another weblog

Blurb to targeted audience:

No Giftmas this year, at least not from me. I won’t get anyone anything; don’t get me anything. (Not that you were planning to!)

Invest your money in some safe financial investment scheme instead.

Mindless link propagation:

This Craigslist posting (with route name substitutions) is a pretty good representation of my bus trips to and from work. It is very much not-worksafe.

One difference: I don’t have a problem with my block.

Anyway, it is also a pretty damn funny post, especially if you’ve ever had to deal with the uglier sides of the CTA and mass transit in general.

Hopefully this won’t be the same. The Union Trade – Everyday Including:

Everyday Including by The Union Trade

It’s fun shoegazey stuff; I particularly like For The Resilient, Crescent, and Talk.

The above is a Flash player containing songs from their latest album. If you can’t use Flash, check out the streams here.

If you’d like to buy the album, consider doing so via the artist’s website, Magnatune, or Amazon MP3. Amazon’s royalty tiers seem to favor the artist, but the distribution of revenue from iTunes is controversial.

…and so I wrote up an implementation of Daniel J. Bernstein’s Salsa20 encryption function in Haskell.

It won’t win any prizes for speed (it runs at a blazingly slow speed of ~3.2 MB/s on my Core Duo) or cleverness (I’m sure there’s a lot left to do in terms of taking advantage of Haskell the language), but it is very straightforward. Much of that straightforwardness is due to the simplicity of Bernstein’s algorithm than anything I coded, but I was still rather surprised at the incredible resemblance between what I wrote and what’s in Bernstein’s paper. That’s high-level languages for you…

Code is browseable here and can be checked out with git clone http://code.ninjawedding.org/salsa20.git. Not sure if I’ll keep working on this one, but if I do, you’ll know. I place all this code in the public domain.

I think this goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: if you use this code to do anything important, you’re insane.

Found this video in my bookmarks, and the current worldwide financial situation seems like a good time to bring it back up.

The video, produced in 2002, predicted a complete economic meltdown without drastic monetary Change.
Guess it’s on the mark.

Paul Grignon – Money as Debt
Paul Grignon’s comments

This weekend I was involved with setting up a large number of servers for Anime Central. Web, database, other essential private and public services.

Most things were going pretty well. There were some hardware problems (some old machines and recent Linux kernels really have to be coaxed to work with each other), but other than that most things went pretty well.

Except one thing, which took the better part of the early dawn to debug. And it was all because everyone (including me, obviously) forgot to flip a switch. Doh.

In any case, the new stuff does work. My internal clock is really frobinated, though.

Title of this post is a reference to Debugging by David Agans.

Just arrived in New Orleans for the “caBIG Tissue Banks and Pathology Tools” conference. There seems to be a bit or two of good information I can pick up here, so might as well do that.

One (obvious) observation: it’s really warm here. Specifically, it’s 68°F (20°C) outside. Compared to Chicago, which is hovering around 48°F (8°C), raining, and probably windy, this is pretty good. (Now if there wasn’t such a problem from bugs, hurricanes, and humidity…)

So I know McCain has already given his concession speech, and even FOX News is projecting Obama as the next President of the United States, but I can’t help but think it’d be hilariously awesome if McCain ended up pulling out a win.

This generation needs a Dewey Defeats Truman. (Though, at this point, it’d be a far greater gaffe. And proportionally far more funny.)

EDIT: Well, that was quick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_McCain&oldid=249793686 (not safe for work)

Seems like this guy needed to make his opinion known, as crude as it is. Looks like we Americans have finally overcome racism: we can now apply racial epithets universally!