Sun Apr 7 13:20:51 BST 2002

I'm back! And damm, that conference was good. Now, I don't have great experience with conferences (O'Reilly P2P1 last year and ACCU 2002 so far). But during every slot there was something I wanted to go to, and usually 2 or 3 things. The speaker list could be read off a list of the great books on C++ and there were no managers or reporters.

My presentation went great (it was my first time presenting). Everyone said it was very impressive (admittedly, they weren't going to say it was crap to me, but they could have said nothing at all) and I had more than enough to fill the 90 minutes. In fact, if there was one thing wrong with it, it was that it was too long.

School tomorrow, sigh

Wed Apr 3 14:51:38 BST 2002

I'm off to present at the ACCU conference. Wish me luck about 11am BST on Sat.

Because of that I'm going to be out of contact until at least Sunday

So WeHaveTheWayOut comes up running OpenBSD and after the media storm switches to IIS 5. Now it's down!. Currently returns "No web site is configured at this address.".

(note the solution to :) at the end of a bracketed sentence! )

Tue Apr 2 09:35:18 BST 2002

Hmm, seems I did pretty well in the Information Olympiad (however you spell it) and they want me to goto the final in Cambridge. I wonder how I'm getting there.

I found this in No Logo last night:

The most creative response came from students at the University of Toronto. A handful of undergraduates landed part-time jobs with the wash room billboard company and kept conveniently losing the custom-made screwdrivers that opened the 400 plastic frames. Pretty soon, a group calling themselves the Escher Appreciation Society were breaking into the "student-proof" frames and systematically replacing the bathroom ads with prints by Escher.

OMG! How cool are those people!! (I sound like pupok :) )

Dilbert rocks today [looks like Dilbert links don't stick around]

Sun Mar 31 15:15:57 BST 2002

Well, the Queen Mother has died and, boy, don't we know it. Now, don't get me wrong - it's headline news, but you can't move for tributes to her. Back to back tributes, and stories about her life, stories about mourners - all for someone that few people knew and who's death will only really affect a handful of close family. Lots of very nice old women died last week - and I don't see the BBC going nuts over them.

On a more cynical note - now is just the time we need reporting on other matters as anyone with an announcement that they want to bury will be making it now. (as Mrs Moore demonstrated)

Also, we've switched to British Summer Time - which now means that my bed side clock is right (I hadn't changed it since last time :)

(and there's a question for you all - if you put a :) thing at the end of a bracket span, do you also put a close bracket?)

Fri Mar 29 18:31:44 GMT 2002

Kernel security problem

Thu Mar 28 18:52:23 GMT 2002

Operation Enduring Valenti

Wed Mar 27 20:23:05 GMT 2002

Sigh - madness spreads to Canada

Preaching to the choir

Wed Mar 27 18:40:33 GMT 2002

Big shock: XP Server == XP Pro etc at The Reg. The ZIP file has been pulled already - I would mirror it otherwise.

Mark Thomas is on tonight, Chan 4, 11pm (and I missed Century of the Self! Aggh!)

Bloom Filters and The future of multi-player online games

And today's (not so) wise words:

Bex: ginger is never sexy

I think will all feel smarter having read that

Tue Mar 26 19:27:42 GMT 2002

Remember, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place: 1024-bit keys now considered weak. You have to keep in mind what your attack model is, but now might be the time to move to 2kb keys (at the very least you must support large keys in your apps).

Tue Mar 26 16:31:31 GMT 2002

Well, it's the Easter holiday and (between revision) I'm getting quite a lot of reading done. Emergence is starting to drag a little now I'm half way through. Done get me wrong, it's a good book - I'm just wondering when it's going to say something interesting. It also lacks that indefinable fluid quality to its prose which makes a book easy reading.

In its place I've picked up Flux (Stephen Baxter, 0-00-647620-1) which ok (not up to his usual standard thou), and No Logo (Naomi Klein, 0-00-653040-0). No Logo is an very interesting book on advertising and has avoided some of the fanatical anti-corporatism which is the bane of many of her peers.

No interesting papers or links recently (except maybe this)

Sun Mar 24 10:45:48 GMT 2002

Vodaphone's personally written press releases (if they pull it let me know, I have a local copy)

I dug these up for something else - but I might as well post them here:

• Peter Gric
• Escher
• Giger
• Another Giger

Great comedy links from This reg page

Don't forget Century of the Self (8pm, Sunday, BBC2)

Thu Mar 21 18:48:44 GMT 2002

Zooko has updated his P2P names paper

I put GRUB on the HDD of one of the netboot boxes and, thou it boots Linux ok, it can't seem to boot Windows. The docs reference a chainload command which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to exist in GRUB. So this poor box is sitting there, booting GRUB, which tries to boot Windows but ends up booting itself again in a loop - oh well.

/. has a good story about those Scientology bastards acting up again. Go read Clambake (which is /.'ed just now). Kick a Scientologist's butt today.

Wes has some good links today (another bit about CoS, one about Gosling dreaming again and PayPal SDK. The SDK looks almost worthless (no pun intended) - but it's a step in the right direction).

One of the links Wes has is to Valgrind, which is worth a read. See the impl doc. Wow

Book of the moment: Emergence, John Holland, ISBN 0-19-286211-1

Tue Mar 19 18:18:37 GMT 2002

Well, I got the netbooting thing working pretty well. In the end it was a 128MB box because I have no idea what NIC the 16MB boxes have.

The startup sequence goes something like this:

• GRUB boot up (as below)
• /sbin/init is a shell script
• Connects an NBD (see linux-src/Documentation/nbd.txt), mke2fs's it and mounts as /tmp
• mounts proc and so on
• Prompts for a username and smbmounts their home directory (symlinking /tmp/home to it)
• Starts X and Mozilla

Which, all in all, is pretty sweet. I need allow anonymous logins and error check some more stuff in that script. I also need to setup home dirs with good Mozilla defaults (proxys setup etc). But nearly there.

Mon Mar 18 19:07:47 GMT 2002

Live it (thanks to Zooko for the link)

Sat Mar 16 18:48:55 GMT 2002

Someone mentioned net booting some of the poor bloated Windoze boxes at school just before I left Friday afternoon. I'm not quite sure what they had in mind, but it sounded like fun.

Google turned up the Diskless Nodes HOW-TO which talks about Etherboot and Netboot. I downloaded the srcs and they didn't look like what I had in mind so I did an `info grub` (as I always do for all my boot loading problems) and sure enough, GRUB does it! :).

You just need to pass a driver name at configure time and GRUB builds with all the netbooting commands. I setup zen with tftp (for the kernel) and nfs, and built a stripped down kernel for to test with a little 486 I have sitting around. This is all the GRUB you need to netboot:

Thu Mar 14 19:26:34 UTC 2002

FreeBSD has some cool kernel features like kqueue and aio (yes, you can tell me they exist in your favorite OS, if you like). Maybe I should follow this.

On the Scheme compiling front, this is a damm fine resource for the interresting bits and this is a good book (and all online!) on the subject

Wed Mar 13 18:38:23 GMT 2002

Found this link from a comment on AlterSlash - I love JWZ's grumbles :).

I got the Moulin Rouge and Romeo+Juliet DVD - both really good films.

This site is really useful for UK people. It beats the sucky Radiotimes site at least

Tue Mar 12 18:23:38 GMT 2002

I found this in my home dir (I often download stuff for later reading and then forget where I got it from). I've heard of it before but never read the paper (which is really worth reading - wow)

Mon Mar 11 22:21:21 GMT 2002

Got round to fixing up iv.org, which I've been meaning to do for a long time (still looks crap in Netscrape thou). Linuxpower.org was down for the whole weekend and I'm considering if I should shift my email to iv.org - but since that it pretty much the first time lp has been down in years I'm think I'll stick with it

Currently reading papers on Scheme implimentation and thinking about optimising compilers. This is a very good resource and even links to a paper by Scott! (so it must be good :).

Looking again at Pliant, which I'm sure would be stunning if I could understand it. A little worried that it seems to lack closures, first-class functions, continuations and the like - but I would bet that you could add them within the language

Also looking at AChord which looks interresting, but certainly has some weaknesses. These don't seem too hard to fix, however and I might write something up about it sometime.

cherub:        did brandon tell you that just before his talk he thought of a really easy attack on achord?

cherub:        he thinks he can fix it, though

cherub:        and I think one of the slightly more complicated designs we came up with while working on achrod might not have the problem

Book of the moment: The Thread of Life 0-521-46542-7