Inspired by an article by Joey Hess (which I actually read a while ago), I finally managed to clean out my computer and put everything worth keeping into version control. The advantages are worth mentioning:

• Easy migration. I can paint down a basic working environment on any machine I want to use. This can be done without putting any sensitive info on the machine, in under five minutes.
• Backups. I'll always have every version of every file I've created. On a machine across town. This is always a good idea. I've been doing it sort of half-assed, in a way that wouldn't scale to more than two machines and that doesn't keep any history.

Of course, the migration didn't go without some hiccups. The most notable being that I mistakenly deleted all of my homework for the past two years, thinking that I'd already fed it in to the repository when in fact I hadn't. I'd added my high-school-and-middle-school homework archives, then I went off to do something else. When I came back, I was all “Oh, I've done all of ~/school/! I can delete it now!” Then, later in the evening, I blasted away my laptop and sucked down magicked copies from the repository, only to see this message:

[duncan:14:10:30 0 ~]$ svn co svn+ssh://slime5/home/svn/duncan/school/uw
svn: URL 'svn+ssh://slime5/home/svn/duncan/school/uw' doesn't exist
[duncan:14:15:50 0 ~]$

So it's well and truly gone. sigh. Such is life, I suppose. Most of ~/school/uw/ was homework, but some was neat stuff that's mostly gone now; some of it I can recreate but I don't know if I really want to.

And I'm off to the library to get fiction books, so I can hide from reality during finals week. Yay me! I'm so good at studying it's not even funny.

Mood: irritated

When reading my website statistics, I noticed that many people were coming from blog.Wired.com. Apparently they picked up on Symantec picking up on my virus. It's about time; I put the page online in early 2006 and Google indexed it on 13-Jun-2006.

Today I figured out how to edit Wikipedia with emacs. This is amazing. It's so easy; it makes editing fun.

I wore sandals to school today. I forgot one universal truth, here expressed in the predicate calculus:

Fx: x is a pair of sandals.
Gx: x gives me blisters when worn.
∼∃x(Fx ∧ ∼Gx)

Isn't that sad?

Also: My email posts don't work lately. And I'm pissed.

I'm participating in (and started!) a rather small, pointless, but collaborative hack.

Some things please me for sheer deviousness. (Yes, that is my page.)

I especially like how all I'm doing is posting their addresses on the open net. The punishment is done by proxy. I've recently used a throwaway address to confirm that my site is indeed harvested occasionally.

Mood: mischievous

Today I am 6969 days old.

I wrote a perl script to poll the SDB registration system periodically, check if either of two alternate sections of Physics 121 lab are open, and switch into the first open one. I don't want to have a lab section from 15:30 to 18:30, when I've got space to have the lab from 12:30 to 15:30.

Mood: accomplished

Expect all future email from me (with some exceptions) to be signed. If I have your key, I'll encrypt it too.

If possible, I request that all email I receive be signed/encrypted as well.

Mood: nerdy

#! /bin/bash
for F in `seq -w $1 $2`
do
  wget `echo $3 | sed -e "s/{}/$F/g"` --referer=`echo $4 | sed -e "s/{}/$F/g"`
  sleep 4
done

I'm sure that you guys can come up with another use for this.

Posting from UW HUB, using the LogJam client on my laptop named "eldritch". I would use my web browser, but FireFox 1.0.4 crashes on opening the "post" page when using the new LJ style. I should report it, but I'm too lazy.

At least here I can cut from emacs easily. (LogJam is really small w.r.t. screen space.)

I went to the Facilities building eariler today to pick up a copy of the map I requested a few weeks ago. Actually, I first went to the Communications building to pay at the copy center. But they told me I had to get a card and they would charge me that way. So I went to the Facilities office building and talked to Jeff, who got me the card with "$3.75" written on it. Back up to Communications, where I paid and got a receipt. Then I go back to Facilities, where I hand over both the card and the receipt and get the map in exchange. They then present a bunch of receipts to the copy center staff monthly or so and get money transferred into their budget.

It kind of reminds me of the Kerberos authentication process.

The UW has pervasive wireless network, which is cool. But I can't setup passwordless SSH to the Dante shell account, because sshd wants your IP to be the same all the time. Perhaps there's a way around this.

Yesterday was my fourth day working at Microsoft this summer. I'm sharing room 2600 with my boss (Bill M) in building 119.

The first two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) I did an excellent job of not pressing the Big Red Switch mounted on the wall inside my group's computer lab. (Sounds silly, eh? Computer labs at the world's largest sofware company.) Had I pushed it, I would also have brought down MapPoint, which shared about 55% of the lab space. Would have been a problem. Also, it was my first time inside a datacenter. It doesn't have the raised floors so stereotypical of datacenters, but rather the same industrial-pile carpet that every single building at Microsoft is paved with. They air-condition the rooms to about fifty degrees Fahrenheit so that the machines don't overheat. Nevertheless, in the side of the room give over to MapPoint, the ambient temperature is about eighty degrees. There are the big fans in circular metal cages sitting between rows, moving hot air towards the intakes for the air conditioning. Every server on the rack has almost exclusively blue lights for indicators. I guess they just look cooler than the yellow-green that was so popular before they invented cheap blue LEDs a few years ago. My reasoning is that it makes red LEDs stand out better, so they can be used for warnings.

Friday I went to the Recycled Office Supplies Center in the garage of Building 16. The intent was to get a suitable mouse. The mice (about a thousand of them) live in a rather large cardboard box. It's the size of a standard cargo pallet (about four feet on a side) and filled to a depth approaching three feet. As people root through the box in search of The Perfect Mouse, they tangle the cords of all the Non-Perfect Mice. So there are about a thousand mice, all tied together. I think I'll take a picture of it soon.

I'm working in the group that brought you such innovations as Windows Embedded for Point of Service (also known as WEPOS) and POS for .Net.

I bought a new TI-89 Titanium calculator today. They ship them with so many crap apps on them, it isn't even funny. I had to delete about 1.5MiB. But that's not why I'm posting. The interesting thing is that I hadn't even had it in my possession for three hours before I prised the case open. Now that's nerdliness.

And yes, it is HW4.

As I sit here in the library, listening to the subtle music of the floor being abraded, I write. I have nothing better to do while waiting for 300MiB of data to copy to my bulla (rfriel knows what I'm talking about, so ask him).

Some people, most notably tsukiyomijapan, are always whining about how the Metro system should have stored-value cards so that users don't have to carry about change. I agree, but there are several technical problems with that sort of thing.

In order for a stored-value card to work, the value must be stored. (duh) Early stored-value systems (ATMs in the 1960s) kept the balance on the card and phoned in updates all at once, at night, because phone charges were expensive. Of course, this allows a user to just use a magcard thingy to change the number encoded on his card and take all the fare he wants.

Modern subway systems work well with stored-value systems because each ticket booth can be in constant (or at least frequent) contact with the central database, stopping this sort of fraud.

It is possible to have a copy of the master DB on each bus, in a computer under the driver's seat, but that would be a nightmare. Somebody would have to maintain around six thousand databases. Frightening indeed.

So somehow the buses must be in constant contact with the central database, and the cards can only know what their account numbers are. But how are they going to stay in contact? Packet radio sounds like the only option. You have six thousand buses, all competing for airspace. Sounds like more fun, but it would be doable and all that. (And what about reception problems? Metro goes all over the county, so they would need a very powerful transmitter on each bus, or else a massive repeater network.)

It would be very expensive, though. All the buses would have to be upgraded and a new system would have to be put in place. Worst of all, it would be very confusing for some buses to have the SV system and others not to, so it would have to be done all at once.

I logged in and it told me, "Welcome back to LiveJournal!". Do they really know how long I've been gone? This is the first time I've been here in ... three months?

Well, I'm doing some stuff that's ... interesting at school (technology-wise). I don't talk about it online, so call me if you want to hear about it. It's quite technical, so--for those who aren't--it probably won't be worth your time. I fixed a vexing (and previously undiscovered) bug in my code today. Vexing because it causes data loss, and undiscovered because I didn't know that I wasn't getting all the data.

I bet that was so vague as to be incomprehensible. Whatever. I'm not dead, just on IRC. (It's like death, only more social.)

Last night I had my first nightmare in about 7 months. It was so terrible I don't want to say what happened. Suffice it to say that I felt miserable when I remembered it just now.

I'm writing this from work. I like work. I'm about halfway through with my internship, and am almost done with my current project. I'm not supposed to tell what it is because it's Microsoft Confidential. It's really cool, though. Everyone I've showed it to says, "I want that!" or something similar.