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OSS, I has it

I just sat in on a conference call as a representative (by default, since no one else called in) of the Linux ath5k community, with Atheros, makers of my MacBook’s wireless ethernet card. Atheros have really done a 180 for supporting the community, first by releasing ath9k, then by releasing the source to their previously-closed HAL last week. Thanks to that, 6 patches have already gone out fixing various problems. BTW, conference calls are just as pointless in the OSS community as they are in real life. But at least I did learn that it is pronounced “uh-THERE-ose”, not “ATH-er-ose.”

Buy laptops with Atheros wireless cards!

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Divested

As of last Thursday, I’m no longer a land owner, so you guys are on your own with that whole voting thing.

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Turing

I’ve been going over a lot of old textbooks while studying for my upcoming CS GRE. I forgot how good the Hennessy and Patterson books are. Also I’ve read the dragon book cover-to-cover for the first time (the new edition with the lame CGI dragon on the cover), various parts of TAOCP, and Sedgewick’s Graph Algorithms in C. Time will tell whether I’ve digested any of that.

When I was in the bookstore the other day, I saw Petzold’s The Annotated Turing. I still blame Petzold for the worst book in my computing library, Programming Windows 95. But I needed to fill in some gaps on formal logic and it was 30% off so I thought I’d give it a go. One nice thing is that it presents in full the paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” with corrections inline. I found a number of the annotations on the machines themselves to be superfluous to the original, while the background on Cantor sets and formal logic were absolutely worthwhile. The main problem is that the book sometimes cites large sections of material from another work, which just makes me wish I had read the other work instead. Conspicuously absent from citation but appearing in the bibliography is the mind-altering but lengthy Gödel, Escher, Bach, which in my opinion better tackles the philosophical angles. I give The Annotated Turing a B: nice explanation of the paper but Chuck loses a letter grade for citing his own book twice and for having a Windows tattoo.

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Buy my stuff

If you’ve always wanted to own a piece of history, now’s your chance. Since I’m just over two weeks away from having to vacate my house for good, I’m selling all my crap. Oh, it’s wonderful crap, such as my couch, beds, bookshelves, small kitchen appliances, propane tanks, lawn mowers, chainsaws[1], and various electronics. Actually, assuming I get it all in order in the next day or two, you can drop by my house on Saturday to paw through the meaningful effects of a great living legend[2].

[1] Only one lawn mower, propane tank, and chainsaw. Two broken leaf blowers though.
[2] Great and legend not guaranteed. Living hoped for.

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Ads

Anyone in the interweb know why my LJ now has an ad sidebar, when I’ve explicitly opted out of the ad-supported-for-useless-goodies account? May it be time to move/shutter this thing?

Update:
Oh. 🙁

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Mainlandy

Ange & I are back from our brief tour of the Carribean. PR was nice: wonderful weather and warm ocean water. We somehow lucked out and missed all three hurricanes that went through the area during our stay. The local cuisine left a lot to be desired, and the area just outside of the resorts was pretty sketch, but otherwise it’s a decent little island.

I did find time during the traveling downtime to complete my Gstreamer FS. I’m rather proud of the fruits of that two-day hack, though I’ve yet to see if it works well enough to trick iTunes.

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Islandy

Angeline and I are Puerto Rico bound on Sunday! Here’s hoping for an absence of hurricanes. We’re also in ATL for two days next weekend.

I have a new FUSE filesystem in the prototype stage: gstfs. The idea is to mirror a directory of music files and automatically transcode them at read() time using a gstreamer pipeline. This is so my lovingly cultivated ogg collection is friendly with Angeline’s iPod. It seems to work so far but is still a dirty hack.

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This post encrypted with the one-time-pad of all zeros

I only made 770 (67th percentile) on the practice GRE CS subject exam I took today. I guess I need to study up on graph theory and grammars over the next month. The computer architecture questions were all fun though.

Stupidest question of the exam, which I “missed”:

Which is the closest to a perfectly secure encryption scheme:
a) Caesar cipher (heh)
b) DES
c) Enigma
d) One time pad
e) RSA

I take issue with the supposedly correct answer of “D”, since yes, in principle, it is perfect encryption, but in practice, it sucks. Knowing OTP is flawed has to be more useful than knowing that it could be perfect in circumstances that are never true. If only there were an option in the list which provided good encryption and also solved the key distribution problem!

The engineer in me is at times in conflict with the “computer science == astronomy” crowd (yeah, I’m looking at you Dijkstra). Which is why every time I read someone’s article on here’s-how-to-do-X-in-unreadable-haskell my eyes glaze over. Maybe I’m not smart enough, but I would take the fact that there are now a zillion blogs trying to explain monads as evidence that the functional people made pipes too confusing.

Oh, by the way, here’s a secret: CPUs are imperative!