I heard today on NPR that China is finally admitting to having more than 1000 confirmed SARS cases. Apparently somewhere near Beijing they are building a new 1000 bed hospital from scratch. The physical structure was built in 5 days! They are bringing in 350 military doctors to man the facility. Can anyone say quarantine? It's good that they are finally owning up to the magnitude of the problem, but it's frightening that they are responding with the old Soviet SanEp style mechanisms. The reporter said the effort is complete with banners and motivational sloganeering. Amazing.
For those who don't know, OpenBSD had DARPA contract funds through the POSSE program run out of UPenn. For some reason, the remainder of the contract was recently cancelled. Theo was using a portion of the contract to fund the upcoming hackathon - that's now in jeopardy. For the record, this sucks but I don't necessarily subscribe to the conspiracy theories being promoted by the folks on the openbsd-misc mailing list. I think that gives the gov't too much credit. Still, please take the time to donate - OpenBSD is a great project and deserves the backing. We as a community should help make up the shortfall.
6 am. Saturday morning. Sitting in Pickering Tully's listening to Frank Zappa's "ThingFish" and writing code for a C# implementation of the Twofish cipher. I'm just noodling around. This is definitely going to be the slowest code going, but at least it will work and I'll understand a bit more.
My sister-in-law is in town this weekend, as if my kids need any extra spoiling.
I found out yesterday some friends of ours are pregnant and the baby is going to have Down's syndrome. Can you imagine getting that news? Sitting there, excited to be pregnant, waiting for the Doctor to tell you everything looks great. Then, the long pause... probably followed by that concerned, caring look. Wow. I have no idea how I would cope with that.
So, I'm trying to learn more about Cryptography. I fancy myself a math guy, but I'm clearly only a legend in my own mind.
I wrote an arbitrary precision math library in C#, patterned after the one in Welschenbach's Cryptography in C and C++, with some changes based on my reading of Knuth's vol 2.
My library of Crypto books is growing, but that doesn't mean I really understand any more.
Reminds me of what my step-dad used to say "I buy you books, but you just eat the covers..."
Figured, what the heck, better put the music list up for ridicule as well.
My friends love to bag on my taste. I prefer to call it 'eclectic'. You decide.
Hedningarna - Karelia Visa
King Crimson - Starless and Bible Black
Crash Test Dummies - God Shuffled His Feet
Eminem - The Eminem Show
Jacques Brel - Les Marquises
Francis Cabrel - Hors Saison
Lords of Acid - Voodoo-U
Moby - 18
Rush - Power Windows, Signals
Frank Zappa - ThingFish, Joe's Garage, Yellow Shark
Meryn Cadell - Angel Food for Thought
Ok, I'm going to attempt to keep current here, but I'll probably fail like everyone else I know.
For those who know me and my wife Susan, we each have a stack of books a foot high next to the bed.
We met in a Starbucks attached to a Barnes & Noble... you wouldn't believe how much that says about us.
Now that we have two kids, I get more reading time than Susan does (sorry honey).
Here's the list:
Faster, James Gleick - a great analysis of the 'perceived' benefits of time-saving techology
and how recent technological advances cause us to perceive time differently
The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker - I'm re-reading this because, well, I'm a bit slow.
There's a lot here to digest about the structure of language and how humans learn.
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky - I've read some of the recent collections of his speeches post-911
and now I'm trying to make my way through some of the thickest prose I've ever seen. Man, the dude is heavy.
Practical Cryptography - Niels Ferguson & Bruce Schneier -
If you enjoyed Applied Cryptography, your boss will enjoy this new book.
That should say it all.
Elements of ML Programming - Jeffrey Allman - My degree is in EE, so I'm an auto-didact in CS.
This book has opened my eyes to a world full of stuff I don't see on the job.