It’s only been 6 months or so since my last post, so now seems like a good time to upgrade. This semester is probably the most interesting set of classes I’ve had yet (CS-wise anyways). Robots and Society, which is an alternative to CS Ethics, is insanely interesting and we have some very interesting debates. I’m planning on writing my term paper about the ethics of strong AI, which will certainly be interesting. CS2200 (Systems and Networking) sparked an interest in Systems. That and my lukewarm reaction to Introduction to AI led me to move into Systems, which has a ton of interesting problems (parallelization is the big thing right now). Hopefully I’ll be able to take the Linux kernel class the next time it’s offered. I’m glad I took databases, it was extremely useful stuff to learn and I got a chance to really build something in PHP. I do want to play with Ruby, or some other functional language - maybe play with Rails and build a simple To Do list that I can’t seem to find anywhere (not one that’s simple or easy to use).
I’m also taking Advanced Operating Systems, we’re doing a lot of stuff with threading. I’ve got to build a multithreaded web server soon, which should be interesting - ironically, a single threaded web server that uses asynchronous IO (and some of the other kernel tricks) is usually faster. I’m also taking User Interface Design, which is vastly necessary - since most CS majors seem to think about interfaces as an afterthought, something years of using Apple’s interfaces then using something else has made abundantly clear. I do need to take algorithms soon though, since it is the core of CS. I can’t wait to graduate though, I want to go build something in the real world.
It snowed recently, which was cool - other than the freezing temperatures. 30 Rock and the few episodes of Studio 60 I’ve seen were great - it’s sucks that Studio 60 was cancelled though. This writer’s strike sucks - give in soon you evil producers! I needs my Entourage and trashy TV. Lost starts tonight, I’m hoping for consistent awesomeness, but I should probably go in with low expectations after most of last season. Now to head off to a group meeting. Maybe I’ll post more often this year… maybe….
So the Homo Sex Is Sin people are on campus again this year and the results have been… hilarious. They’re a circus freakshow in the first place, but the student response this year was several notches up from last year’s response. Check it out.
I got an iPhone Friday at 8pm. No lines whatsoever at the AT&T store I went to in Watkinsville where I was visiting family. I literally bought the iPhone and walked out - it was really simple. Brought it back to my cousin’s place and got it setup (I didn’t have any issues with activation luckily). I’m fairly impressed with it - the interface is amazing and is everything I’ve come to expect from Apple. There’s a few issues I’ve encountered though - IMAP couldn’t see all of my mailboxes by default, so I had to set the IMAP Path Prefix in the settings. Safari isn’t blazing fast (on WiFi that is, its even slower (as expected) when using the EDGE cellular data network as well) and it crashes quite often and I’ve run into quite a few web sites that are broken (I can’t update my status on Facebook and I can’t enter text in the WordPress post writer for instance).
The only learning curve has been getting used to the keyboard (which is quite intuitive and easy to use). Mail works intuitively and comes off as pretty well polished - it’s definitely better than a CrackBerry and any of the Palm OS devices I’ve had in the past. The phone just works, which is critical to me. The switch for vibrate/ring works wonderfully (no more ascending/descending beeps as I mute or unmute my phone). And the iPod portion is simply amazing - it’s intuitive, but far more powerful than a normal iPod (CoverFlow is great). Put simply, I love it. Though I will say - there’s a few things I want to see - MMS (I foresee a software update delivering this soon), iChat (it just makes sense on a portable phone), and a terminal for SSH (I’m not holding my breath on this one though).
Tech has been overrun by little kids. They are everywhere (*everywhere*) I go. Must be some kind of camp thing Tech is putting on, but it’s weird having little kids running around everywhere I go on campus.
Waking up at 7:40 AM Sunday and sitting outside Target before they opened at 8 was well worth it, as I’ve finally acquired a Wii. There were people there since 6:15 in the morning and I was about 10 or 12th in line. I only got the Wii at Target, they didn’t have controllers or component cables when it was my turn to checkout. I’ve had three nunchuks since I happened to come across them at a Walmart during one of my previous Wii searches. I ended up finding plenty of controllers and the component cables at a Best Buy. One of the sale guys noted that for $10 more than a controller, I could get WiiPlay (which includes a controller)… an easy sell obviously.
I’ve got Wii Sports (comes with the Wii), Zelda, and Wii Play at this point, and so far I enjoy Wii Sports the most. I’m still in the tutorialish town adventure thing in Zelda, but I do like it. I haven’t played my Wii a whole lot though, when I got back to Tech Sunday I dropped my stuff and then headed off to a group meeting which lasted until about midnight. I got back and set things up, and I played 4 minutes according the the Message Board on the Wii. The graphics aren’t remotely as good as my XBox 360 games, but the gameplay is interesting and the interface is fun. I also like that the games are still $50, instead of the $60 games for the 360 (or PS3). I’m also glad I didn’t have to shell out $400 (360 Premium) or $600 (PS3) for the console. The lack of high def is a downer, but 480p doesn’t look bad on my TV. I think I’ll get WarioWare at some point, not now though, that’s enough money at once (everything total is still less than a PS3 though). Overall I’m very happy with the Wii.
I saw SCPlugin when I first discovered versioning, but it wasn’t compatible with the newer versions of Subversion as I recall. It hasn’t been updated in a long time, but I noticed a new version out on MacUpdate and had to check it out. When I was in CS2335, I used TortoiseSVN under Windows for all my C# coding and loved it. At last there’s something that has one of the two big things I really enjoyed from TortoiseSVN (GUI interface in the Finder). It still needs something like TortoiseMerge for dealing with conflicts, but still, this is a huge improvement over the command line or Quicksilver for me. There are icon overlays to indicate versioning status, that seems to be a bit buggy though, because as soon as I removed the .svn directory in the root of my homedir (since my entire homedir is, sadly, not versioned), it stopped working in a number of my working copies. Regardless, this is an amazing tool for anyone who uses Subversion on OS X and I look forward to further updates of SCPlugin.
The NSA has a really good article on why we should (technically some people are, but most people don’t create certificates with ECC signatures or implement it into their solutions) start moving towards elliptic curve cryptography. Basically - smaller keys with better security, which means less memory consumption and reduced bandwidth usage (which all translates into better performance).
Stuff the ballot box! Vote for Colbert (Runner up: Jon Stewart):
Who will be the next big comedian to appear at Georgia Tech? Help the Student Center Programs Council select him/her by filling out the survey at www.fun.gatech.edu (The Comedian Survey in the What’s Hot section) by Tuesday, Oct. 31.
You will have a chance to win two free tickets and backstage passes to the comedy show when you complete the survey. Please let us know who you want to see!
I’ve been meaning to check out OpenDNS for some time now and finally got around to it, in part thanks to Paul and WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg’s blog post. I’m only playing with it in my dorm right now (I set it up as my static DNS servers in my router and DHCP does the rest). It’s billed as a fast DNS service with typo-redirection and anti-phishing capabilities. It is fast, Tech’s DNS servers have been noticeably slow this semester when performing uncached lookups (they’re still fast when the lookup is cached though) and when I visited several sites that are notorious for being uncached lookups it zipped right along. The TLD typo (.comm -> com) works well and quickly (I will admit to making such mistakes from time to time). I haven’t done much with their phishing capabilities. Phishing hasn’t been an issue for me, but obviously it is for some people since we have billions of dollars disappearing as a result of identity theft, some of which occurs due to phishing.
The other service the OpenDNS people rolled out today is their PhishTank service. It’s essentially a user-driven phishing URL submission service that relies on the community to verify phishing URLs. It’s got a great interface and what looks to have a good API. They’re working on plugins for SpamAssassin and Thunderbird, which will make this service useful beyond its use in OpenDNS (the plugins are what really interest me). There’s talk of using it with antispam plugins for blogging comment spam, à la Akismet. One thing they’ll have to do is make it incredibly simple to submit phishing URLs with their plugins (One click submission in your email client is almost a must), otherwise this service will quickly become useless (user driven services are useless if they’re not easy to use and no one ever submits content).
There are already services that do URL blacklists (Spamhaus does phishing and spam), the issue that has arisen from time to time is that these services aren’t very democratic and from time to time there have been abuses (a lot of people use these services (or their ISPs use them) to filter junkmail and as such they hold a lot of sway over what people ultimately see in their mailbox). That’s not to say that a democratic system is immune to such abuses, but it should be easier to rectify issues that come up when others can verify the validity of your claims without waiting for a select few to “get around to it.” I’ll be interested in the statistics on false positives, percent of phishing emails caught (emails that trigger PhishTank / actual phishing emails), and such when the project has gone on long enough to get good information on its real usefulness.
