Outside of Engineering IV at UCLA, there is a big tank of liquid nitrogen. Beside it there are some pipes with ice all over them. Out of one of those pipes there is a very cold vapor pouring. I guess it is nitrogen, but I don’t know if it is because it is leaking or if it is some kind of safety valve to reduce pressure.
In any case, it looks really cool (sorry about the bad pun there).
I am preparing for my trip to DSN 2004, the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. I will be presenting our paper: Fault Tolerant Computation on Ensemble Quantum Computers. This is joint work with Tal Mor, Farrokh Vatan, Vwani P. Roychowdhury. I leave this Friday and return on the fourth of July.
A work with co-authors Nima Sarshar and Vwani Roychowdhury has finally reached the Arxiv: Scalable Percolation Search in Power Law Networks. It has also been accepted to P2P2004, the IEEE conference on P2P.
This is an exciting paper. It shows that flooding on unstructured P2P networks is not neccesary to find all content. In fact, one can send queries to each neighbor with a probability which approaches zero as the network grows, and still find all the content. Total communications complexity can be made to scale like O(log(N)) or O(sqrt(N)) for a network of size N (depending on the setting). This compares to O(N) in existing systems.
I hope this work gets some attention from the practical P2P community. It could really decrease the bandwidth required for P2P systems.
I have been interested in making Dendrograms, but I have not seen any Free Software which can do this. So, like any hacker, I scratched an itch.
I wrote Dendro.py, and added it to the Netmodeler CVS. It takes a simple text format of the dendrogram and spits out code which will make Octave draw the dendrogram.
As an example, here is a picture of a graph, here are the nm and dot versions of it. Here is the text represenation of the dendrogram. Finally, behold the dendrogram given by a clustering algorithm:
Fun stuff.
I have a Danger Sidekick which I like quite a lot. Recently, I have been playing around with Python. I thought I would set it up so I could send a blog entry (with attached photos) from my phone and have it show up here. I know wordpress has an email blogging ability, but I think I don’t care for it:
My solution was to use Procmail to look at my incoming mail. If it is a photoblog entry (I can tell by who mailed it, a password, subject, anything…) send it to UUDeview. UUDeview rips the text and images out and drops them in the current directory. Finally, my Blogpost.py tool moves the pictures into a certian directory, and uses the Blogger API in Wordpress to post to my blog.
It may sound complicated, but it was not. It was only the second Python script I have written and it only took me a little over an hour to debug all the issues (including making it work on Python 2.2 and 2.3).
As usual, the programming part was the most fun. Now lets see if I actually blog with it.
An old picture of millie 
Here are some older pictures I took. I am testing multiple pictures in one post.
Wish me luck
See it go!
See if this works.
Today is my 30th birthday. My Chinese friends pointed me towards some wisdom from Confuscius:
At fifteen my heart was set on learning; at thirty I stood firm; at forty I had no more doubts; at fifty I knew the mandate of heaven; at sixty my ear was obedient; at seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing the norm.
I guess I have ten years to dispell all doubts. Thank you all for your kind birthday wishes.
How do I undelete on an ext3 filesystem? It seems there is no way.
There is one method: just look at the raw device and see if you can find any of the data in there (good luck checking through 80 gigs of it). But it seems that unless that data is incredibly valuable, you might as well hang it up.
I guess I just role up my sleeves and start coding again. I guess I would not code if it was no fun, so I should look at the positive: I get to code more! woo hoo!
I got a little visit from the “since you didn’t backup I will delete your precious files”-fairy this morning. I have been working on some code for the past three weeks without doing any CVS commits. Our current code works properly using TCP as a transport, and I was adding UDP support (which required some changes which along the way might leave the whole system unstable). I was being lazy. I should have made a CVS branch, or copied my files somewhere or something. Buuuut noooooooooooo….. I don’t need a back up.
The good news is, I had really reworked some of the more problematic aspects to our code. I added most of the new features we wanted, and I basically had UDP working. The bad news is, that while removing some log files, rather than type “rm oldlog*”, I typed “rm oldlog *”, which, of course, deleted all my code. Oh well, it is only three weeks work.
Of course it will be faster the second time around (since most of the time is spent doing design). And, I *MAY* be able to recover the files using a tool like unrm which is TCT package in Debian. I probably should have done this before I left the machine, but since this is in the home partition, I might be able to be okay. Time to read that the undeletion howto in detail.
At any rate, I am trying to learn a few things here:
I just finished watching Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It reminds me that Charlie Kaufman is an incredible screenwriter. I have a good friend that often talks about existential crisis. I can’t say how, but it is all related: beauty, absurdism, tragedy, comedy, love, disappointment, sorrow, joy. They know it well. Finally, kudos to George Clooney, it was really a spectacular directorial debut.
Sun plans someday, “it might be today, tomorrow or two years down the road”, to open source Java. Slashdot and OSNews readers correctly notice that this is:
If it is not a GPL compatible license, GPL software won’t be able to reuse any of the code. Also, it may not even qualify as Free software.
I am cautiously optimistic, but I think this announcement may be geared towards increasing Java’s appeal compared to .Net. Mono is a Free/Open Source .Net implementation that is getting a lot of attention. People who use Mono will usually also consider using Java. Some might choose Mono because it is open source. Putting the idea out there that Java will someday be open source, Sun may hope to cloud the decision, and make the “open source” argument for Mono weaker.
This reminds me of the term Greenwash. Perhaps we need a similar term for these sorts of activities: Freewashing.
Mono 1.0 Beta 2 was released recently. We are using Mono to develop Brunet, our research P2P platform. We use Mono rather than Java because we wanted a complete, Free, portable platform, and Free Java, despite being older, did not seem to be improving as quickly as Mono. For the most part, we are pleased with our choice (although sometimes we look across the fence, and you know, it’s mighty green.)
There has always been controversy over Mono (an older article and the recent gnome debates [Havoc, Seth, Miguel, and Andy]). But now, as if general opposition to Free CLI/.Net technology is not enough, it seems that the DotGnu/Portable.Net people have to smear Mono for not being Free enough. This reminds me of the quote (often attributed to Henry Kissenger), “the reason academic in-fighting is so vicious is because the stakes are so small.” Both Mono and DotGnu are Free software. Do we really need to get into the business of splitting hairs about who is more Free?
For what it’s worth, my opinion is that Mono is great. I hate software patents as much as the next guy, but you can’t avoid them by not using Mono; see gif, mp3, MS patents double click, and various Amazon patents on obvious things. Further, most of the ideas for the CLI/.Net bytecode system are not new at all. Java is obvious prior art, but there are many others. Finally, there is no right not to be sued in the US. You can never guarantee you won’t be sued. But then, MS usually plays defense in the legal system, not offense. In short, the threat to Mono is basic FUD. It is way overblown by people that are having allergic reactions to MS.
