After over four weeks of being sick, I'm finally starting to feel
better.
I've had a lot of strange dreams while I've been sick. A few days ago,
I had a dream which involved attending something at the Ninth Circuit.
I woke up from the middle of that dream, and, half-asleep, wondered
if the dream would pick up where it left off if I were to go back to
sleep.
The answer came to me: "No, silly! You can't just fall asleep and go
directly to the Ninth Circuit! Your dream has to start out in the
District Court, and then you have to appeal it."
I saw the Custom Made Theatre Company's
production of Animal Farm. In the program appeared this
quotation:
You must understand, sir, a person is either with this court or
he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is
a sharp time, now, a precise time -- we live no longer in the
dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled
the world. Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them
that fear not light will surely praise it. I hope you will
be one of those.
(Arthur Miller, The Crucible)
Somehow I feel like this is a quotation worthy of being letterpress-printed
on fine paper and framed, in a typeface with serifs. If I were in touch
with Willow and Willow had access to a press, I might ask her -- she did
the beautiful "quæcumque enim scripta sunt ad nostram doctrinam
scripta sunt" which hangs on my wall, and even thought to use the
ligature "æ" instead of "ae".
Custom Made chose to set Animal Farm in America instead of
England, so that the revolutionary song was "Beasts of America" instead
of "Beasts of England", and the later anthem "Animal Farm" ("never
through me shalt thou come to harm") was sung to the tune of "The
Star-Spangled Banner"!
They may have been reminded of the Arthur Miller quotation by a piece
Arthur Miller wrote in the New York Times on February 23
in which he quoted his own play.
I saw The Hours in Oakland with Sunah. It was beautiful
and very, very sad.
I'm a sucker for parallel-lives and parallel-worlds movies. I wrote
about that a while ago (giving examples like Run Lola Run
and Sliding Doors). I love that device: you could
probably make a really bad movie with a parallel-lives story, and I would
probably like it a lot anyway. But The Hours is not that bad
movie.
The biggest trouble with it that I know of is the portrayal of Vanessa
Bell. The movie seemed to make her out to be very superficial, and I
don't know why that should be.
We saw the movie at the Parkway in Oakland. Sunah wrote
What is great about the Parkway?
- you can sit on couches with a table by your side. you can order
pizza, nachos, coffee drinks, cookies and so forth and eat them in
the theater
- for some reason it is seldom crowded or smelly or noisy
- admission is only five dollars
- the owners/staff are nice people and they do this work because they
want to spread joy
All of this seemed to be true. The Parkway has a whole little
restaurant inside, so you can get dinner and a movie at the same
time.
I need to get out and explore more.
How far ahead of the unclassified world is the classified world?
By 1981 or earlier there was a whole classified literature on compromising
emanations, yet the unclassified world -- the "open literature" -- is only
starting to examine this subject in earnest now. (Wim van Eck's paper on
emanations was published in 1985, four years after that, but later FOIA
requests suggest van Eck's work only scratched the surface -- the state
of the military art was much broader than what van Eck referred to.)
British researchers
invented
public-key cryptography years before Diffie and Hellman (and also
figured out RSA before Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman). But the public
only found out about this recently, because the invention was
classified.
Civilians are starting to get
good satellite photos, but how
many years behind military spy satellites are they?
I've been to two incredibly good Japanese restaurants recently. I'd
been to each before, but the new visits reminded me of just how good
they are.
I went with Praveen to Ryowa Ramen (2068 University Avenue, Berkeley),
which has the best ramen I've ever had. (My fellow California loyalty
oath opponent Jimmer Endres introduced me to Ryowa.) And then I went
with Ren to Minako Organic Sushi (2154 Mission Street, San Francisco),
which has the best sushi I've ever had. My opinions on Japanese food
may be perceived as eccentric because I don't eat fish, and some people
can't imagine how you could have a proper opinion on Japanese food
without eating fish.
But actually, I think my first meal at Minako was the best meal I've
ever had -- from any cuisine.
Speaking of great restaurants, I also went with Praveen and friends
to the Indian Oven,
which has been rated as the best Indian restaurant in San Francisco.
It was also excellent, and I'm tempted to go there for my
birthday.
My ear infection is finally gone. That's a relief; I was feeling
sick for over four weeks, which contributed to the lack of diary
entries here. I'll try to get back in the habit of writing more
regularly.
Unfortunately, I'm having a lot of arm pain again. It's funny how
problems can seem to line up in series, so that they're experienced
one at a time (seriatim, as the Latin adverb-wielding
lawyers put it).
I visited Kragen and Beatrice
and tried out wedding cake (remember:
choose the strawberry!) and got to meet some of their friends and
make pirate jokes.
We had a meeting at the headquarters of
AC Transit in Oakland to
talk about privacy issues in the new TransLink system. If Lee
doesn't mind, I may publish some notes soon. Transit privacy is
an interesting issue which is becoming more so as more transit
operators accept more payments with stored-value instruments linked
to large databases.
I went to the RSA Conference and saw various people I knew, and got
to talk DRM with several interested strangers. I also had the
latest of my meetings with Microsoft on trusted computing, had an
informal meeting with AMD, and resolved to finish a paper on the subject.
In other RSA news, I got to ride a Segway scooter for the first time, thanks
to a company using it as a booth attraction. It is a wonderful
feeling. (I don't see it as a healthy replacement for a bicycle,
or a practical replacement for a car, but it's fun!)
Supposedly I'm going to get e-mail with a digital picture of myself
riding the Segway.
While I was in the South of Market, I dropped by a convenience store
where I used to shop, and bought a few things for old time's sake.
I told the owner about moving away from the South of Market area
because of the rents. During the boom, I told him, they tried to
increase our rent to $3,000 a month, or was it $4,000? The store
owner said he thought those rents were back down around $2,000 now.
It's sad to wander around there and see the CoffeeNet closed down
(and even painted white instead of purple, the only signs of its
former glory being some purple spots on the sidewalk where the paint
had dripped) and the Something
Wonderful gone, too.
I was astonished the other day by the following experience:
I booted an LNX-BBC test image and
started a test download of something using
BitTorrent.
BitTorrent was downloading into a RAM disk (actually a tmpfs, which is
kind of like a dynamically-sized RAM disk) with a maximum size of
about 128 MB.
I expected the download to run out of space at some point, since the file
I was trying to download was about 1 GB, much larger than the RAM disk.
After a little while, I went to check on it by looking at how much
disk space had been used.
The system said that only about 50 MB had been downloaded. Then I
remembered that BitTorrent preallocates space for the files it
downloads. I couldn't understand how the download had even been
able to start. The
BitTorrent
FAQ says that
BitTorrent pre-allocates the entire file when your download
begins, then writes in pieces in random order as it gets them.
As a result the file jumps to its full size immediately.
BitTorrent will tell you when the download is complete.
If this was the case, how could a BitTorrent download of a 1 GB
file even start on a 128 MB RAM disk? Furthermore,
how could the system claim that only 50 MB had been used?
My confusion was compounded when I went to look at the size of
the preallocated file, and ls reported it as occupying 1 GB.
Nick, who was visiting, explained that Unix supports sparse files
and a file's size in the filesystem may be substantially larger
than the amount of space it's actually taking up. When BitTorrent
allocates a complete file's size on a Unix filesystem, it will
only use a trivial amount of actual storage, and the amount of
storage used will increase as the download progresses.
I found this totally astonishing. I'm familiar with sparse files,
but I always thought they were a VMS thing and never realized
that they've been a standard part of Unix for a long time. I
don't know how I missed that.
The basic consequence of this is that the file size reported by
ls -l can be totally different from the file size reported by du.
Blocks not yet written will just not be allocated on disk, and
reading them will return zeroes.
Here are four problems:
- you have a collection of strings G which were generated by
some unknown formal grammar; find a formal grammar which generates them
- you have a collection of strings G which were generated by some
unknown formal grammar and a collection F which could not be generated
by that grammar; find a formal grammar which generates them
- you have a formal grammar G and a string S; determine whether S
could have been generated by G
- you have a computer program P and a string S; determine whether,
for some input, S could have been generated by P
(Another twist is to replace "grammar" by "Unix regular expression" and
"generated by" with "matches".)
I would find these problems more straightforward to talk about if I had
taken a compilers course, or an automata course, but I never got that far
in CS. I did study formal languages only briefly, and I once read
Minsky's Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, which
talks about the different classes of automata.
(1) and (2) are easy because you can just say that the grammar is
( string1 | string2 | string3 | string4 | ... ). This is a trivial
solution and not very useful -- it has no economy and no
predictive power. It's tantamount to saying that the laws
of physics are "All observed phenomena occur and all non-observed
phenomena are impossible". (What's amusing is that this isn't even
true, partly because some observed phenomena do not actually occur.)
It would be nice to have a more interesting solution.
(4) is as hard as the Halting Problem, but it is solvable for
some programs. You can see quickly that it isn't solvable
in general (even if you didn't know that the Halting Problem is
unsolvable and if you just had an intuition that there is no magical
way of solving all math problems with the same technique). You could
just write a program which verifies whether something is an
exception to some conjecture. If you can tell whether "yes" is ever
an output of that program, you can tell immediately whether the
conjecture is true.
(3) is pretty interesting, and it can actually be solved. The
regular expression version is a standard part of many programming
languages. The efficiency of a solution is also an interesting
question.
I regret that I didn't get to go on
this
hike, because it was beautiful.
The recordings on Out There Live are very good. Some of them
are better than the studio recordings on some other Dar Williams CDs.
I have to recommend this CD very highly.
I went to Stacey's with Zack, at the end of a fairly unsuccessful
series of errands.
I got the 2nd edition of Friedl's regular expression book from
O'Reilly, which might shed some light on my problem (3) above, in
that it discusses implementation issues related to RE matching.
Friedl's book is one of the most useful books ever published by
O'Reilly, but it's not particularly well-known. But it is a triumph.
I also got a Chomsky book on the Vietnam War because of the publisher's
successful attempt to suggest that it had a new relevance or resonance
today.
I also got a copy of Practical Cryptography, the latest in
the series of "Schneier books that criticize earlier Schneier books".
(So Bruce Schneier is like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cliff Stoll --
interesting company.)
"What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you.
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or
like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward
you must throw the ladder away, because you discover
that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er
muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen,
sô er an ir ufgestigen . . . . Is that how you
say it?"
"That is how it is said in my language. Who told you
that?"
"A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I
forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody
one day to find that manuscript again. The only
truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown
away."
(Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose)
(Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem
er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)
Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht
er die Welt richtig.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
6.54)
I repeat: it suffices that a book be possible for it to exist.
Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a ladder,
although no doubt there are books which discuss and negate and
demonstrate this possibility and others whose structure corresponds to
that of a ladder.
(Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel")
If, like me, you hadn't noticed sparse files before, and you want to see a
large sparse file, do
#!/usr/bin/env python
foo = open("sparse", "w")
foo.write("sparse")
foo.seek(2 ** 30)
foo.write("file")
foo.close()
Codd's tuple-logic vision brings
"A world made of facts, and not of things";
And now he joins the ranks of history:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The Emerging
Man party in San Jose was among the geekiest events I
have ever attended, and naturally great fun.
Hooray for Emerging Man!
In a rare moment of good news on copyright law,
MusicCity and Grokster were held not to be subject to secondary liability for
copyright infringement based on their publication of file-sharing software;
the court reaffirmed the Betamax doctrine and recognized that software
publishers are like VCR
and photocopier manufacturers.
I worked on that case -- spending a whole day in a cage to protect others'
freedom -- but most of the credit on our side goes to our lawyers,
especially Fred von Lohmann. Congratulations!
I just met Ada Norton, and she is cute!
I had a great time seeing Alex,
with whom I worked on the Morpheus case when he was at
Wilson Sonsini and they were
co-counsel.
My father and my stepmother each just sent me a wonderful thing. My
father sent me my
grandmother's copy of a piano score for Mozart's Requiem.
("Klavier-Auszug", or "Piano excerpt".)
The publisher of that score, Edition
Peters/C.F. Peters Musikverlag, is still around, and still selling the
Requiem.
I have high-resolution scans of a few pages linked above, but here's a
lower-resolution version of the title page:
I like Mozart's Requiem a lot; people who know me might
recall that I named my computer after it! I never knew that my
grandmother liked it too.
I never really got to meet her, since she died when I was an infant.
She was a pianist. If she'd lived longer, maybe she would have
played music for me, or even taught me to play the piano.
My stepmother sent me a beautifully hand-decorated t-shirt.
The t-shirt includes a patch which reproduces a picture of me
from when I was eight and dressed up as the Rambam for a pageant.
It turns out that that was the first time I was ever photographed
with a beard!
(It's easy to find out
what the
Rambam looked like if you're curious. I didn't look a whole
lot like him -- more like an eight-year-old in a costume.)
My mom's putting on a major
Virginia Woolf
conference at Smith College in June -- it looks like a lot of
fun!
If you know any humanities fans or Western Massachusetts fans,
let them know.
"Spring Street" might be the best Dar Williams song I originally
didn't like.
I'm resolved to being born and so resigned to bravery.
[...]
I don't have to go to Spring Street, 'cause it's spring everywhere.
[Main]
Contact: Seth David Schoen
