12 April 2004, early evening
I ended up going out with Rishi saturday night. He was DJing at Transient Orange’s two year anniversary party. All the acts associated with Transient Orange are really impressive. There is a lot of talent in this city you may never ever hear.
7 April 2004, evening time
I posted my first comment yesterday at Metafilter (well, Metatalk to be exact.)
Ever since Mez got me hooked on metafilter, I wanted an account, if only to say I had one. There is a lot of dumb shit posted on Metafilter that I always feel like replying to as well. At times Metafilter is very US-centric.
Mezan messaged me letting me know that Matt Haughey was finally opening up Metafilter again. There would be 20 new accounts allowed each day. You would be able to apply for an account at 12:00 PM, Pacific time. I had to wait a day to apply.
When 3:00 PM Eastern time rolled around, I logged on to Metafilter, hit refresh a few times and was greeted with a page welcoming me to join Metafilter. To say I rushed to fill out that form would be an understatement. I was so worried someone would sneak in and steal my spot. I typed as fast as I could and hit the submit button.
I had my own Metafilter account. Such a nice feeling.
I tried to login. The name I chose for myself was chungking express, after my favourite movie. I was surprised to find out my username and password didn’t work. I tried again and again with no luck. Confused, I pressed the back button on my browser, trying to find my sign up page.
You know what I typed in my rush? chunking express. I hope if I harass Matt Haughey enough, he’ll change my name.
How do I forget to type a G.
Comment [14] Life | Metafilter
5 April 2004, early evening
Patrick wanted me to post the CS 444 exams I found, incase they got taken down. Here they are: 1986, 1987, 1993, 1994, 2001.
On a scale of 1 to hard, I’d say these exams are hard. I hope the one we have to write tomorrow is easy, but I have my doubts.
Useful information about the SPARC architecture and the assembly language can be found here.
5 April 2004, terribly early in the morning
I watched Taking Lives last night with Shima, Gary and Liz. I thought the film was done well. The movie is a thriller about a serial killer that assumes the identities of the people he kills. Shima found it scary, as did Liz. You get to see Angelina Jolie naked in the film, which was a bonus. The film is set in Montreal, which was also cool.
5 April 2004, terribly early in the morning
I am amazed at how much of this term I have spent working on, or thinking about, compilers. I have one last thing to worry about in that class, the final exam, which I will write this tuesday. Since handing in the last assignment I have done absolutely nothing useful with my time. I wish I had at least spent some of it reading. The old exams I’ve read over look hard. God damn, when will it end.
1 April 2004, early afternoon
Here is a link to Kinja, the weblog guide. In particular, it is a link to my user page, which contains the latest posts from blogs that I read.
Kinja lets you make a digest of all the weblogs you read. They have programs that will scan those weblogs and when a new post is made, list the result. Kinja seems a bit imperfect, since Shima’s weblog has yet to show up in my digest. The service is currently a beta release, and is probably still not quite perfect.
Comment [4] Interesting Links | Weblogs
30 March 2004, mid-afternoon
I think I like the handheld version of dollarshort.org more then that real, meant-for-the-web, version of the site. Both layouts are pretty nice though I must say. The site belongs to Mena Trott of Moveable Type fame.
30 March 2004, late morning
And that is that. We’re done. In a half hour I will have been up for twenty-four hours. I’m tired, but it is raining outside, so i’ve decided to stay in the C&D with patrick.
What can I say? If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have taken Networks. No, I suppose I am joking — a little bit anyway.
Compilers has definitely been an experience.
update: I woke up at 8:30 yesterday, so I could make it to my Marxist Theory class. I got home today at 11:15, just before lunch. (My plan is to take a shower and sleep.) I’ve missed all my classes for today. My last class as an undergraduate should have been STAT 231, instead it will be PSCI 321. I kind of like it that way. I didn’t think about it at all till I started walking home, listening to no surprises by Radiohead.
30 March 2004, terribly early in the morning
CS 444 / 644 Assignment Part 3 Due March 30, 2004 Complete your Ada/CS compiler by implementing a code generator and run-time environment for the SUN.Fuck you too, Cormack.
29 March 2004, terribly early in the morning
.file "test/code/simple_assignment.ada"
.global main
main:
save %sp, -96, %sp
sub %sp, 4, %sp
mov 10, %r16
sub %fp, 0, %r17
st %r16, [%r17]
mov 20, %r16
sub %fp, 0, %r17
st %r16, [%r17]
nop
ret
restore
Assembly has never looked so good.
28 March 2004, the wee hours
(11:30 pm) I’ve basically spent the entire day at my desk. I woke up late, at 1:00 or so, and started programming again. 10 hours later, I’m still at my desk, and I’m still programming. I wish there was more progress. It seems like things are moving so slowly.
(1:00 am) I am feeling stressed.
(1:40 am) Here is some useful information for those of you who aren’t in CS. A lot of the times when you program in C/C++, you will encounter one of the following two runtime errors:
Our compiler currently has neither error.
27 March 2004, early morning
It’s four in the morning, and I’m just about to go to bed. This is going to be a horrid weekend I think. The compiler does a little bit more then it did yesterday, but we still have so much to do.
26 March 2004, mid-afternoon
Well, I have no been to my last fed ever. It wasn’t what I expected, but I think things like that are always a bit of a let down. Too much on my mind I suppose. That said, it was nice seeing so many of my friends out. I need to talk to Gary and see what his opinion of the night was as well. He told some girl he was in first-year pre-op. That was entertaining. He eventually showed her his drivers license. She was shocked I’m sure.
The night ended well.
I’m meeting Kumar and Patrick at school to continue work on our compilers project.
26 March 2004, the wee hours
I’m waiting for Simon and Steph to come over now. We’re going to go to Fed shortly. I don’t know how I feel about going. No one loves Fed Hall more than myself, but all I can think about is my compilers assignment. I think it’ll be a fun night out.
The compiler is still not really doing anything of substance. We’re close to crossing that line when it does do stuff. That’s all I want. I’ll feel much less stressed once I know it’ll compile something, anything.
Shima’s walked to meet Matt and Durshan at the bomber. I’m hoping they decide to go to Fed too.
25 March 2004, lunch time
I slept through my Compilers class today. Cormack has gotten better at lecturing in the past few lectures I’ve been to, but he’s still a bit too rambling for my liking. Nevertheless, I still think he is a very nice professor.
Our compiler is doing a lot more stuff now. I think we have pretty much completed A2 now. We do analysis for almost every part of Ada/CS. There are holes here and there, I think the most obvious two are subtypes and function overloading. Regardless, it’s quite impressive watching it determine that A(1,1)(1).B(1)(1) is a function that returns an array of records that contain an array of arrays. Well impressive for me anyway.
We have 5 days to get the compiler to make code. I’m hoping we can get it all done. I have faith. We’ll have to wait and see.
23 March 2004, early afternoon
XFN is a way to describe your relationship to someone else on the web via the rel attribute for a link. XFN is a simple idea, and seems easy to implement, so I may add the information to my links shortly. Basically if Dave is my friend, and I have a link to him on my web-page, then I state that he is my friend in that link.
Update: I’m listed on rubhub now. I haven’t thought of anything cool to do with the XFN information, except perhaps highlight links differently depending on my relationship with someone.
Comment [8] Interesting Links | Weblogs
23 March 2004, the wee hours
I love useless widgets and other crap people add to their sites. This guy tells you the temperature in the area he lives using a banner picture that represents a garden of sorts. His description does his work much more justice then what I have just said.
Comment [1] Interesting Links | Weblogs
22 March 2004, late evening
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought that this comment authentication thing was interesting:
20 March 2004, late afternoon
I’ve been getting comment spam at my photoblog, as some of you may know. SixApart, the company that makes Moveable Type, is developing an authentication system called TypeKey that they hope will reduce comment spam. They plan to have people register with this authentication service before they can post comments to sites that are using TypeKey for authentication.
I wonder if it will be effective, and if people will want to use such a system. Some people want to post anonymously, and some people may not want the comments they post on one site to be linked in anyway to comments they post on another site. (Maybe you post comments at a forum for child abuse victims, and want those comments to remain anonymous and separate from comments you post on your friends photoblog, for example.)
Most of all though, I am really curious as to how they will implement the system.
(I found this link at one of my favourite sites on the net, kottke.org.)
19 March 2004, late evening
Those of you who enjoy writing on the web, but are less then impressed with the way MT converts your writing into HTML, may want to look at the following two programs: Textile and Markdown.
Textile has been around for a while, and is basically a shorthand for HTML. Instead of using the tag <em> to emphasizes some piece of text, you simple mark your text with underscores, like so: emphasis. There is similar notation for most of the important html tags you would want to use. Also, textile will automatically encode entities (like &), will convert—to ’—’, and make your quotes curly. There is a moveable type plugin to let you use textile to format your text instead of using moveable type’s lame ‘convert line breaks’ function.
Markdown has all the features of textile as far as I can tell, but the design ideas behind it are slightly different. You can read in-depth the reasoning for the syntax markdown uses here.
I don’t use either program at the moment. Most of what I write is short, and not filled with lots of HTML. However, if you find you put a lot of HTML in your posts, then these programs definitely will make the code for the posts much easier to read.
19 March 2004, terribly early in the morning
I’ve been doing nothing but compilers for the past few days. I’m definitely not as productive as I would like to be, or as I should be; i’m hoping that will change in the next few days.
I had promised Gary I would go to Fed with him this week. So, tonight, Gary, Steph, Simon and I all went out. We saw lots of people at Fed: Patrick, my other compilers partner, Victor, Phoebe and Rick, Ahilan’s friends Monica and Eddie. Even Liz and Sylvia were there.
When we arrived at Fed it was totally empty. I signed in 3 random brown guys, and then waited for Gary to sign in Barbara and her friend. When we walked inside there were 3 other people in the club, the 3 guys I had signed in. By midnight the place was a lot more busy.
As I said, I saw Liz at Fed. As she walked by, I grabbed her and pulled her over my way, which is something I do when I’m out and drinking. Jeff, if you are reading this, be glad, because she turns around and pushes me away. No fuss. No words. Nothing. I had to get her attention again before she realized I wasn’t some random dude looking for some attention. It was a funny scene. I think she may have felt a bit bad, but really she shouldn’t. I should probably tap people on the shoulder to get their attention, as opposed to yanking them over my way. The whole thing reminded me of this joke I had read at Patrick’s site earlier.
The most memorable moment of the night was at the end. Standing on the dance floor with Gary and Simon, some random girl, walking through the crowd, stops and starts starring at me. Now, I was trying to figure out if I knew her or not, but I was quite sure I didn’t. She kept looking at me though, like I should know her. So then I thought, maybe she was one of Ahilan’s friends who thought I was him. I asked if I knew her, and asked her name. Her friend told me her name was Jennifer, before they both stormed off. At this point I was worried I had offended one of Ahilan’s friends, so I told Simon to go look for her. He was more then willing, for reasons I will leave to your imagination. I decided to go look for Gary, who had wandered off by this point.
I come back to the spot we were dancing to find Simon with the two girls. I pulled her over and asked her, “How do I know you?” Her reply, “I don’t know you, stop flirting with me!” Yes, girls can be stupid, but what can you do. I laughed to myself and left Simon to dance with the girl and her friend, while I wandered about.
We left Fed and loitered outside for a bit, talking to people as they left. We saw so many people on their way out. The two girls also left, and Simon and Gary went to talk to them. I sat and chatted with Patrick, well aware that my raw-animal-magnetism would be too much for the girls to bare, that it would result in their confusing my mere presence with some sort of flirting. The girl thought Simon was quite hot, but her friends were quite opposed to her leaving with him. Gary and I left for Mel’s, and told Simon he would get mad props if he could get the girl to Mel’s as well.
Gary and I arrived at Mel’s, and shortly after Simon arrived. The girl, and all her friends, beat Simon to Mel’s by a few minutes.
17 March 2004, late evening
Update: Nowadays I never make an unauthenticated key-pair. I always pick a passphrase, and use ssh-agent to avoid having to type it again and again.
Here are the steps I went through to get public-key authentication working for my ssh connection to school. What this means is that I no longer have to type a password in when I connect; the server sends a message to my machine, which I decrypt, thereby convincing the server I am who I say I am.
First, you need to generate a public/private key-pair. I had to generate a SSH1 RSA key. To do this, required the following command, ssh-keygen -t rsa1. Don’t enter a pass-phrase when prompted, save the files in the default locations with the default names. A pass-phrase is not quite needed if your home machine is secure, and it would defeat the purpose of this exercise, as we are trying to avoid typing passwords. This will produce two files, a private-key and a public-key.
Second, upload the generated public-key to the remote computer, using the command, scp identity.pub <user>@<server>:.ssh/authorized_keys. This will overwrite your authorized_keys file, if you already have one. I’m guessing you don’t, since if you did, you would already know how to do this.
Third, try connecting to your server. You shouldn’t be prompted for a password.
Now, why would you want to do this? Trust me when I say you will quickly grow sick of typing your complicated password every-time you want to do a cvs command which connects to a remote machine.
Comment [4] Technology
17 March 2004, early evening
I like this dude’s site, Right Wingin-It. Most everything he posts bugs me, don’t get me wrong, but it’s interesting to read how the other side thinks I suppose.
How did I stumble on this site? Through a bizarre internet project called Radio Vox Populi, which converts blogs to streamed audio you can listen to.
Show me how you do that trick
The one that makes me scream she said
The one that makes me laugh she said
And threw her arms around my neck
Show me how you do it
And I promise you I promise that
I’ll run away with you
I’ll run away with you
Spinning on that dizzy edge
I kissed her face and kissed her head
And dreamed of all the different ways I had
To make her glow
Why are you so far away? she said
Why won’t you ever know that I’m in love with you
That I’m in love with you
—Just Like Heaven by the Cure.
12 March 2004, mid-afternoon
Someone has written a script to generate episode summaries for nonexistent episodes of 24. Metafilter is good.