A Sandwich Story
I didn't sleep well last night. Last night, I dreamt that people kept trying to kill me. They were all accidents, as far as I can remember this morning, but they were all brutal. In one I can remember, I was riding in someone's back seat, not paying attention, and apparently neither was the driver as we slammed headfirst off a ramp into a truck. In the one that I remember most strongly, I was in some weird kitchen set up in the basement of someone's log cabin. Pots and pans were hung on all the walls, and the room was dominated by an older gas stove. A guy was cooking some sort of greasy food in a skillet, bacon maybe, and from time to time grease would spit out and ignite sections of the log cabin. Two guys would quickly try to chase the fire and extinguish it quickly. All I could do was watch, perhaps I was stunned at the many layers of stupidity exhibited. Then one of the grease splotches hit something important... a power supply or outlet... and as the fire started to engulf the area a huge spark of purple electricity zapped from the fire and arced onto the nearest pot to it, and from that pot spread to the many others on the walls. I remember that distinct feel of the entire room vibrating from the electrical energy, and it was immobolizing, leaving me to watch in horror as the fire got bigger and smokier... then I woke up, there in the middle of the night.
I had little time to dwell on weird dreams, because as soon as my alarm proper went off I had to rush across campus to get everything set up for our 412 lab sell-off. Things ...
Sam & Max Rise From the Undead (Sort of)
It's official, Steve Purcell (creator of Sam & Max, to whom the rights were reverted back to following the abortion of LucasArts' much lamented 90%-completed sequel Freelance Police) has given the Sam & Max rights to Telltale Games. Telltale Games, for those who haven't met them yet, include a number of the developers that left LucasArts at the death of Freelance Police. There current project is an episodic (!) adventure game based on the Bone series of comics... it looks just like the comics do and I'm downloading the demo right now to see if its any good (if I have any time to try it). Telltale plans to develop a similar episodic series with the Sam & Max rights, but it won't/can't be like Freelance Police was going to be. Still no word on what LucasArts plans to do with that work other than continue to sit on it indefinitely.
The Relative Silence of Busyness
School work has been ramping up pretty quickly. Then there's the fact that I'm looking for both a medium term (possibly/hopefully 2+ years) apartment and a coop job, one or the other (maybe both, depending on the job location) as soon as this Spring. Partly because of that, I'm also working on a couple games in Java for Game Gardens. Cooping with Three Rings would be pretty cool, and I was told that getting demos together would be a good step in the right direction. It's mostly fun work creating these demos, and I'm hoping that when we get to the project requirements of OO Design I'll be able to swing some of my work on the demos into counting for that particular class. The Three Rings Narya library needs some good public UML diagramming, alone.
Most of my activity can be watched in pretty shades of biege at the darcsweb view of my code repository on Ox. I'm using Ox for a lot of inter-computer work, as well as my current main repository, because it is the shell server that I have easiest access to. (My web host refuses to give out shell accounts for security reasons.) Ox is a Speed ACM server, so I'm gratious for the access to it, and its another reason I make sure to pay my local ACM dues.
Something like that darcsweb view is something I was hoping to set up at code.worldmaker.net, but I haven't been able to get the cooperation to do that, and even if I did, ftping the repos is much more of a pain than being able to directly talk to the repo with darcs via ssh. I don't want to just forward it to ...
Bringing Theoretical Class Work to Life: Meet My Pal the DFA
Just to prove it was quite easy to do, and also to show to my friends in Automata that the stuff might be more practical than they think, I put together an actual implementation of the Problem 11, an ugly DFA assigned to us as homework. Problem 11 was to prove that L = { vwv : v, w ∈ {a, b}*, |v| = 2} defines a regular language. The easiest way to do this is to build the DFA. In this case the DFA is a large 19 state system.
Here's the diagram (generated with Graphviz's dot):
Here's the DOT file code that generated this (color highlighting by VIM):
digraph prob11 {
q0 [style=filled, color=green];
q9 [shape=doublecircle];
q12 [shape=doublecircle];
q15 [shape=doublecircle];
q18 [shape=doublecircle];
q0 -> q1 [label=a];
q0 -> q2 [label=b];
q1 -> q3 [label=a];
q1 -> q4 [label=b];
q2 -> q5 [label=a];
q2 -> q6 [label=b];
q3 -> q8 [label=a];
q3 -> q7 [label=b];
q4 -> q11 [label=a];
q4 -> q10 [label=b];
q5 -> q13 [label=a];
q5 -> q14 [label=b];
q6 -> q16 [label=a];
q6 -> q17 [label=b];
q7 -> q8 [label=a];
q7 -> q7 [label=b];
q8 -> q9 [label=a];
q8 -> q7 [label=b];
q9 -> q9 [label=a];
q9 -> q7 [label=b];
q10 -> q11 [label=a];
q10 -> q10 [label=b];
q11 -> q11 [label=a];
q11 -> q12 [label=b];
q12 -> q11 [label=a];
q12 -> q10 [label=b];
q13 -> q13 [label=a];
q13 -> q14 [label=b];
q14 -> q15 [label=a];
q14 -> q14 [label=b];
q15 -> q13 [label=a];
q15 -> q14 [label=b];
q16 -> q16 [label=a];
q16 -> q17 [label=b];
q17 -> q16 [label=a];
q17 -> q18 [label=b];
q18 -> q16 [label=a];
q18 -> q18 [label=b];
}
...and with a few simple changes to that I created the Haskell file:
q 0 [] = False
q 1 [] = False
q 2 ...
Do I even want a job?
Yesterday was yet another resume-sending day in what feels like a long fruitless job search. I could only think of three companies I felt like sending my resume to yesterday, and two of those didn't have a way to apply. I feel real stupid because I've really lost a lot of confidence in the business world. I'm not sure really if I actually want another job at this point, the way I feel like I've been mistreated. The money might be nice, but I don't really know what I want to do anymore in the job world, and I'm getting kind of fed-up at the beauracratic nature of business, the slow pace, and the lack of anything really in the way of response to inquiries and applications.
Maybe I'm just impatient, but the "pace of business" just seems so glacial. I spoke with one particular company for over two months and they sounded like they were interested, but then they just didn't seem to be moving on it. I guess I could contact them again, but the initial enthusiasm has drained away.
The only reason I need a job right now is for my degree requirements (required 2 coops for the BS, 3 for the M.Eng). I'm tempted to just grab a work study here for my second, like foreign nationals and other people who can't get a "real job". Another possibility I've considered is to just take a semester off and get real involved in some big Open Source project like Mozilla or Mono. If I wrote a somewhat detailed coop report on how much I learned from the experience I figure the CECS Department would accept it. I'll remain a poor college student, not getting ...
Book Review: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (being the latest novel by Cory Doctorow) was slow to grab my attention and then didn't hold on to it as well as I would have liked. I really liked Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, but the direction he's moved toward since just hasn't intrigued me as much. Down and Out was about normal people being normal people in a weirder world (one in which average people could take control of and shape Disney World rides). Eastern Standard Tribe (and now Someone) reversed that and was about weirder people trying to be normal people in the normal world. EST offered something akin to a spy novel thriller, and that made it entertaining when it wasn't spending so much work trying to give a glimpse into the "normal world". In Someone I found the normal world sequences even more tedious. The weirder sequences offered some small bits of fun and interesting visual images, but in their way seemed much more like a drawn out punch line than an actual attempt at something interesting.
I figure I should clarify, though, that the "normal" sequences of EST and Someone are actually more "pop geek" (like the stuff they put on TechTV (before G4) that people drooled over and became "popular"; we could install lee-nix and set up wireless networking and be cool!), thus I guess I might identify with them as being closer to "normal" a bit more than the next guy.
I particularly felt that the denoument for Someone left several things to be desired. Much of the book seems to hint that it might be leading somewhere; that there might actually be some sort of idea of where things are going; that there might be some big revelation ...
New Toys
The Realm of Code Signing
I gave up on commenting at Slashdot articles a few years ago, so if I have something to say, it might as well be here. It's not the karma I worry about (I've always been positive) so much as the fact that there is a huge signal to noise ratio, and I read it about a day behind when most of the comments/moderation has already precipated out and anything I might post quite possibly won't be read. Also, this post got to be an extremely long essay of sorts.
This latest Ask Slashdot was full of a lot of well-moderated dreck. I mention it because it falls within one of my weird "areas of fascination™", and although I can't make any claim as to being an expert, I think I have a hell more an idea of the intricacies than the average slashdotter. I've done a lot of work in security, authentication, and privacy studies. The three together compromise one of the biggest, ugliest, and most complex systems we deal with unconciously in our lives. Most people treat this topic like some form of black magic... you "have it" or you "don't", and often only blood sacrifices might change that, in the minds of most.
So, someone on Slashdot asked a bunch of nerds whether or not "code signing" (using a digital signature on program code) was "worth it", citing the opinions of an expert in Cryptography (the applied mathematical facet of the whole Security-Authentication-Privacy megasystem).
First, signatures are the major component of the Authentication world. (The lesser counterpart to signatures being vouchers, which is where OpenID gets its strength as an Authentication system. OpenID is my recommended standard (of the ones I've seen) for basic website authentication, and I'm hoping ...
