Category Archives: OldBlog

Preaching to the Choir

Posted on 2009-09-18 by pappp

The Bruce Schneier talk in the previous post was quite good; he is an excellent and entertaining speaker (an hour without any sort of slides or visual aids!), but was a little disappointing because he was very much preaching to the choir. Most of the (nearly auditorium-filling) audience was made up of upper-level CS students, and CS/EE faculty who are for the most part well versed (especially the many attendees with cognitive science background) in the high level conception of the perceived security/actual security/security model paradigm he discussed. The talk would have been excellent for a less focused audience, but I would have enjoyed hearing his thoughts on some interesting specific topic, either technical (his work on Skein?), or high profile (Chemically improbable liquid bomb plots? C6H12O6 + H2O2 ===> 6CO2 + 18H2O does not an airliner-destroying bomb make…), or a topic which he has not thoroughly saturated the geek news channels with his thoughts on. Several of the other attendees I spoke with afterward felt the same way. This is just a particularly strong instance of a general problem; the people who would get the most from a high-generality talk don’t know to come, and the people who do know to come already know the material. I have no idea what the solution is, finding and engaging the potentially interested on campus is nearly impossible (the noise levels are too high), and offering only highly technical seminars seems to violate the egalitarian ideal of public talks.

In other announcements, DorkbotLex#6 will be this Saturday (2009-09-18) at 4PM in room 101 of the Reynolds Building (349 Scott Street), with the following topics:
* “Twitter Cutups” Patrick Morissey
* “Propoganda Machine” Aaron Miller
* “Biofeedback software” Matt Ward
as always, it should be cool.

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Bruce Schneier Lecture at UK

Posted on 2009-09-16 by pappp

To quote the announcement that went out to the mailing lists:
September 17th, 2009 at 5:30p.m
W.T. Young Library Auditorium

“Reconceptualizing Security”
Bruce Schneier
Chief Security Technology Officer, BT.

In a startling change of pace from the usual uninspiring speakers UK tends to bring in, Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s foremost security experts, will be giving a lecture tomorrow night. It sounds like it will be about the perceived security/actual security idea (this is the person who coined the phrase “Security Theater”) he often talks about, and it should should be VERY cool.

I’m definitely going to be there, and there is some talk that it will fill up quickly, so I would suggest showing up early if you plan to come.

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Haiku!

Posted on 2009-09-14 by pappp

The Haiku project to reimplement BeOS just released their first alpha, and despite having less than no time to do so, I took a few minutes to play with it, and it is bringing back some great memories. BeOS was a really spectacular operating system which was floating around the edges of the market in the late 90s, with some truly revolutionary features, some of which are still not widely adopted. Remember WinFS, that Microsoft has been failing to deliver since 2003? Be had almost all the amazing indexeng/medatdata/journaling features (basically everything but encryption) in it’s BeFS in 1997. And that “new” Grand Central Dispatch thread model in the most recent version of OS X? BeOS had something analogous from the beginning (around 1995). It was, in many ways, a perfect, highly responsive desktop OS, which (if not for the anticompetitive practices of Apple and Microsoft) could have owned a large portion of the market. Probably my favorite memory of BeOS was running the classic “BeOS is more responsive” demonstration: bringing up dozens of instances of the built in media player, each playing a different mp3, on pathetic (I did it on a Pentium MMX @ 233Mhz with 192Mb of RAM) hardware… and having them all play smoothly and mix together. I’m not sure my current machine could do that under Linux OR Win7, and it is (roughly) ten times as powerful.
This OSNews Article has a good history and perspective; the quick version is that Be, Inc. was formed largely from disenchanted former Apple employees (including Joseph Palmer, an electrical engineer/ industrial designer who I’ve always looked up to), designed themselves a revolutionary platform (hardware and software), moved to a software-only model because they couldn’t afford to maintain their hardware buisness, and were actively pushed out of the market by Apple (who took action to keep BeOS from running on new Macs, and killed the clone business, ruining the market for PPC hardware) and Microsoft (who bullied PC vendors into refusing to bundle BeOS). Before Be imploded, and had their assets bought by Palm, Apple almost bought Be as the core for the “post-classic” Mac after the Copland project failed. Instead they bought NeXT (also made up mostly ex-Apple people) for roughly Be’s asking price, and that eventually became OS X.
Best of luck to the Haiku team, a big part of me hopes that progress will continue, and sometime in the not too distant future my everyday use machine will be a Haiku box.

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HDL Testbenches

Posted on 2009-09-10 by pappp

After three classes (EE281, EE480, EE585) where I should have been taught how to write real, procedural testbenches for my digital circuit simulation instead of clicking in inputs on ISE’s (ISE is the subject of much swearing and hatred) waveform editor, there was a nominal effort to demonstrate it in EE685, and between that example and the Verilog book I bought for my own edification some time ago (It’s an OK book: I’m yet to find a HDL text I really like), I finally managed to get it down. This is important for three reasons: First: NO MORE CLICKING! I can write little procedural blocks to generate counting-order covering inputs, or other arbitrary stimulus. Second: Automatic Testing! For simple modules, I can simply write two logically equivalent but stylistically different versions, and, barring any design-level fuckups, determine that they both work by telling the simulator to compare the two version’s behavior and alert me if they differ. Third (and most signifigantly) it allows me to do my check/test/verify my modules without dealing with ISE. There are a number of free Verilog tools, most significantly Icarus Verilog, a Free (GPL) synthesis/simulation suite which seems to be well liked (and builds and installs easily on my machine), which allow me to have a whole toolchain without the hassle of maintaining my own ISE installation, or putting up with the glacially slow (despite being very, very powerful; bad configuration) lab machines for longer than is required to generate a test run to turn in for class.
Icarus looks to be an interesting challenge; it definitely doesn’t go out of it’s way to be user friendly, it requires an external tool like GTKWave to display waveforms, and it’s got some features and switches that I’m not even sure what are for, but it is documented and seems to be quite reasonable.
One feature Icarus doesn’t (AFIK) have is the ability to synthesize to the various programmable chips (which are all very, very proprietary). I do have my own FPGA board, which I got in a burst of excitement after first being exposed to FPGAs, and have never had a chance to play with as much as I’d like. Somewhere deep, deep down on the list of projects is to get a decent programming cable for it (my current one is an old parallel model), and spend some quality time playing around with it, I clearly wouldn’t be alone.

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Ada

Posted on 2009-09-06 by pappp

The latest weird obsolete piece of technology I’ve decided I enjoy is the Ada programming language, an older imperative language, developed at the request of the Department of Defense in the late 70s, and named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. The CS655 text Advanced Programming Language Design uses Ada-like syntax for its examples, so I invested a few minutes in reading some of the Ada Spec while working the first homework: its really a pretty cool language, especially the concurrency features that are actually integral to the language instead of half-baked in after the fact now that we’re rubbing up against the limits of single-thread CPU designs, and various compile-time and runtime self-checking features.

I’ve been exposed to an Ada-like language once before; VHDL, with which I’m fairly familiar, is derived from Ada’s syntax in the same way Verilog is derived from C. The advantages aren’t so obvious there; Verilog has a lot of the more idiomatic behavior cleaned out…and you can tear Verilog’s amazing array slicing features from my cold, dead hands.

I’m coming to appreciate that there are two distinct design philosophies in computing; incidental, haphazard, and/or organically grown designs which tend to become extremely quirky over time (ex: C, LaTeX, both of which I love dearly, largely for their quirks), which I will call “idiomatic designs” (the phrase is occasionally used elsewhere, not always for the same thing), and painstaking, careful “intentional designs” like Ada and that tend to be kind of unwieldy in real world applications. Unlike a lot of intentionally designed technologies, which tend to exhibit design-by-committee syndrome, the objection to Ada seems to be more because there was an attempt by the Department of Defense to mandate Ada for defense projects before it was fully mature, which bred considerable resentment, rather than any deficiencies in the language itself. I suspect Ada might actually make a comeback as a result of the elegant concurrency support, unless there is a miracle breakthrough in automatically parallelizing compilers in the near future. (I’d bet on the lack of usable generalized parallel programming models being the next big issue in computing.)

Probably more interesting than the dichotomy is the fact the organic approach is winning in most sectors. A lot. C and it’s various descendants are going strong; Ada is almost a dead language. UNIX is spreading; VMS is dying out.
In general, it seems like Idiomatic designs are idiomatic to suit themselves to what people actually use and enjoy using, even when they don’t objectively make sense.
Clearly I’m already learning useful things from CS655.
Side note: the best resource on C weirdness ever. It will hurt your head.

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Food: Fuck Yeah.

Posted on 2009-09-05 by pappp

Eggplant_Plated_sm.jpg
Italian fried eggplant (at least an hour and a half in the kitchen to make, plus the place looks like the Mongols and Catholics (ca.1200-1205) gathered in your kitchen for a round table on razing technique afterwards), plating and all, and J. Lohr 2006 Bay Mist Riesling (my current favorite cheap table wine). A Saturday evening well spent.

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Class Impressions: Fall09

Posted on 2009-08-27 by pappp

I’m taking two (rumored to be extremely time consuming, hence only two) courses this semester, and in keeping with the before and after impressions from last semester, I’m going to state my impressions and expectations after the first meeting of each, so I have it stored for comparison at the end of the semester. It is interesting to think that I have taken the undergraduate versions of these courses (EE480 and CS450 respectively), so it should be interesting to see how much the graduate versions are enriched (or not).

EE685: Digital Computer Structure/Heath
This is rumored to be the most time consuming class offered by the ECE department at UK, and 1/3 of the grade is derived from a single project. I’ve only had one class with the instructor, and didn’t have a terribly positive experience with him. The biggest day-to-day issue is he has a number of mannerisms that drive me slowly insane (”favorite” example: “In this case” is NOT a flavoring particle). There are few enough English-speaking instructors in this field it would be really wonderful if the native English speakers actually did so. I also find some of his grading policies grating, I once had a concrete example where more points were awarded for syntactically correct, algorithmically incorrect solutions than algorithmically correct syntactically flawed solutions on an exam. This is what highlighting editors are for. The other snag is that the tools we will be using for the big project (Xilinx’s ISE and MentorGraphic’s ModelSim) are both big, hateful pieces of software, which are incredibly ponderous to use, and will do all manner of unpredictable things with your input, sometimes changing behavior after simply restarting the program. I am not looking forward to spending more time with them. Gripes aside, it IS a topic I really, really love, and the opportunity to play with it in depth is highly desirable, and further instruction on the underlying theory should be useful for my research.

CS655: Programming Languages/ Finkel
I took CS450 (same basic course) from the same instructor (who is a VERY interesting person and a fairly notable figure in computing) a few years ago. It was quite a bit of work(program in a new language every 2 weeks on top of the theory!), but it was the CS prefixed class I feel I gained the most from as an undergraduate, so I have very high hopes that this will prove invaluable as well. It appears to be structured the same way: language theory supplanted by rudimentary forays into various examples, which should be fascinating, I just hope the theory is a little more in depth and implementation-focused for the graduate version.

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Birthday Music

Posted on 2009-08-18 by pappp

The world coincidently provided me with a couple of musical birthday presents: Third Eye Blind’s new effort, Ursa Major came out for my birthday (a day earlier than was announced…), and Electric Valentine’s first full length Automatic the next day.

On first listen Ursa Major is… kind of disappointing. It’s not BAD; understand I’ve loved 3eb as long as I’ve been listening to music; the first album I bought when I got my first portable CD player in middle school was Blue, and they have been a standby for me ever since. All of their albums have had something that really moved me: The selftitle was cut with crystallized adolescent angst, Blue was the sound of a burgeoning broadening and discovery of the world, Out of the Vein was pure passion… and in comparison Ursa Major just sounds kind of douchey and self involved. The music itself also seems a little less sophisticated, or at least less polished (they called it “more acoustic” but it’s more than that), especially in the meter of the lyrics. Judged against rock albums in general it really is a good album, but it doesn’t seem quite up to their previous efforts. Maybe it’ll grow on me.

As for Automatic… real bands don’t only release on iTunes. I don’t want AACs, I can’t install iTunes on my (Linux) machine, and I wouldn’t install Apple’s memory-eating crapware even if it were an option. Their previous releases are all on Amazon, this should be too. That said, I ordered a physical copy, and already have a digital copy (I’m not 100% sure the tracks on said copy are the album versions, some of it sounds a little lo-fi). Purchasing complaints aside, its wildly catchy electropop, with rich instrumentation, dark lyrics and adorable delivery. The album sounds a little less energetic than their earlier EP, but it still has that infectious quality that makes me keep catching myself dancing to it. I found their previous project (A Kiss Could Be Deadly) more compelling than Electric Valentine, but it really is great stuff and deserves all the attention it can get, and I’ll be listening to it for some time to come.

Yay music.

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22!

Posted on 2009-08-17 by pappp

I turn 22 years old today, and it occurs to me that if I follow the obvious path of least resistance, or anything like it, I may never have to do anything I don’t feel like again. Obviously not on the day-to-day scale, but on the macro scale of career and lifestyle and the like, it has passed conceivable and headed off toward likely that I can continue to learn about and play with things that interest me (which certainly includes education itself, and, based on conversations with faculty that have done this sort of thing, can also include deciding I’d really like to do other quasi-related things that interest me like HCI or demographic-scale computational sociology), and make a comfortably self-supporting life in the kind of environment I enjoy out of it.
I think this means I’m doing it right. I feel very lucky.

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Woodland Arts Fair Peoplewatching

Posted on 2009-08-16 by pappp

The Woodland Arts Fair has been running this weekend, about a block from my house, and I’ve been wandering down to peoplewatch (I really want to know the etymology for that term) whenever I get bored. The art itself was…the same honestly pretty awful crap as every year. Lots of trinket-y crap, some classic caught-in-the-moment scams (”Buy a little square of this painting” seems cool until you get home with an expensive 1×1” paint-splattered canvas square to …throw in a drawer or something). There were of course some genuine artisan pieces out, which were naturally out of the price range of any normal human being. That said I did spot Lee Todd and some other people who really might buy that kind of thing wandering around, so I suppose it isn’t a waste.
Art festivals are excellent places for peoplewatching, they have everything from sugar-wired little kids (best: alpha-child caused every kid in one of the playgrounds to start screaming) to crazy old people trundling around with walkers (best: I missed it, but I am told there was an old woman best described as “Shoe leather in a bikini top” browsing around), and every sort of weirdo in between. Another fun phenomena is that my Hawaiian shirt habit is in no way out of place there, although I’m about 20 years to young to fit in with the expected demographic for it. One worrying detail is that I’m totally losing my ability to guess ages; I’m not sure if it’s that I’m getting older, or that I’m out of practice or what, but I was reliably taking first impressions that were grossly incorrect: the “16-year-old” that set off a mental jailbait alarm…who on second inspection holding a beer. The “Probably about a college freshman”… who’s mate is pushing a stroller with a relatively old child in it. I’m sort of curious if there is some way to recalibrate that.

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