GZigZag has renamed itself to GZZ and moved to Savannah (from SourceForge). GZZ is a free, java implementation of Tel Nelson's ZigZag. It's a neat idea and something like it plays a large part in my plans for total world domination.
Ian has an article on CNet about Freenet and Sept 11th. It's worth a read, or at least a skim
The Mouse Genome is now online if the like that sort of thing. And (better yet) it looks like it's free (in both speech and beer). BBC article
Maybe I should see a doctor about my nosebleeds. They don't happen often, but when they do - boy does it bleed. At least I didn't pass out this time.
Metis now has a TLS (the protocol formally known as SSL) enabled MTA
IV now validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict! (well, the front page at least). The W3C validator sometimes needs a few refreshes to connect to IV thou.
Wes has a link to this interesting page on XHTML+MathML+SVG. Maybe this could actually be a decent typesetting system.
Roger Dingledine has released the first draft of the Mixminion design paper. Remix is pretty much dead as the only reason I started writing it was to try my hand at RSA coding - so go read it and pass comment. Maybe when exams are over I'll help with Mixminion because, let's face it, Mixmaster is getting a little long in the tooth.
Just finished Diaspora by Greg Egan - wow. The scope of this book is stunning as is the authors grasp of maths and physics. How many other authors explain all the reasoning behind their ideas?.
After about 4 weeks trying, Smiths have given up and said that the new True Names book is out of print, despite that fact that it was published in December 2001! This is a sucky country to get books in
Some links:
If anyone knows Aspect Orientated Programming I want them to email me an example of why I would want to use it. (you know, like the example of GUI's which is always used for OOP).
Stackless Python (which I'm sure I've mentioned here before) is moving towards a Limbo [1, 2, 3] model of microthreads.
Maybe an interesting book: IA-64 Linux Kernel
Wolfram's book of about 10 years is coming out soon (May 14 so says the website - but that might slip).
Kotako is being dehosted as of June 1st after years of fine service (kotako runs linuxpower.org). So I'm moving my mail to imperialviolet.org - which involves re-subscribing to far too many mailing lists - but I'm getting there. Maybe I can get linuxpower.org's MX pointed to mail.imperialviolet.org so I can run a forwarding service for a while.
This was posted to Slashdot - but I don't care I'm going to post it here too because it's a really great list of major software bugs. It's nearly all `physical effect' bugs thou (for example it doesn't count things like the Ping Of Death). Funny reading - if a little scary
I think I've got a decent grip on Garbage Collectors now and damm, it's a nasty problem. I have a few design ideas which I should write up at some point.
The Bloody Sunday Inquiry has demanded that two Channel 4 journalists reveal anonymous sources, on pain of contempt of count. Quite frankly I don't see any way that you couldn't hold such a court in anything but contempt. If the sources had not been granted anonymity then they would never have said anything - the inquiry should be grateful for what they have. Forcing disclosure will only damage future inquiries and alienate people against this one. At least the two reporters have refused for the moment.( Guardian story with some great quotes from the reporters).
Another good story (and another link to the Guardian). I wonder if you could retrofit a computer to a car (a proper computer) and live your whole life in a car? Drive-thru everything, wireless internet access, a postal box to get your internet ordered stuff delivered (it would have to be drive thou of course). You would be the totally mobile citizen, telecommuting and living out of your car. The only problem I can't work round (reasonably) is toilet stops. But I suppose you could have a toilet fitted and store the waste somewhere in the car until you find a place to, erm, dispose of it.
I'm sure people have seen Jamie Kellner's `views' on PVRs. If not - see the Slashdot story. Comments about the stupidity of this guy aside (and I loved Ian's Tivo) it seems to me this is an example of the Tragedy of the Commons. As long as people watch adverts on TV (actually, for as long as marketing people think they do) - everyone gets free content. However, some people can skip the adverts (either by not watching or by using PVRs) and get free content without suffering the adverts. And let's face it - nearly all adverts are just painful. This works until too many people do it and marketing people realise that ads don't work and so people have to pay for content.
Now, I really don't want to be seen to be agreeing that "PVR Users Are Thieves" (because I'm not) - but it looks like the current system is fundamentally unstable and will fall at some point. Now the thing not to do is to try to pin reality somewhere it doesn't want to be with laws and fuckware which force people to watch adverts (HDTV and the like). One point where the link with the T of the C fails is that in true T of the C situations everyone is worse off afterwards. I don't see that this is true in this case. I wouldn't have a problem paying for what little TV I watch if it were advert free (assuming a decent micropayments system).
But then people will be trading DivX's of shows and they'll still be bleating about users being thieves. And you can bet they'll still be trying to pin reality with laws and fuckware. Sigh.
Woody not going to make release tomorrow. (but who doesn't track unstable anyway??)
A Retrospective on Paradigms of AI Programming has been updated
I'm reading up on Garbage Collection at the moment. Microsoft's .NET GC implements the write barrier my watching for dirty pages - but that gives 4K granularity, which is pretty poor. But the thought of a write barrier in the code at every pointer write isn't exactly nice either.
More on the EUCD (DMCA for the EU). Does anyone else feel political jetlag? I thought you had to be older for that to set in. Maybe we should abolish politicians (I don't think I actually agree with that page thou).
And here's today's (badly spelt and lacking grammar) message from our sponsors:
it's official Linux is pant s cause it doesn't support all of the messenger icons - go out and buy up xp all u linuxites" - will merrett CEO of willmerrett corporation the biggest company worldwide by 2020 and runnin on windows!
Google has launched a new service in beta (requires HTTPS)
Currently nostalgia tripping on New Order - Shellshock and Screenwriter's Blues (finally found MP3s of them, lyrics for SB at the bottom of the page)
CERT working with a new language for doing simulations of complex systems [Link has broken since then]
And today's random link is this
Well, I take it back about Kompessor after Zooko pointed me to some of her better works (namely Attack and Release and Never Talk to Strangers).
I read this in the latest issue of New Scientist:
The depression had hit, and the town had thousands out of work and little money in the municipal coffers. So the mayor printed his own. The value of the Worgl "stamp scrip" was set to automatically depreciate: this is, it earned negative interest.Once a month, its holders had to pay a "stamp" fee of 1 per cent of the value of the note. The result was that everyone spend the new money in the town as fast as possible. The streets were re-paved, the water system rebuilt, new houses appeared, then a ski jump, a new bridge. Some 200 other Austrian towns came up with plans to copy it, the central bank panicked, and it became a criminal offence to issue currency.
That's pretty stunning. I always wondered what the basis of the fiscal system was - thinking it must be pretty stunningly complex and well thought out. I'm pretty much of the opinion that it's not thought out at all and just works because of luck and is designed by powerful conservative, neophobic organisations.
Some other links which mention this story:
I'm sure you can all Google for other links as well as the next person
My book of the moment is Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation (1558603204) (Table of Contents). It's a real blood stopper when you open it on your lap, but it's a really good book (from what little I've read) as this stuff is pretty difficult to digup off the net. More when I've finished it.
Looking to build some kiosk boxes (Internet access only) at school so I set a P75 (16MB of memory) building Gentoo. 20 hours later is had only got to building gcc (the first time) so I scrapped that idea and installed Gentoo chrooted on metis (Gentoo is cool in that you can do that sort of thing) and copied it over.
Ouch is it slow loading galeon! I'm talking 5-10 minutes to load and display a web page. And that's after having to run X on the frame buffer because it can't seem to drive the Mach64 card. I'm going to have to look at a lighter weight solution. (maybe netscape is smaller - I'm sure the memory is the major problem).
This is today's really random link. Quite a few broken links on the page - but still lots of (maybe) interesting stuff.
Welcome to the new, NS4 friendly, Imperialviolet. This is where agl stops playing web designer and goes for something simpler. Bitch away if you will. I need to improve the scripts which generate IV to handle these blog entries so I can limit the number of entries per page.
Zooko's blog links
to a song called Rappers We Crush by Kompressor. I can't say
it's at all to my liking - but the girl on the Kompressor page is
really cute 
.
This link is Kuro5hinated at the moment - but I want a go once it's up again.
Kali is a Scheme which can move closures and continuations across computers. I've yet to read their paper (it's currently top of list thou), but it looks sweet
I'm off to pickup a nice big book on compiler design from Smiths tomorrow
Kotako was down for a couple of days due to a power outage, so I'm guessing lots of email bounced. I'm sure people will resend it.
An apt-get on metis foobared it as upgrading caused /bin/zsh to disappear, thus needing a power cycle and a init=/bin/sh since zsh was root's shell. The IP address also changed on the new boot so it will take a little time for the DNS to shake out (more so since the DNS server for imperialviolet.org just died).
The RIAA (boo! hiss!) has published a paper on file sharing networks. This one is lacking the torrent of crap which is the usual mark of output from these sort of organisations. At 75 pages of information I mostly already know I'm not going to read it all, however it does mention Freenet lots. Some choice quotes (mostly they are pretty nice to us!)
As of this writing,the Freenet community has yet to release a usable Windows client and demonstrate its real-world scalability.
Ok, so that's the only bad quote about Freenet that I could find (and even that's pretty fair)
My Programming Language Crisis (not mine thou). Interesting reading, even if I cannot agree with his placing Ocaml first (if only because of that syntax). But Python comes second
Andy Oram on semantic webs
I'm using SpamAssassin at the moment and it's doing a really good job at filtering spam (with little messages about why a given mail was filtered and things). However, since it's written in Perl, I'm wondering if I could manually delete the spam far faster than it can. In fact I'm pretty sure I could. Hmm
I've promised to stop playing web designer since IV renders really badly in Netscape4. Maybe if I get time I'll fix it
New Kernel Traffic out (#163)
My Gentoo install at school is going pretty well (certainly a lot faster than the install at home over my 56K dialup link). A few niggles about Gentoo:
In light of the last point I should remember Ctrl-SysRq-K is the one to kill the current terminal's processes. It's called SAK thou, which is why I missed it today (System Attention Key).
IV validates again as HTML and CSS. It's only HTML 4.01 Transitional thou. Maybe I should try and make it XHTML Strict or something.
Lisp kicking arse here and here (second link is NYT)
Another BIO link (OMG I look an idiot in that photo!)
**** Kotako is down (mail to agl@imperialviolet.org should still work thou) ****
Yesterday I must have got about 4 hours sleep on the coach to and from London, and about 9 hours sleep last night and I still feel like I could curl up and sleep some more!
Mailed zooko about his backup MXes being broken
Mother's birthday today. Got her a huge box of chocolates and some smelly stuff (I'm awful at buying presents, but the rule if (female) { buy (smell_stuff); } seems to work pretty well)
Been reading the The Qmail Handbook. I've been using qmail for ages on all my boxes, but this is a really useful book. With an animal on the front, this would be an O'Reilly book
Another link for Aspect OP, which I've mentioned before
Guardian article on a ray of light in S.Africa's AIDS policy
If a google search returns 0 results and there's a spelling correction then google now automatically tries the corrected search
Another self link to print off tomorrow: A Case for Automatic Run-Time Code Optimisation
Took the image out-of-line since the load times were too long
Firstly a better link to the IOI2002 site which I linked to yesterday (this one's in English at least)
Maths on the Web: a link from IRC might be interesting to some people. Personally I think HTML is a massive pile of crap which is only just rescued by strict HTML 4.01 and CSS. Mozilla is implementing Math-ML in current versions but there are still many browsers for which this site could be useful. Then again you could just do the right thing and use PDF (without Type3 fonts thou!)
Lisp Magazine. Lisp is cool. Nuff said.
An old, but interesting paper on why people are violent.
Goo is a YetAnotherLanguageGoingNowhere, but at least I'm interested in this one. It's an S-expression based language (as all languages should be) which calls gcc live to do incremental compilation. Clean, but not the head-in-the-sand clean like Scheme.
Just a link to myself really since I want to print this off tomorrow (it's a paper linked from the GOO site anyway) Adaptive Optimization For Self: Reconciling High Performance With Exploratory Programming
As an end note I'd just like to say I like trains. Despite the battering that the UK rail network gets in the press I've managed to go from Warwick to Cheltenham, Cheltenham to Cambridge and back without a hitch in the last couple of weeks. For one of those trips I was even travelling on a Sunday (when track repairs and the like are done).
Well, I made the international team and I'm off to the world finals in South Korea. Maybe I should have a stab at learning Korean. I also got a copy of Introduction to Algorithms as a prize (the one with the hanging red things coauthored by Rivest) so I'm reading that.
I also talked to a really smart guy called TBL (who works at Lionhead) and I'm pondering some really nutty debuggering ideas now.
I should write a review of Bruce Sterling's Distraction, but I can't be bothered to write too much, so here goes with a reviewette: It's a good book, but I didn't ever feel like I cared about the characters enough to really want to read on. I could have dropped this book half way through and not batted an eye. Despite this (I should think being trapped on a train for hours and hours helped) I finished it, and it's still good by the end. Nothing stunning, but good.
Well, I'm off to BIO tomorrow so no IV updates for another weekend (but then there haven't been any since Monday anyway)
Let us look at my bookmarks over the last couple of days then
First there is Mono, the free .NET implementation. Quite a lot of smart people at the ACCU were saying that .NET has some good ideas in it (a first for Microsoft) and I was thinking about building a neat little garbage collector for it. Unfortunately it needs MS's C# compiler to build - so that idea is fscked. (with a little kernel help the GC could have been good too, oh well).
I've also been looking at Gentoo. This is a build-everything-from-src distrib it's (sortof) reviewed here on /.. Since it downloads lots (the ISO is only 16MB) you need a good internet pipe and my 56K isn't going to cut it. Thus I've been trying to install it at school (cable modem).
The first point is that GNU parted is good for resizing FAT
partitions and the second is that my victim box doesn't have a
CDROM (and I don't have a burner either). So in the tradition of
playing with anything that looks fun (cough! ) I loopback mounted the ISO and netbooted a box to
run the ISO via NFS. It actually seemed to work a little. Maybe
more when I get back to it Tues.
Next down in my bookmarks is Stackless Python. Now, I've always that that Python's dynamic naming was such a sucky idea (and pychecker is too much of a pain to use), but the rest of Python makes up for it. At the UK Python conference I said that Python was just becoming Lisp (w/o S-expressions) and stackless makes it more so. Basically they add continuations support and the like (Python generators are a crippled version of this).
I've also been looking at Aspect orientated programming, but haven't grokked it enough to say anything really. Looks like it might be pretty cool thou.
I've been looking at the Lambda library (can't find URL right now, try google). This is a pretty stunning template library for C++, an example:
for_each (l.begin(), l.end(), cout << free1 << endl);
Go read that again if you want, I'll wait. Yes, you do see code inserted in the middle of a function call - and it works! I thought Modern C++ Design was pretty stunning, but this is just wow! Now I know that Lisp does this with its eyes closed, but C++ never has been a functional language and it's a testament to templates that they can be used to do this kind of stuff.
If you don't read
Dilbert, why not? [looks like Dilbert links don't stick around]
| / | Root |
| Alternate | The Weird and Wonderful |
| Backlinks | What are backlinks |
| John Gilmore | What's Wrong with Copy Protection |
| Archives | Blog Archives |
| One | Archive 1 |
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| Twenty One | Archive 21 |
| Twenty Two | Archive 22 |
| Twenty Three | Archive 23 |
| Twenty Four | Archive 24 |
| Twenty Five | Archive 25 |
| Twenty Six | Archive 26 |
| Twenty Seven | Archive 27 |
| Twenty Eight | Archive 28 |
| Twenty Nine | Archive 29 |
| Photos | Poor People Caught on Film |
| Jack and the Beanstalk | Jack and the Beanstalk |
| RIP Scan | Results of a Stage Scan Fire |
| Yosemite | Yosemite National Park |
| Projects | Incomplete things from the lab |
| Seagull's Bane | Linux Automounter |
| bttrackd | BitTorrent Tracker |
| CAPTCHA | CAPTCHA CGI script |
| Conserv | Console Serving |
| Deerpark | Using Tor with Firefox/1.1 (Deerpark) |
| DNSFix | Fixing DNS |
| Xovers | XTA Crossover Control |
| IAFS | Archive Org Storage |
| JBIG2 | JBIG2 Encoder |
| Verify | PGP Key Verifier |
| MaxFlow | Maximal Flow in Python |
| PyBloom | Bloom Filters in Python |
| pyGnuTLS | Python wrapping of GnuTLS |
| Sxmap | Apache SuEXEC Map |
| Hellard | Union Server Notes |
| Recordings | Free recordings |
| ICSM Choir | St Paul's Church |
| School | Ancient School Stuff |
| Writings | Who knows |
| Cap Systems | Capability Systems |
| Intro | Introduction to me |
| Suprema | JMC2 Group Project |
| MP Letters | Letters I've written to my MP |
| Sound | Sound With Dramsoc |
| SyncThreading | The wonders of user-land threads |
