Various
A lot of things have been going on over the course of my trip, so here's a quick update, which necessarily leaves out a lot.
Happy palindromic year, the last such until 2112. A neighbor and I reasoned that about 1/(b^(n/2)) numbers of length n digits in base b are palindromic (although I think that's not exactly right).
I flew into Boston for the vacation and was reminded of Michelle a lot during my brief stay there, because of a memorable trip to that city with her.
I got some interesting Python code from Michael Hudson, who attacked the ZD problem enthusiastically, deploying both mathematical reasoning and programming acumen. Maybe I'll post some of his code here at some point; it came out much more efficient than mine.
It seems that the "Superpolynomial Subexponential Runtimes" song from the RSA patent expiration party is not the earliest example of such a song!
John Gilmore says, in connection with what I wrote about people who feared sound cards on account of the capabilities they gave to the public:
Actually this was the reaction of the telco folks (and the phone phreaks) to the ~1980 introduction of the Apple-Cat // modem by Novation for the Apple II. It could generate and detect touch-tones, and could also detect some sorts of signals on the phone line, like ringing tones or busy signals or voice. This was a 300 baud modem, with a 1200 baud half duplex (Bell 202) mode as a later extra add-on. It didn't even permit general D-to-A or A-to-D on the phone line; all modern modems do that. But it still worried people!
In Northampton, I saw my friend Sarah, who was busy packing most of the time I was around. She left for a year in Ghana as a Fulbright Scholar, and I'm really proud of her! I also saw my friends Maya and Brita, who are doing neat things a little closer to home, and I had a good time all around.
I got a cold while I was out here. Darn.
Ole Craig took me to lunch at Haymarket in Northampton. Thanks, Ole!
That was one stop, as it turned out, in the ritual of eating in many of my favorite Northampton restaurants. I'm still working on the Northampton restaurant circuit tour, and I'll have to come back again to continue it (not that San Francisco doesn't have great places to eat -- these places just have such sentimental value for me).
For the new year, I went off to Eric's house in Hopedale -- for my seventh annual new year celebration with him. This year, we cut back a bit on the technology, although I spent some hours writing a C program which would render the current number of seconds remaining in the year in a bit-mapped font on a text terminal. That was fun. The most impressive part was that I was writing it in ANSI C, in the vi editor, on a Macintosh laptop running Mac OS X. Their Unix implementation is that real and that good -- I had a perfectly functional C compiler, a Bourne shell, and a full set of BSD-style shell utilities.
I was really impressed with how much Unix has gone into Mac OS X. They even have an X server, a GIMP port, and ssh and sshd. I felt right at home in that terminal window, even as various graphical applications were running around me.
My program built a large array, and, converting the seconds count into its component digits, sequentially copied rows from the appropriate digits' bitmap arrays into the larger array. Then the filled part of the larger array was printed out, centered horizontally, after the screen was cleared. It worked great!
We played Monopoly (Eric won, displaying substantial business acumen) and a great game called Cranium which I first encountered at Anirvan's party. It was a small party, but a very nice time. I ate lots of cannoli, as I usually do if they're around.
There's a TradeWars 2002 game starting at dasbistro.com in honor of 2002; to play, just telnet to port 2002 of dasbistro.com.
I had heard something about a car which runs on vegetable oil, but until this trip to Massachusetts, I hadn't actually seen one. My mom and I noticed such a car on the highway around Holyoke; we also noticed that it was going about 70 miles an hour and passing trucks! One of the best parts is the bumper sticker promoting the project: "Drive Vegetarian".
I wrote a little search program for my father's book business so that you can do on-line searches through a portion of his inventory (from his own web site, rather than using ABE or BookFinder).
