brainstorms

Sunday February 27, 2005

sound of ipod: a story of reverse engineering

here is a really neat bit of ipod reverse engineering and seth david schoen's good discussion. [thanks peter!]

(2005-02-27 09:36:32.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday February 23, 2005

stross: five rules for designing a fantasy series

charlie stross's latest blog entry, Five rules for cold-bloodedly designing a fantasy series (all about writing his Family Trade time-travel-fantasy series) is a great read. here is a quick-and-dehydrated summary:

• don't steal from living authors
• steal from the best
• steal from at least two and mix thorougly
• only steal things you find interesting
• make sure it doesn't look stolen.

Tuesday February 22, 2005

lenstra: all new designs should use SHA-256...

just ran into a new paper by arjen lenstra, now at bell labs: further progress in hashing cryptanalysis. abstract:

Until further notice, all new designs should use SHA-256. Existing systems using SHA1 or MD5 should confirm that they only need second pre-image resistance, not random collision resistance. Usage of MD5 in certificates should be discontinued unless the presence of adequate mitigating controls has been verified.

also includes a sketch of antonie joux's result about the concatenation of hash functions.

[musical recommendation while reading about the future of sha-N where N is 224/256/384/512: Trio - Mozart: The Late Symphonies (etc) / Bernstein, Vienna Philharmonic, 3cd set, Deutsche Grammophon. these Trio editions are a remarkable and affordable gift to classical music lovers.]

[surprising that this paper was not slash-blotted, not that it matters anymore]

(2005-02-22 10:45:51.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday February 21, 2005

pma2005... o nikon, where art thou?

so far, pma2005 looks like a replay of some yesteryear, except in digital: dozens of point-and-shoot cameras consumer digicams, a few lenses, and two digital SLRs. both SLRs are updates, but while canon cleverly updates its cheap digital rebel as 350d and beats d70 specs, nikon updates its journalist-grade d2h as d2hs. sigh, this means a longer wait for less-than-wealthy prosumer nikon users like me. [d2x costs $4,999. d2hs will be $3,499. d70 costs $999.]

[resolution: by june 2005, i will either own a successor to nikon d70, assuming it shows up on time, or will have sold a part of my nikon gear to buy a canon eos d20 with a few good canon lenses.]

(2005-02-21 16:17:17.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday February 18, 2005

two haikus

winter sunset -
a hawk floats
near my window

[a special sight at markham offices: late afternoon, a red-tailed hawk rides the wind a couple of meters away from my eight-floor window. it is nearly motionless, watching the ground.]

early morning light -
crows near the shrine
louder than trains

[maiji jingu shrine is near the harajuku station. tokyo, jan 05]

[copyright ozan s. yigit. this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.]

(2005-02-18 18:56:23.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Thursday February 17, 2005

literacy, osi, etc.

i just read some vacuous, humorous commentary on OSI licenses, but not surprised: these are still the source salad days in some, less imaginative (and incidentally less relevant) parts of the industry. going from not being able to spell G P L without turning blue to commenting on the usefulness of OSI licenses for the future: this is a remarkable development in literacy, sort of like watching my six-year old making his way through a grade-1 reading curriculum:

the source began to glow.
the magic was working.
"oh help!" said biff.

the magic was working.
the trolls got smaller and
smaller and smaller.

related reading, written for adults: lawrence rosen's Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. it has excellent coverage of reciprocal (GPL), academic (BSD, MIT etc) and alternative (MPL, CPL, OSL etc) licenses, alternative models to open source etc. highly recommended.

[addendum: i was very pleased to note that russ nelson will be the new president of OSI. congratulations, russ.]

(2005-02-17 20:53:13.0) Permalink Comments [0]

i, robot

[no, not the asimov book, not the recent movie]

cory doctorow's new short story i, robot is here at infinite matrix. the story title is no accident: [quoting doctorow]

Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of 'Fahrenheit 451' to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the toalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives.

(2005-02-17 09:25:54.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday February 16, 2005

nebula award ballot

this year's nebula ballot announcement is here. some tough choices. [i am rooting for doctorow, but am also a very big fan of mcdevitt and mcmaster bujold. note: "down and out" link is a free download from craphound]

Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
(Eos, Oct 2003)

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , by Cory Doctorow
(Tor, Feb 2003)

Omega, by Jack McDevitt
(Ace, Nov 2003)

Cloud Atlas: A Novel, by David Mitchell
(Sceptre, Jan 2004)

Perfect Circle, by Sean Stewart
(Small Beer Press, Jun 2004)

The Knight, by Gene Wolfe
(Tor, Jan 2004)

(2005-02-16 18:58:30.0) Permalink Comments [0]

alan kay in conversation

an interesting conversation with alan kay. here are some notes, re/paraphrased sentences or full quotes. marginal notes in [] brackets.

-----

kay repeats a strange land claim and mentions hewitt's "wonderful" (but mostly paper) planner as a "predecessor" to prolog. [similar but funnier version of this claim can be found in a SICP (steele/sussman) footnote.] here is a bit of history from Colmerauer and Roussel's The Birth of Prolog:

While attending an IJCAI convention in September ‘71 with Jean Trudel, we met Robert Kowalski again and heard a lecture by Terry Winograd on natural language processing. The fact that he did not use a unified formalism left us puzzled. It was at this time that we learned of the existence of Carl Hewitt’s programming language, Planner [Hewitt, 1969]. The lack of formalization of this language, our ignorance of Lisp and, above all, the fact that we were absolutely devoted to logic meant that this work had little influence on our later research.

very odd (be polite) commentary about "lack of software engineering" in the current pop culture. mention of low-pass filters; one cannot help but wonder about the density of his filter.

-----

early-binding languages lock you into stuff you've already done. you cannot reformulate things easily. [not clear what he means by "reformulate." what about early-binding OO languages? bertrand meyer would be dismayed]

a benchmark from 1979 Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. [should be 40,000 to 60,000] a factor of 1,000 in efficiency has been lost by bad CPU architectures. [hah. time to dust off those old compilers and benchmarks.]

a lot of the success of various programming languages is expeditions gap-filling. Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

[smalltalk, lisp] have so many ways of dealing with problems that the early-binding languages don't have, that it's very, very difficult for people who like lisp or smalltalk to imagine anything else.

if the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. [Kay needs to say more, but does not]

most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

you have to be a different kind of person to love C++.

the agglutinative languages tend to produce agglutinations and they are very, very difficult to untangle when you've had a new idea.

all creativity is an extended form of a joke. most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. there is an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha."

-----

ag·glu·ti·na·tive (adj)
1. adhesive
2. characterized by linguistic agglutination

ag·glu·ti·nate (v)
from latin agglutinatus, past participle of agglutinare to glue to, from ad- + glutinare to glue, from glutin-, gluten glue

(2005-02-16 18:57:49.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday February 15, 2005

open source beginnings...

through a series of loosely related events and text, i was flooded with the thoughts of free and open source origins of my computing life at york university. no, it was not linux, it was not something from MIT or Berkeley, and not a part of the GNU project. they all came later. this is a remarkable bit of hardware-specific open-source engineering that all the hack "historians" tend to overlook:

David G. Conroy's DECUS C compiler.

this was the first C compiler i ever used for hello, world. i did not have a copy of K&R at the time [my first K&R is dated 82], but a printed copy of the C reference manual and Kernighan's C tutorial. i think this compiler came to us with the 1980 RSX11 sig tape or the Torlug tape. it ran fine under our 11/780's compatibility mode and remained in use until DEC's native C compiler showed up. [conroy compiler kept going for many years after that under pdp-11 thanks to hard work by late martin minow. it was the preferred compiler for pdp-11 hackers, so far as i can tell. its latest incarnation can be found in johnny billquist's pdp-11 archive.]

all this came to mind after reading a surprising fragment from a foreword by larry lessig to Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law [recommended]

Why code must be propriatery is a question whose answers have changed over the past ten years. At first the reasons were technical: no free or open source project, it was said, could develop the highly complex and robust code necessary for modern software applications. But when the GNU/Linux project began to produce an operating system that rivaled Microsoft's in robustness and efficiency, this technical argument began to fade.

emphasis mine.

(2005-02-15 08:52:46.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Thursday February 10, 2005

fdlibm, kahan paper etc.

sometimes things get too indirect for me. i was reminded of the great and free SUN fdlibm library through an interesting, if heavy recent paper (in progress) by kahan (thanks henry): How Futile are Mindless Assessments of Roundoff in Floating-Point Computation?

[i am not an FP geek, i hardly write any FP code, but as an educated programmer, i try to follow his arguments. his engineering perspectives and his relentless critique of mediocre implementations in the industry make kahan papers great fun to read.]

kahan quotes from this and other papers:

The longevity of inaccuracies in numerical software by and for numerical adepts has ominous implications: Numerical software does not have to be very complicated to be difficult to debug by experts, practically impossible to debug by amateurs.

Name-calling makes the caller feel better without enlightening him.

The essence of civilization is that we benefit from others' experience without having to relive it.

What runs too slowly won't get run.

If we keep no records of our mistakes, how can we learn to avoid more of them?

[music suggestion while reading kahan papers: donald byrd at the half note cafe volumes 1 & 2, blue note RVG edition.]

(2005-02-10 20:15:24.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday February 09, 2005

tokyo: minimalist travel notes

United Airlines, toronto->chicago->tokyo
long lines at US customs as usual. customs agent surprises me and does not ask what i would be doing in japan.

boeing 777, center row, hardly any sleep, cold, five really bad (cheap) movies, including cat woman (mind numbingly awful), taxi ("as much fun as getting a flat tire in midtown manhattan during the rush hour" -- roeper), shark tale, and couple of other moving pictures of emptiness. [look no further than just about any top 10 list of the worst movies]

brook hollow: quite possibly the worst cabarnet sauvignon ever tried: rubbing alcohol with deep red coloring?

economist 1/1/2005: special report on endangered languages, navajo elder as quoted by akira yamamoto:

if you don't breathe
there is no air
if you don't walk
there is no earth
If you don't speak
there is no world.

[i will remember this last line often.]

reading pratchett's jingo. each page has more thought and humor than any of the two movies on board.

dimmed down ibook g4 lasted nearly five hours.

narita: absolutely the cleanest airport washroom (or any other public washroom) i have ever been in. [i have been to swiss, german, dutch, british and of course canadian washrooms. no contest.]

terminal 1: past the gates, looking for a limo bus to cerulean. mysterious cash-only-yen-only signs. have to lineup for a single government money exchange operation, four people in a tight office, two-piece suits, lots of paper, stamps, mechanical calculator, dollar goes in, yen comes out.

decided to take the train: narita express to shibuya. modest train, no bullets on this line.

no gsm here or maybe different bandwidth? my cellphone useless.

smartly uniformed train personnel, white gloves. one uniformed kid with detector/scanner, looking between the cars. trying to stay awake. advance warning in english about arrival to station.

shibuya station: uniforms everywhere: men in two piece suits to students in sailor moon pleated skirts and white socks.

lots of smokers.

cerulean towers: distant unobstructed but hazy fuji-san view from 20th floor.

next morning, alternate world: decade-old dark-navy two-piece suit, silk necktie, cotton hankerchief, bostonians. pocket-full of business cards, enough yen to get around.

2300 yen for a miniature breakfast buffet. neat little omelettes [delicately built by a quiet chef with chopsticks], breakfast sausages, some coldcuts, salad(?), fruits, yogurts, berries, cereal. not enough cheese. no multigrain bread. there is a smoking section somewhere, but not too noticeable. stroong coffee.

tokyo adventure: you are in a twisting maze of little subways, all different. quite possibly the most intricate subway system there is. [my wife, reading these notes, quips: you have not been in paris metro yet.]

yes, trains are really really packed, but going the opposite direction. getting in and out is an elaborate, polite, close-contact dance.

getting on: one ticket machine with better english, easier buttons, but as it turns out, wrong line. found out [later] we have a tokyo subway ticket instead of a tokyu line ticket. paid 230 yen instead of 200. proverbial lost keys, streetlamp. exit gates flash and complain loudly.

finding starbucks: i ask for the usual grande nonfat nofoam extrahot latte, but her call more melodical, less english. done nicely.

food show in shibuya station, well named. dozens of food tables and booths, all elegant and beautiful and ready to take home, but carbs, carbs, carbs, some protein. bought some smoked salmon.

english and latin alphabet a rarity. nothing like linguistic loneliness.

large flip do-everything cellphones everywhere. More than one person carrying two.

interesting phones in booths.

SUN offices at yoga: dtlogin hopeless, sunray trying nfs across pacific, futile. tightvnc [darwinports] to lifeline (u60+s10) with an ibook is very comfortable.

dress shoes really hurt.

hard to find sugar substitutes. trying expresso without it. (cough)

product presentation to a customer.

formal, traditional business card exchange, both hands, reading, bowing.

14 hours time gap, a day ahead. tokyo morning call, talking last night. missing my son.

skip lunch. work until 7pm.

cars on the other side of the road.

amazing food and drink dispensers: hot, cold, pop, beer, tea, latte, junk food.

next day a brief chance to walk around with my camera. doing a greenspun impression: good light, good technique, pedestrian images.

one evening, all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu (like mongolian hot-pot but without the chimney) with colleagues, excellent beef but i am told australian, not kobe. i declined beeru, chose red wine instead.

later also missed sake and karaoke with colleagues.

large book/music/video/game/comix complex in shibuya. finding miyazaki, kodansha bilingual ghost in the shell, akira sketchbook and few other mangas i recognize, but i can get them in toronto. on another floor, wishing for a kodansha bilingual haiku volume i may possibly not have. Also would have liked a Juzo Itami collection, but too tired and confused to find anything without help.

english->japanese translation industry doing quite well.

early thursday morning, meiji jingu shrine, just before sunrise. a wide road through the large forest, crow calls louder than subway trains. a large crow sitting on a branch near the shrine doors. cannot get close enough for an image. it reminds me of the basho haiku, but the mood is all different.

vast courtyard (outer shrine), beautiful gates and doors (inner shrine) monks in white, cleaning, dusting.

morning sunlight catches the top of the shrine. a photographer's lucky day.

mostly very quiet, disturbed only by a crow, double clapping of a worshipper, melodious clanking of the coins thrown into the offering box, and my nikon's (sigh) shutter and winder. a team shows up, players make their offerings, and take a group picture on the shrine stairs.

A giant drum in the corner.

outside the shrine, groundkeepers sweeping, morning sun beams through the dust.

frozen fingers, two-and-a-half rolls in an hour, hard to leave now.

double back to the hotel, some breakfast, just on time for the limo bus.

a nice but long trip back to narita. I can see trees that look like enlarged bonsai. I can hardly spot any classic-looking japanese homes, but not looking very hard.

at the airport, just enough time to get my morning latte and do some gift shopping. found takara batman and batgirl two-pack for eren: some of the most articulated action figures ever. i did not get a second set for myself.

flight back shorter, but with even worse movies. sad about julie andrews. trip again made tolerable by pratchett, ibook, and a little bit of sleep.

chicago customs: huffy customs inspector - i require hand inspection of my slide film; been through too many scanners already. ibook goes back, gets out of its neoprene sleeve, gets rescanned.

back to toronto: much colder, but familiar. will have to watch lost in translation again.

[notes from a trip to tokyo, jan 2005]
[all images (except the map fragment) by ozan s. yigit, using nikon 801s, 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5D, fuji velvia 100, provia 100]

(2005-02-09 07:24:56.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday February 07, 2005

finding spinrad essays

happy day: i just received a copy of norman spinrad's science fiction in the real world, southern illinois university press, 1990. i did not know spinrad had published a collection of his essays (well, essays disguised as book reviews) from Asimov's; i found out about it through one of the essential references of SF: barron's anatomy of wonder: a critical guide to science fiction, now in its fifth edition. [great content, utterly uninspiring cover; fourth edition had a much better graphic designer, evidently]

The Sturgeon and Dick pieces are passionate and moving, and Spinrad's treatment of cyberpunk is among the best early accounts available.

yep.

as an aside, one of my favorite non-SF-related pieces by norman spinrad is la cuisine humaine.

[there has been many more essays and reviews since 1990; i hope they get collected as well.]

(2005-02-07 18:07:57.0) Permalink Comments [0]