about
projects
elsewhere
archives
Switching to Pyblosxom, and a colophon
Until recently I had been using on bitbashing blosxom, a minimalist blog system which stores each entry as a flat file on disk. My existing workflow relies heavily on tools like emacs for editing and merging and monotone for revision control, and it is nice to have a blog system that plays well with these other tools, rather than using, say, a MySQL database as the storage layer and an AJAX widget as editor. However over time blosxom has seemed less and less maintained, and I started looking for alternatives.
Today I switched to pyblosxom, which started as a clone of blosxom, and still has much the same philosophy, but seems to have many advantages and useful features as compared to blosxom. A description of the upgrade process along with a site colophon are after the jump.
posted 2008/11/20 19:53 [/about]
Robot packs will hunt 'non-cooperative' humans
A new Pentagon project proposal for a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" will allow soldiers and police to "search for and detect a non-cooperative human".
posted 2008/10/25 15:46 [/security]
This fall I've been learning how to bake bread. I like sourdough, so I've been learning how to make real sourdoughs using a starter. The starter is the nameless yeast colony that spends most of its life in an old salsa jar in the fridge. Mixing the starter with more flour and water, and letting the yeasts grow at room temperature, they eat and as a byproduct produce the small air pockets that you want for good texture in bread. After a while the jar the starter lives in gets encrusted with flour (the main food of a pet yeast), and I will move the starter into a new jar and wash out the old one.
I used to feel sorry for the yeasts who were left behind in the old jar, which were washed down the drain rather than moved to their new home. Then I realized that the ones that stay get to either be baked alive, or have a chance to reproduce so their offspring can be baked alive, whereas the ones that get washed down the drain escaped their captivity to have a chance, presumably, of reproducing in freedom somewhere out there and keeping their genes going through all eternity.
I wish the yeasts the best of luck out there.
posted 2008/10/24 16:32 [/baking]
Interesting W3C Workshop - Security for Access to Device APIs
Thomas Roessler posted a call for papers for a W3 workshop on secure device access for web applications:
posted 2008/10/12 14:25 [/security]
Botan Used in Pirates of the Burning Sea
In the hey-cool category (at least for me), I am informed that my project Botan is being used by Flying Lab Software in their new MMORPG Pirates of the Burning Sea. I was told by their Directory of Community Relations that it is being used in their user authentication system.
I've even seen ads for it on Cartoon Network, which means now I've indirectly been on television! OMG
posted 2008/10/10 12:25 [/programming]
Mexico drug plane used for US 'rendition' flights: report
I would like to see the original documents... this article doesn't even give the tail number.
Story via AFP:
MEXICO CITY (AFP) - A private jet that crash-landed almost one year ago in eastern Mexico carrying 3.3 tons of cocaine had previously been used for CIA "rendition" flights, a newspaper report said here Thursday, citing documents from the United States and the European Parliament.
The plane was carrying Colombian drugs for the fugitive leader of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, when it crash-landed in the Yucatan peninsula on September 24, El Universal reported.
The daily said it had obtained documents from the United States and the European Parliament which "show that that plane flew several times to Guantanamo, Cuba, presumably to transfer terrorism suspects."
It said the European Parliament was investigating the private Grumman Gulfstream II, registered by the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, for suspected use in CIA "rendition" flights in which prisoners are covertly transferred to a third country or US-run detention centers.
It also said the US Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) logbook registered that the plane had traveled between US territory and the US military base in Guantanamo.
It said the FAA registered its last owner as Clyde O'Connor in Pompano Beach, Florida.
posted 2008/09/07 10:51 [/coincidences]
Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis
From Salon:
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.
posted 2008/08/30 19:50 [/politics]
I removed the daily link generator, as well as past posts. I update so rarely here that everything I did write was getting totally swamped by links, which is not really what I wanted. So I declare that delicious is the canonical source for my bookmarks.
posted 2008/08/15 00:17 [/dailylinks]
I've been looking at Scala for the last couple of days. This is actually the first JVM language I've learned - I have not used Java since my freshman year of college, and never in anything like production code. What follows is basically a set of disconnected notes and thoughts about Scala that I've had so far:
posted 2008/07/31 00:23 [/programming]
Powerset seems like an interesting concept, but reminds me a lot of the NLP projects I saw while I was in college, in that they produce output that almost makes sense, except not really. China "took: actions, actions, and steps", shark "eats: Samuel L. Jackson" (!!!), or my favorite, "computer clogs: system and government".
It seems to do better on phrases that represent very specific concepts like 'Emacs' or 'calendar'. In general though, it combines very specific and very broad concepts (presumably because it can't tell the difference), for instance "Electricity reaches: village and Drewsey".
Still, kinda neat, especially if they can pull in information from other sources and cross it with the Wikipedia data. e2, perhaps?
(Edit: Oh, and apparently they got bought by Microsoft today)
posted 2008/07/01 16:45 [/net]
My #1 Most Wanted Google Reader Feature (Right Now, At Least)
Mark all as unread
I just discovered Arch Robison (formerly of KAI C++, now at Intel) has a blog, and I'd like to work through all of his posts since it looks like he has some good stuff to say. But short of going to each post and marking it as unread, I just have to remember which ones I have or haven't gotten to yet. :(
Update: Google Reader won't let me mark posts in Arch's blog feed as unread. Weird. I neatly solved the problem by reading all of his past posts in one go.
posted 2008/07/01 15:16 [/net]
A Failure Case in a Linux Random Number Generator
The Linux kernel implements a random number generator called a Tausworthe generator, in the file lib/kernel32.c. The kernel uses this generator for a variety of non-cryptographic purposes, such as calculating network delays and random ports numbers, choosing a random element to drop from full caches, and many other places where a randomized algorithm is useful. While looking through this source, I found some cases where it could fail quite dramatically.
posted 2008/07/01 11:18 [/programming]
Roman Proverbs Applicable to Software
Quod non est in actis, non est in mundo. ("What is not in the documents does not exist")
posted 2008/06/30 12:35 [/programming]
Iowa Loses Years Of Topsoil in Days
Soil erosion has caused substantial damage to Iowa's farm fields hit hard by heavy rain and flooding this spring, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey said after touring two areas of the state.
Heavy rains this spring came when the soil was most vulnerable to erosion - when the soil has been tilled for planting, but before plants' root systems grow to hold it in place, he said.
[...]
Richard Cruse, director of the Iowa Water Center at Iowa State University, said areas of the state lost 7 to 8 tons of topsoil an acre in a 24-hour period. Those areas also had multiple one-day periods when that amount of topsoil per acre was lost.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service defines "tolerable" soil erosion levels at 3 to 5 tons an acre annually, Cruse said, adding that he thinks that the "tolerable" level is too high.
- Des Moines Register, 2008-06-22 (full story)
posted 2008/06/24 14:11 [/economy]
A major part of C++0x is the addition of an explicit memory model, which will allow for safe multithreaded programming (C's memory model, which C++98 inherits, is really only sensible in single-threaded code). At the most recent C++0x meetings in Sophia Antipolis, an important change was voted into the working paper that assists garbage collection, based on the wording in N2586.
posted 2008/06/23 13:18 [/programming]