phone to them yesterday, and the chirpy call centre girl I spoke with had the nerve to state that their security was “better than everyone else’s” as if this were incontravertible fact. Well, with Lloyds TSB I have three keys, only two of which I get to choose and none of which are associated with my account. None of them are only four digits long, either. The first key, which is effectively my username, is a nonsensical mix of numbers and letters. Hard to remember, completely unguessable.
The only mitigating factor here is that of course, failed attempts to log in lock down the account – but that’s also the case with other banks, so how is this stronger? Answer: it isn’t.
The third observation is this: hang on, this is a joint account – we both enter the same sort code/account number. How does it tell the difference between us? Answer: with the 4-digit security code of course! It’s not just for authentication, it’s also the username. Nice! And when I get it wrong three times, it locks me out and it locks out Bash! Because it doesn’t know which of us is getting it wrong/being attacked. In the words of The Mighty Boosh: Genius!
Oh, wait. That’s not genius. That’s stupid design.
OK, so enough about logins. Suffice to say, it’s messy.
No downloadable statements.
The next most annoying thing is that statements aren’t available in electronic format for download. Unbelievable but true! This hasn’t been a big problem for me thus far but at some point in the future I will want to do this and it will be annoying to scrape the HTML by hand. I’ve written to them twice about this with no response. To me, this is a no-brainer, especially for “the internet bank”. Yeah, right.
And yet every month they email me telling me my statement “is ready”.
Inconsistent statement formats, and no running total.
Your old statements have a running total. Obviously. Your latest statement doesn’t. In general, they seem to be different things, your latest statement is somehow “special” rather than just happening to be the most recent page of activity. As a programmer, that makes me think “yicky”. But that missing running total is the worst thing about the statements. Awful!
No dates on standing orders.
Obviously when you set up a standing order, you assign a date to it. For example, “monthly, on the first of the month”. But when you edit them, all you see is “monthly”. What the hell? When’s it going? According to Chirpy Call Centre Girl, the way to find out is “look at your statements and look at when the last one went”. a) That’s just lame, and b) What if the first payment hasn’t gone yet? I just have to sit and wait. Rubbish!
Those are the main things have have bent my widgets over the last year. There are other, smaller, niggly things – such as kicking you out if you accidentally hit “Back” on your browser (Lloyds TSB can deal with this – why not Smile?), but let’s leave it there for now. I know it’s going to take months, but I want to to move to something better, and if anyone’s got any good suggestions, let’s hear them. Thanks!
Since I didn’t get very far with writing about the UKUUG Linux 2005 Conference, I refer the interested reader to the Ping Wales coverage: day one (tutorials), day 2, day 3 and their first feature arising from the show, which looks at Cutter Project’s work, and is probably more coherent than my hastily penned efforts.
And the award for “cool name of the day” goes to Milton Tectonidis, who’s a nutrition specialist for MSF according to this piece on how “Plumpy Nut” is saving lives in Niger [robot].
Spotted on the cover of ACM’s “Computing Reviews” (vol 46, number 8):
Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, “intellectual property”, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each new round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.
The above is an obvious truism for anyone paying attention much today, and hardly worth blogging. What’s interesting is that those words weren’t written today – they were written an eon ago, in 1987. It’s from “The media lab: inventing the future at MIT” by Stewart Brand. I find it interesting that this perception existed even back then, before HTTP was invented and the net exploded onto the public consciousness. I also find it interesting that the term “intellectual property” gets quotes around it, presumably because of its unfamiliarity and dubiousness – which don’t think it would today.
Also, from vol 46 number 5:
Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music. — Karl Kraus, “Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths”, 1990.
A month of silence. What have I been doing?
The Linux 2005 conference showed me two things very clearly.
One, I needed my own laptop. I’d been limping along using a departmental Windows laptop shared with another tutor, but I knew that wasn’t going to fly this year because it was tricky enough last year, and our teaching loads have both increased since then. Sitting in a room full of Unix geeks listening to talks about Unix while typing on a Windows laptop made me feel dirty – time to break free.
Two, Linux is getting very messy – maybe it’s time to give the BSDs a try. Another good reason for this is the security module I’m teaching this year – part of that’s gonna cover OpenBSD and the like, so…
Result: one second-hand Dell C600 from eBay, a new battery, a new big hard drive, FreeBSD 6.0 beta 4, and lots and lots of learning. It’s taken a while to get up and running, and the process hasn’t been helped by having to return the hard drive ‘cos it was riddled with errors (but I learnt about SMART, so that was good), and it hasn’t been helped by the metal pins in the right-hand hinge of the laptop screen shearing, necessitating the purchase of a replacement “screen backing” (but I learnt about lapop repair, and how easy it is in this modular age, with the right instructions at least, so that was good too, ultimately).
It’s been fun, but for some reason I haven’t felt in the least like blogging throughout the whole episode. You’d think this would be ideal technical blog fodder wouldn’t you…? Imagine, a whole month of “OK, so video was crashing the laptop hard every time I started vlc, but I spoke to TR and he suggested I use the VESA driver instead of the ATI one and that’s completely fixed it – w00t”. That would have been exciting, wouldn’t it? Well, arguably yes, and arguably it would have helped other people with this same laptop when they installed FreeBSD in the future. Maybe I’ll summarise my experience sometime – discharge my public duty that way. Or maybe not.
Anyway, for whatever reason I was more focussed on actually doing the job than writing about it. I think I’ve also been feeling a bit less like blogging because it’s been suggested to me that the words I write here are not my own; that I only echo others’ thoughts and sentiments without truly reflecting myself. That’s possibly true. Perhaps I don’t want to truly reflect myself in public. I started this blog long enough ago to predate the blogging explosion, and its primary purpose was (and remains) “a big list of links I don’t want cluttering my browser bookmarks”. Any ranting or diarising included was incidental (though yes, there’s been more as time’s moved on). But these days a blog is seen as something more than that, a window on the writer. Having this pointed out to me, that through my window it looked like I had no thoughts of my own, has disturbed me, and I’m not sure how much I want to play. This has certainly influenced my recent quietness. Whether the outcome will be more or less (zero?) opinionating in the future, I don’t yet know.
Having said that, I’m going to give one short, informed, and genuinely “mine” opinion: BSD is very nice indeed. Linux has been feeling increasingly cluttered and messy to me, and FreeBSD (on the laptop) and OpenBSD (on another box which I’m using for various things) are undeniably both clean and coherent in a way Linux never has been and probably never will be. I’m enjoying that. And I haven’t, so far, found anything I can’t do with this system that I could with a Linux distro (or would want to, anyway). Thus, and in summary: It’s good to have finally made the switch.
Python Browser Posuer (formerly “Python Browser Probe”):
… exposes browser functionality at the level of a shell-like interpreter so that testers can quickly write tests in a simple language designed specifically for that purpose. Anyone familiar with a command line should be able to write test scripts for even the most complex web applications with PBP.
Handy. Other approaches to this problem exist and will be blogged about when I can be bothered to try them out (as will this, further). For now, a bookmark.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics – PDF notes on all the lectures and mp3s for most of them. Gigabytes of data, however…
Update 2006-10-07: looks like that’s now a dead like. I guess the copyright police wrote a threatening email, or something. Ah well…
Living in Britain? Give a monkey about civil rights? Give a monkey about civil rights in a digital age? Me too.
Get over to pledgebank and pledge a fiver a month to fund The Open Rights Group, then. Yes you can afford it, and yes it’s worth it.
Or at the very least, read this to find out why you might want to do such a thing.
Message ends.
Anyone stupid enough to believe The Powers That Be when they say anti-terror legislation won’t be used inappropriately for general authoritarian head-stamping should read this about a woman arrested under the Terrorism Act for walking on a cycle path [robot].
On Saturday morning, I drove Bash to Cardiff Airport and saw her off to Amsterdam, where she’s spending the week reporting on Eurooscon for Ping Wales. How, then, to spend the afternoon? I somehow managed to resist the alluring prospect of tidying the house, saving it for Sunday, and instead walked from our house to Three Cliffs Bay. It were nice.
Photos are here, potentially boring account follows…
(By the way, Friday night was rather good too – Lanonima Imperial at Taliesin, performing The Ecstasy of Orpheus. We somehow got invited to the after-show nibbles and wine, and Will’s excellent art is here.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Oona King in America, talking about New Orleans, the race divide, and in particular the idea that whites don’t think about race, just because they don’t have to. Good stuff, to make you wish even more fervently that George Galloway hadn’t unseated her.
Paper chess [robot]. Indeed, a veritable wealth of paper foldy things to make and do on that site. Go Jo!
Will has published a few rather good photos Bash took over the summer, at the Welsh National Botanical Gardens and elsewhere.
Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? – Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding [robot]
I really enjoyed this article, if only for the profound sense of relief it drenched me in. When I program, I program in emacs, mostly, (but not always) in python, and mostly (but not always), under Unix. I haven’t done any “visual” programming for over seven years, and haven’t missed it. I found the experience painful. I do sometimes, however, worry that I’m getting stuck in the dark ages, or missing something great – that I would be so much more productive if I just “got with the program” and did things The Modern Way.
The article reinforces my underlying belief that what I do is right, for me at least. I remain convinced that the programmer’s most important tool is their brain, and that the programmer’s key task is organisation. Any tool that gets in the way of that task, and which prevents me from wielding my brain to full effect, diminishes my ability to program well.
The other thing the article confirms for me is that yes, Windows programming really has been horrible since day one. So much of what I read there had me nodding, saying to myself “Yes! When I did this I knew it was wrong! I knew it was stupid!”. I’m definitely better off out of it. :-)
Read these updates, then read the post, then read all the comments. Then do it and/or comment. :-)
Update 2006-10-15: For reasons discussed below and in the comments, I am no longer allowing comments which say “I installed such-and-such-a-driver and it fixed it”. Thanks.
Update 2006-05-19: OK, will people please stop posting comments that say “on Windows you can just use the Synaptics drivers” or similar? Yes, I’m sure it’s true, but no, it’s not very interesting, since this post is about how to fix the problem if you’re not running Windows. Thanks. :-)
Update 2006-03-03/2007-02-27: someone has just added a comment pointing to these instructions which claim to fix the problem without cutting the cable. Instead, they involve inserting a small piece of plastic shielding (but see comment #92 for a warning why not to use an anti-static bag for this purpose). I haven’t tried this out (and can’t any more!) but if anyone comes here looking for a solution, and tries this out, I’d love to know if it worked or not. Also, I’ll keep a local copy of that page in case it ever goes away – again, if it does, please let me know and I’ll publish the instructions here instead. Thanks!
As reported
previously, I now use a Dell C600 laptop for most of my computing. I’m running FreeBSD and it’s been a very agreeable experience. There has, however, been one fly in the ointment.
It started small – one day I was typing and the mouse pointer started slowly drifting to the corner of the screen. Odd. I pulled it out, and carried on with my day. Then it started happening more frequently… In my first lecture of the year, it went completely doolally, rushing up into the top-right corner and refusing to come out. Since then, every now and then it’s been doing this intermittently, sometimes just a little, sometimes so much that the pointer is unusable.
I’ve managed quite well for two months, because I use the mouse as little as possible. I do most of my work at the command line or in emacs, and only really need the pointer for
web browsing,
chat,
drawing and
painting.
Yesterday, however, I snapped. It was too much – the pointer dancing all over the screen like a drunken hillbilly, my blood pressure rising, clearly something had to be done…
Read the rest of this entry »
w00t – I just watched the sun rise, standing on the beach. Delicious, no matter how cold your ears get.
Americans using (banned) napalm and white phosphorous in Iraq, BBC not reporting it, thanks to practice of embedding reporters in military units [robot].
Thus, BBC viewers were unaware of the fine words of Colonel James Alles, commander of the US Marine Air Group II. “We napalmed both those bridge approaches,” he said. “Unfortunately, there were people there…. you could see them in the cockpit video… It’s no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect.”
(And of course, there’s that other old “what in name of all that is good are they thinking?” chestnut, depleted uranium…
I’ve heard many people in the UK talk disparagingly about how the “news” in the USA is just a joke, a farce, and that most Americans have no real idea of what’s actually going on in the world. Alas, America doesn’t (of course) hold the monopoly on biased/incompetent journalism…
I’ve just stumbled upon the wikipedia entry for the Riverworld series of books which sounds both barmy and intruiging.
… the Riverworld is an Earthlike planet whose surface has been sculpted to consist solely of one staggeringly long river-valley.
The story of Riverworld begins when almost the whole of humanity, from the time of the first homo sapiens through to the early 21st century, is simultaneously resurrected along the banks of the river, an estimated thirty-five to thirty-seven billion people.
There’s more. It is, of course, impossible to tell from the article if they’re well written or a bunch of pants. A lot of sci-fi works enjoy a vociferous and enthusiastic fanbase while still being turgid rubbish… The mention of Esperanto is troubling… Hmmm, well, ultimately I suppose I should just get hold of a copy of the first book and see what I think – unless anyone can advise me otherwise? :-)
Not a situation I’ve experienced myself, though I guess there’s still time [simon]. I’m amazed at their bravado – actually telling him to leave.
Nice life hack which I should remember next time I need to, for example, arrange tutorials with my students…
A really good meal: it takes you from not believing you could ever be full, to not believing you could ever be hungry again.
(Not very taoist, I realise…)
At the end of every module we teach, we hand out forms to all the students asking for feedback. One of my second year seems to be impressed, and made the following +1 Insightful comment at the bottom of his form:
Mr Gimblett’s lectures tell a compelling story. His office is full of leather-bound books and his apartment smells of rich mahogany.
Please would whoever is selling LSD to my students stop it?
Build-it-yourself cell phones – hardware and software [bash]
Personally, I’d just be happy with a phone that was scriptable with Python, but hey.
I haven’t yet had chance to read this properly, but it’s very exciting and impressive, and will no doubt be essential supplementary reading on the security course I’m teaching next term: Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling.
Update 2006-01-26: Bruce Schneier’s lucid explanation.
Cuidado: vomito de gato [yeti]. Class. Gladly, Fudge is usually a good girl in this regard.
