ThePanda

Funny man in Rome, fat man in France, strangely unrelated. I am writing an essay on one. The other is this weird childhood memory a book in the living room brings back. There's some sort of a British connection between both, but some connections are worthless. Besides I am pretty sure Roman virtues from the Early Republic had fairly limited appeal for the Gaulic tribes inhabiting France back then. That said, the Gauls seem to have been less Asterix like, and more Spartan like every day. Here lay a group of people who were so fierce that the Romans were afraid of them, fierce not weirdly clever mind you.

I was walking around New York a couple of days ago, one of those short visits where one gets to enjoy expensive hotels and rain. I went to an Afghani restaurant, supposedly owned by someone who was a judge in Kabul in the late 70s. Funny considering his leaving the country would neatly coincide with the rise of the communists, and such things usually have interesting stories. The restaurant itself didn't have a story, it wasn't even exceptionally good. At least I didn't really pay for the food. The rain did actually suck.

I am not sure why I wrote this, I didn't have that much to say. Observations for the night: scheme's cool, coding is fun, writing papers is less fun than it used to be.

Panda

It is all over the web, there are about 50 mentions of this on Reddit, there might be another bubble out there, except it doesn’t feel like one. See back when there was that other bubble, I lived in another country, was there for more than a month a year, and things looked very different. It is easier to pick up somethings when you live in a country when everyone wants to be a part of the bubble, as fast as possible, without care. I was talking to Itay (who has finally posted another blog post) about this earlier today (also about lots of other things, but those are unimportant), and he was pointing out all these subtle clues in the CS department that I am missing. Clues about all the people who want to start startups, clue about all the startups, clues about how the holly grail of achieving anything currently is being bought out. Maybe there is a bubble going on, maybe it is a nicer bubble, what with people paying for things in cash and not stocks, but it certainly does not look the same on the other side. There are no crazy NIIT posters about bullshit that doesn’t help anything, there are no crazy people getting crazy certificates. There are the standard crazy sums of money all the people are being paid to work, but those numbers sound pretty much at par with what I heard last year. Bubbles look different from different places.

I am TAing 167/9 next semester, along with being a lot of work, this should be fairly fun. Woohoo.

Ze Panda

Hi people of the internet (or the subset of those who read this) and more importantly the Gods, owners and legislators of this unlegislated land
While I am aware more important debates, such as ones concerning the ‘tubular nature of the internets’, the ongoing shift to IPV6, the failure of certain registrar’s and such is taking up your valuable time, is there anyway you could make it simpler to just kill the sound on webpages, you know, make a mutable thing for browsers, which affects plugins and such. I know this lowers some people’s advertising revenue, but it makes me less scared.

Also while we are at this, could those of you residing in MSR get the folks at Mono to implement a F# compiler for Mono, I like OCaml, and want to see this new child which emerges from it, but do not really want to go through the trouble of acquiring a Windows license from the folks who administer MSDN-AA licensing for Brown.

Thanks, that’s about it.

Ze Panda

Turns out some people over in the cold land which lies to the north of my current location, and which certain friends of mine call home, have decided that they have a commercially viable quantum computer that they plan on selling soon. No specs seem to be easily visible on the website, so questions about whether this merely reflects their ability to multiply two numbers with some high probability of success, or an actually viable computer, currently abound. A quick search through Google Scholar yields nothing (no research papers, I am disappointed, no specs, and no papers make me unhappy), however the company did file for a bunch of Quantum Computing related patents in 2000 and 2004, though none seem to have been filed post January 2005, which leads to obvious questions about what in the world happened in the last month, and observations about the awesomeness of Google Patents.

Scientific American seems to have a story about this, painting a less rosy, more realistic picture, and much like everything else that can be seen, Flickr has an image.

Scientific American also claims that it won’t be breaking any encryption schemes, making this entirely worthless. Also the guy in the Scientific American article seems to accept the fact that it probably won’t be viable at larger scales, and might not scale up, and might not be the commercial success everyone wants it to be. Wait, a company announces a commercially viable quantum computer that might not work, and does so by solving a Sudoku (simple enough thanks to all the constraints and the magic of constraint programming)... Bah, this has been a disappointing discovery, I think I will go back to approximating my NP-complete problems.

Ze Panda

I have a del.icio.us account that I should really be using and combining with the blog so I can post all the cool (non comic related URLs) I seem to come across, like the one on NTP time synchronization and RAID 6 (though I got that from someone else’s blog). But anyways, this phdcomic seemed appropriate

Ze Panda

Tuxes and books, that’s what it is all about, tuxes and books. OK so it is about more than those two, but they seem to be important this week. Oh meeting with professors (in the plural), going to weird things, interviewing for jobs that I will obviously not get, and coding in groups are amongst other dominant themes this week. But then again, a lot of these are me making predictions, as opposed to much of anything else, and unlike certain physicists who publish strange sounding papers in Nature, which then lead to an explosion in cognitive science papers exploring such questions as how long we will live, the time period for which Nature will be published, and future frontiers in inter-galactic travel, I am not trained in such arts. I am at best an ad-hoc Bayesian person, and that isn’t good enough. Oh and Nature gets published for anywhere between another 140 and 4000 years, we really don’t have colonies in the galaxy, and umm the theory isn’t doing so well, since it needs to be contradicted in fewer than the next 100 years, and should it not be contradicted, it self contradicts, and is thus wrong. So much for statistics and Bayesian inference, as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy mentions, should anyone come close to understanding the real nature of the universe, the universe ceases to exist, and is quickly replaced by something even more ununderstandable.

There are somethings which are less understandable as a CS person than anyone else, or so I am told anyways. One of these is non-zero ordering, like tell a CS person about the Korean system of accounting for ages (add 1 to your age, that’s your Korean age), and the usual response (unless you are lucky) is something of why the hell would anyone do this, tell anyone in the non-CS world about this, and the possible response is a meh. CS people do zero ordering, zero ordering is cool, is cool anyways unless you happen to be one of those JDBC people connecting to PostgreSQL, in which case all your columns have to be 1 ordered, never quite understood this, but there always has to be this one thing which breaks with whatever you consider standard, strange but true.

Weeks can be remembered for many things, two of them are things attended and things missed. This week has had its bad moments in more than one way, but what makes it truly sucky is all that I missed, and not all of it was missed because I was busy in other pursuits. I know the entire what’s done is done thing, but these seem to be hard things to look beyond. So yesterday, Jorge Cham, who writes the usually funny, and wonderful Piled Higher and Deeper was in town, and I have been telling people for ages about how he never comes to Brown, but goes to all the other colleges which are near. Did I attend, nopes, did I have other things to do, nopes, did I notice the fact that Brown was mentioned in huge characters right above the strip, nopes, sucks. Then there is Andy Hertzfield, the guy who created folklore.org, and parts of the Mac, and is a Brown alum, and has a few Brown stories somewhere in there, was here, he works for Google now, and was perhaps here because of them, but either ways, he was here. I had this one on my calendar forever, it met at the same time as Cog Sci, but we could find ways around that, well turns out I couldn’t, so bah on that. Bah I say, bah.

Ze Panda

Blog time, perhaps. It is sort of late, and I’d rather go to sleep tonight, seeing as it is like one of the first days this semester when I really don’t have work to do. Strange, in retrospect I am not completely sure about whether or not I should regret not taking the cool graduate vision course I was in for a day. They were cool, they are helping solve a real crime in Virginia involving a run away car and such, and I really really wanted to do that, mostly because it was research, had lots of real stuff to do, and was very little fluff, however as an undergraduate I am in fluff filled classes and have little time to do much of anything else. I promise next year will be cooler, I’ll be done with most of the fluff, I will be in a year where I am pretty certain about completing concentration requirements, should I ever actually get the time to file one before this semester runs out, and everyone my year will be out exploring the world. Wonders of wonders, I am still associated with my research from last semester, if everything works out and things don’t go kaboom like they are now, I might even have a paper out, and that can be fun. Working with a professor across the country however is not always fun, it involves meeting other people, and that is not a fun thing to do if you are not a very people person.

Blogs were predated by .plan files, and being in a CS department where Zephyr is still popular makes you intimately aware of the importance of maintaining one. However I also have a blog, and hence it is fairly important to put stuff up here too. Well anyways, I am going to be in New York, New York for the summer, living with my roommate, his girlfriend and other people, and this can be fun. I will be working for a semi-to-majorly evil corporation which makes lots of money, and is not completely weird. I have so far interviewed with what was formerly Macromedia and is now Adobe’s Flex division, which seemed fairly exciting, because it involved mostly research, and Apple Corporation. Adobe was one of the places where I really wanted to work, sadly they came to Brown too late to actually create a major dent in Bloomberg’s chances of getting me. Apple on the other hand has convinced me of not really wanting to work there (no I don’t care about declaring this, I e-mailed them this already), because they really never got back to me, kept dropping out of sight, and pretended to be far more important and busy than they were. I have long been a fan of Folklore, and would at some point of time really like to work at something of the Apple they describe. That Apple however no longer exists. I am not sure I am applying for any internships after this, a lot depends on how I find this one, but I would really like to do more research the next year, probably a more tightly controlled piece of work.

The powers that be are going to discontinue making the Aibo at the end of this month. As many people as I have told about this, have told me I am crazy to want one or care about this, however I am known to be crazy, and an Aibo is one of those things which I would really like to own at some point of time when I am rich enough to not care about the über expensive price tag. That being said they are cool, used by colleges and things like the Robo-Soccer World Cup, and are some of the best pieces of robotics available in the consumer market. Sony wasn’t going to discontinue them until they got a new CEO/Chairman type thing who decided they weren’t making enough money. Post rootkit Sony seems to be doing increasingly evil things, is sad, they used to be a fairly good company according to me, and weren’t very high on my evilness scale, but are getting there now. I also just noticed, that outside of my cellphone, acquired from Cingular, and my digital camera, I really do not have any SOny products littering my room.

So KM has acquired one of those nifty Intel based iMacs, made because Apple shifted just as IBM was coming out with what it claims are better chips. He’s yet to post a review of this, however conversations, and hints provided so far, seem to indicate he’s doing pretty well with them. However what concerns me is the lack of native Photoshop support on any of those machines, even Apple admits Photoshop doesn’t really deal with Rosetta well. And as much as I’d like to think Photoshop CS 3 will solve these problems, it will be really really expensive, and again come with some form of a hardware key. I’d like to claim GIMP is the solution to all these problems, what with GIMP being open source and all, however I am yet to come across a really good native GIMP installation for Mac OS X, those that exist aren’t really there yet, and this is getting annoying. With my father recently acquiring one of ‘em PowerBook G4s, just about everyone I know who does any significant amount of computer usage has an Apple, this is amusing, for when I bought mine, KM was probably the only other person I knew who had a recent (as in post PowerPC) Macintosh. Hopefully at the end of the summer I’ll be buying an updated nifty MacBook thing, hopefully by then Microsoft will be announcing the launch of their now universalized Office or the forthcoming release of the same, one hopes anyways. My computer’s clogged and slow, well not really, my old computers got a lot slower, but umm, ya this might be a good time to buy a computer, before I (hopefully) end up in grad-school and end up becoming very poor.

Well I am in a software development class now, and I have to crib about Tigris. Tigris is cool in some ways, they host Subversion, which seems to be a pretty OK versioning system, and seems to fail less often than CVS, and is free, Tigris also happens to be one of the very few places offering project spaces (to university projects amongst other things) with support for Subversion. Now let us see, technically I should just make a repository in the CS department, this however isn’t very appealing to people (not completely sure why), and getting a Tigris project would be nice. We even have a name (Raphael, I originally wanted Rembrandt, but that was too hard to spell according to some), a team (SCE, LRG, IAN and me) and an idea, however my Tigris project has been waiting for approval for like the last 3 or 4 days, and they don’t really give any indication as to how long this should or should not take, I wish they did, but they don’t. Hmm, so much for that.

Ze Panda

PS: This is an extemely small subset of the going on’s in my life hence no mention of CS166, classes, or much of anything else. Someday I shall post about this, till then you perhaps want to find a way to access my .plan file

PPS: Attempting to write a worm in Java is an interesting exercise in seeing just how far you can stretch the capabilities of Java.

PPPS: Do not write a worm