By anders pearson 01 May 2002
called in sick to work for the first time yesterday. on monday my throat was a little scratchy; then at about 11pm, i began to feel like i’d been hit by a bus.
<p>spent yesterday in an endless loop of: wake up, pee, drink some orange juice and water, stumble back to bed, fade randomly between semi-consciousness and sweaty, fever dreams, repeat.</p> By anders pearson 29 Apr 2002
the plan was originally for me to go down to DC, then lani and i would take a bus to richmond, anthony and kim would drive up and we’d all hang out with some of lani’s friends. had we actually planned ahead, that might have happened. unfortunately, we didn’t quite have the foresight to get in touch with the friends in richmond before we were ready to leave. when we couldn’t get ahold of them we decided that it wouldn’t be quite as much fun to go to richmond without knowing that we had somewhere to crash.
<p>as a backup, lani and i decided to just rent a car and drive down to Chapel Hill and hang out with anthony and kim there. while the backup plan ultimately succeeded, it was not without its flaws. primarily, we underestimated the difficulty involved in renting a car. despite calling ahead and reserving one, we ended up spending two painful hours at the counter of the rental place waiting for them to get the paperwork together and find us a car. we ended up with a crappy silver ford escort with no cd-player but by that time were were happy just to get out of there.</p>
<p>the rest of the trip went relatively well. we only got mildly lost in north carolina for a few minutes. then we met up with anthony and kim in downtown chapel hill for dinner. while we were eating, some guy in a spiderman costume wandered through the restaurant. then, later, in the parking lot of a supermarket we stopped at to pick up some wine, we saw some guy riding by on a unicycle. kim assured us that guys in spiderman costumes and on unicycles weren’t everyday occurrences in chapel hill and that things were just weird because we were visiting. </p>
<p>then we went back to anthony and kim’s little purple house in the middle of nowhere to have a quiet evening drinking wine, talking, and watching videos. kim showed us an interview with Alejandro </p>
<p>Jodorowsky (the director). i’m not sure if it was something he said or was just translated oddly but he used the phrase “_____ goes straight to my balls.” meaning roughly “_____ really pisses me off.” we decided that this phrase definitely needs to be worked into our slang vocabulary. eg, “Budget Rental Cars goes straight to my balls.”</p>
<p>we also watched a tape anthony had of Bill Hicks’ last public performance before his death. it was filmed in london in 1992. interestingly, all his commentary about Bush and the US government’s habit of giving small countries weapons and then going and blowing them up is still entirely relevant and timely ten years later.</p>
<p>in the morning we went and said hi to the llama (i’m not sure i could have talked lani into driving all the way to chapel hill if i hadn’t remembered that they lived on a llama farm. the promise of llama’s was an important motivational force. although apparently they’re down to just a single llama now). then i insisted on going to a waffle house for breakfast (what’s a trip to the south without going to a waffle house?). it was cheap, greasy, and filled with rednecks; the experience was complete.</p>
<p>traffic going back into DC was scary but we managed to make it alive.</p> By anders pearson 23 Apr 2002
i’ve finally gotten around to writing another theme for thraxil. if you go to your user page and edit your settings, you can now select the ‘barebones’ theme. it’s basically just thraxil with no styling whatsoever; stories aren’t posted on the main page, just their subjects with a link to read the rest of the story. most people probably won’t like it but it could be useful if you consistently visit the site from a slow connection or an old browser that doesn’t like CSS. mostly this was just an exercise to demonstrate that theme selection does actually exist and work properly. expect more to come in the future.
<p>since i now have a <span class="caps">WAP</span>-enabled cellphone, i may even get ambitions and make a <span class="caps">WML</span> version of thraxil so i can read it on my phone.</p> By anders pearson 20 Apr 2002
some days i just love technology.
<p>i got my tax return a while ago and my first instinct was to buy a new computer; put together something top of the line and expensive. my current machine is an old celeron 400 that i’ve had for almost 3 years now. unfortunately, i have student loans and credit card payments and stuff so i knew i couldn’t really justify spending all that money on a new computer. but if i didn’t do something to make my machine faster, i’d be more and more tempted to go blow a wad of cash on new hardware. </p>
<p>so i spent some time digging around through all the specs of the hardware i’ve got trying to figure out what i could do to improve performance the most for the least amount of money. i filled it up with <span class="caps">RAM</span> last summer when prices fell through the floor so memory wasn’t the problem. anything more than a trivial processor upgrade would probably require a new motherboard (which would probably require new <span class="caps">RAM</span>). speeding up my hard-drive would require either moving to <span class="caps">SCSI</span> (expensive) or <span class="caps">ATA</span>-100 (requiring a new mobo or at least a controller card).</p>
<p>really, what was killing my system the most was the graphics. my computer came with one of those evil onboard <span class="caps">ATI</span> Mach64’s. turning on 3d acceleration for that card actually makes things slower. so i picked up a cheap ($50) GeForce2 MX 400 card.</p>
<p>wow. what a difference. before, i couldn’t even load tuxracer; it would seriously take several minutes just to render the title screen; 3d graphics were out of the question. now it smokes. X windows even loads almost instantaneously now.</p>
<p>it’s probably a pretty sad commentary on the age of my computer that a $50 upgrade can just about double the performance. it’s also not exaggerating much to say that the graphics card has just about as much processing power as the rest of my system. on the positive side, i’ve now extended the lifespan of my computer for quite a bit longer.</p>
<p>while i was at it i picked up a wireless keyboard and mouse so i can take full advantage of my projector. i can now relax on the couch and work on the computer (or play tuxracer). </p>
<p>the keyboard i got is a logitech itouch keyboard. it’s a pretty standard black keyboard with a nice feel to it and about a dozen assorted buttons and controls on it. it comes with windows software that’s supposed to make all the buttons do simple things like take you to a web site with just one keystroke. most interestingly, it has a volume knob and play/stop/ff/rew keys which look like they might actually be useful.</p>
<p>after some experimentation with <tt>xev</tt>, i confirmed that the extra keys were just sending keycodes in the undefined range. with some <tt>xmodmap</tt> tweaking and help from <a href="http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:tdeheWhqpvoC:xmms-shell.sourceforge.net/">xmms-shell</a> and i now have all the buttons working in linux and bound to things that i find useful. i’ve even got a “thraxil” button that takes me directly to this site. :)</p> By anders pearson 20 Apr 2002
last night, Gerard turned 0×1D. a significant portion of the people in the office along with other friends of his managed to throw a surprise party for him. i was really impressed that we got as many people as we did without the surprise being blown; i didn’t even realize it was intended to be a surprise party up until right beforehand.
<p>so we all gathered at Madame X, a little bar in the west village, with a cake as one of his friends brought him there under some pretense. between madame X and some other bar that we ended up at later, we pumped him full of birthday cake and martinis and peer-pressured him into doing various embarassing acts (unfortunately, we didn’t have any recording equipment so there will be no future blackmail).</p> By anders pearson 18 Apr 2002
my old ericsson T28 cellphone has been having issues lately and, in the last week, has pretty much ceased functioning altogether. so i figured it would be a good time to upgrade to the new T68 which has all kinds of neat features like a color screen, WAP with email, a web-browser, and IM, bluetooth, and an IR port plus much better battery life.
<p>it is, unfortunately, not a cheap phone. to get a large discount that brought it down to a price i could afford, i had to sign up for a new contract. that meant that i get a new number. so if anyone reading this has my old cell # written down, change the last 4 digits from 4299 to 1299. sorry about the inconvenience.</p>
<p>and of course, if you don’t have my number at all, just email me. with this phone i can now read my email (and send it) from anywhere.</p> By anders pearson 15 Apr 2002
went to connecticut this weekend to meet up with the rest of my family at my grandmother’s house. my sister even brought her dog.
<p>we spent a lot of the time doing yardwork. my grandmother has managed to hang on to a big house with a sizable amount of land (well, a lot considering that it’s the middle of suburbia) but can’t really get around well enough anymore to keep things maintained herself. plants seem to grow at an incredible rate in connecticut. in maine most of the vegetation is killed every winter and the few plants hearty enough to survive a maine winter usually aren’t the kind that grow quickly. everytime my father goes down to visit her, he brings along tools and cuts away huge swaths of the ever-expanding vegetation. and everytime he goes down, it’s grown back and creeped even further out.</p>
<p>so we spent most of the daylight hours on saturday and sunday raking leaves, clearing the branches that had cluttered up the lawn over the winter, and cutting down vines. the whole time, miranda (my sister’s dog) ran around happily smelling all the new connecticut smells and alternating between cooking herself in the sun and cooling off in the shade. despite a little sunburn, i have to admit that a little exercise feels good every once in a while.</p>
<p>on sunday night my aunt (who also lives in connecticut) came over and we all went out and watched <i>A Beautiful Mind</i>. good movie. some of the visualizations of how he ‘saw’ patterns in numbers were kind of cheesy but otherwise it was good.</p>
<p>at 0607 this morning i was roused from <span class="caps">REM</span> sleep, pulled my shoes on, got in the car and rode to the train station. got on the Shoreline East railroad to New Haven, transferred to the Metro North commuter train, rode into Grand Central, got on the subway to 42nd st, transferred to a 1 train up to 103rd, got out and walked to my apartment. took a quick shower (my grandmother forbid us from taking showers while we were there, citing some “water shortage” or something that connecticut is having) and walked to work. considering how poorly my body typically deals with the morning, i’m impressed that i can even remember parts of my day.</p> By anders pearson 08 Apr 2002
[setting: harish, gordie, darya and I walking to the store to get our mid-afternoon sugar fix.]
<p>harish has mastered the trick of launching a penny at high speeds by snapping his fingers and is demonstrating it to the rest of us. we walk by a grassy area and see one of the campus’ many grey squirrels bouncing around doing squirrel type things.</p>
<p>harish: “check it out; i’m gonna nail that squirrel.”</p>
<p>harish goes into his windup. before he can launch, the squirrel whips around to face him, plants its feet and stares directly at him with the most hardcore do-<em>not</em>-fuck-with-me look i’ve ever seen from human or rodent alike. </p>
<p>harish freezes and his arm slowly comes down. we all back off nervously, trying not to make any quick movements as the squirrel continues to stare us down.</p> By anders pearson 08 Apr 2002
i’ve finally gotten around to adding markov back into thraxil. back and better than ever. markov now uses all posts, diary posts, and comments to build the transition matrix (in the old version, it only used the frontpage posts).
<p>for the time being, the markov post is only updated when someone posts someting (anything) so you can’t just sit and reload over and over for new markov posts. once i make some performance tweaks, that might be added back. </p>
<p>and of course, if you get sick of the markov posts, you can always turn it off by unchecking the “show markov” box on your user settings page.</p> By anders pearson 02 Apr 2002
in crypto class today, prof. Rabin mentioned that in world war II, the government decided that they had to test all the soldiers for syphilis and a few other diseases. the problem was that blood tests were extremely expensive and they couldn’t afford to pay for blood tests for all N thousand soldiers knowing that probably less than 1% or so would actually be infected. they had to find the few soldiers who were infected but they didn’t want to spend all the money on expensive tests for soldiers who weren’t infected.
<p>the novel solution they came up with was to take groups of the blood samples, maybe 100 per group, mix them together and test the mixture. if it came back negative, they knew that all 100 of those soldiers were healthy; if it came back positive, they’d break it up into smaller and smaller groups until they’d isolated which soldier was infected. by picking the sizes of the groups intelligently, they could effectively test large numbers of soldiers quite cheaply.</p>
<p>Rabin then went on to explain an algorithm for doing mass verifications of digital signatures using a similar strategy.</p>
<p>i think the whole syphilis testing example is a wonderful example of how a good understanding of the problem and a little cleverness can really pay off. it’s probably also a good explanation/example for the layperson of what computer science is really about and why algorithms are important.</p>
<p>the actual algorithm used interests me as well. the trick to applying it would be to find a situation with something analogous to the mixing of the blood; you need a large scale boolean operation:(A or B or C or …) that will let you combine tests over large groups. then you also need the probabilities involved in the problem to be small enough that combining the tests will help you. eg, if 99% of the soldiers could be expected to be infected, the divide and conquer strategy would end up being more expensive than just testing each soldier individually.</p>