Older blog entries for ncm (starting at number 163)

8 Feb 2007 (updated 28 Jul 2007 at 00:35 UTC) »
fxn: Five titbits you probably don't know about me?

1. I am generally of the opinion that any solution to a problem in personal transportation would be better if it employed a catapult, somewhere. The Crosstown Express sequence in the movie Robots gave me a warm feeling.

2. While in high school I read back issues of Communications of the ACM at the University of Hawaii library. That is where I first encountered Unix, in Thompson & Ritchie's 1973 paper, probably in '77 or '78. I was fascinated, but didn't get to see a real shell prompt until 1982. (I first compiled a program on Windows last week. :-P)

3. I met my wife for the first time on my second day in Jakarta. She was living in Bali, and was on her way through to Singapore to renew her visa. I got her address, she left the next day, and I dropped in when I got to Bali six weeks later.

4. I find mild electric shocks more invigorating than painful. This fact led ultimately to my obtaining a degree in Electrical Engineering.

5. I would like to see capital punishment applied only to public officials and officers of public corporations convicted of abusing the public trust. (Bumper sticker: "See Dick Fry!")

Contributing to the exponential explosion, I a-nominate slamb, mjg59, Ankh, redi, and, oh, robertc.

robogato: What I'd like to see posted in articles is the knowledge of our more distinguished members. I'd welcome anything slamb, graydon, or mjg59 deigned to take a moment to explain. Good coding puzzles have been popular, too. The typical problem with the discussion threads attached is staying on-topic. Maybe a separate "reply off-topic" button, and associated thread, would help; and maybe allow the author to move replies from one to the other.

I found myself porting something to win32, for the first time ever. The linker was failing to see extern variables defined at the end of the C file; moving them to the top "fixed" it. In this day and age?!

5 Feb 2007 (updated 5 Feb 2007 at 21:12 UTC) »

O Happy Day! The wireless card in my Dell D620, which Dell calls a "1390", a mini-PCI-Express card with a Broadcom BCM4311 chip on it, works now. This card ships with lots of other laptops, Dell and otherwise. A patch, bcm43xx-2619.patch, (also for BCM4312) in the 2.6.20 changelog applies nicely to 2.6.19. (It appears you also need on-card firmware to be loaded from /lib/firmware, e.g. bcm43xx-firmware.tgz, to make it work.) Now maybe I can finally retire my orinoco cards. Now, too, maybe people will stop hustling ndiswrapper as some kind of holy grail. It was actually kind of hard to get this patch; the one in 2.6.20 mixed in other stuff, and the git web interface on kernel.org was borked. Copious thanks to Stefano Brivio and everybody else involved.

fejj: The way Bell Labs solved a similar problem (spell checking) on V7 UNIX was to hash each item several different ways, and set a bit for each result in a common bitmap. If hashes for the next URL find all those bits set, you've almost certainly seen it before. Extra credit for quantifying "almost certainly" according to bitmap size, number of hashes, and number of URLs.

23 Jan 2007 (updated 24 Jan 2007 at 20:49 UTC) »

[erstwhile spammers deleted]

23 Jan 2007 (updated 23 Jan 2007 at 22:21 UTC) »
chalst: (In reference to Tupper's Self-Referential Formula) Let's see if I understand this. It seems to be suggesting that, because an image can be represented as a sequence of bits, and so can a large number, by choosing a large number with just the right bits you can represent any image you like -- even a rendering of the mathematical formula you chose to implement the rendering.

Revolutionary.

Perhaps automated calculation can someday be used to compile tables of settings to enable accurate cannon targeting.

pjf: Powdered ginger is the "really strong sea-sickness medication" you're after. In double-blind tests it turned out to be twice as effective as dramamine. Even better, it works even when you take it after you already feel queasy.
12 Jan 2007 (updated 12 Jan 2007 at 21:35 UTC) »
I will not be buying an Apple iPhone. No one in my extended family will be buying an Apple iPhone. I am, however, carefully watching lkcl's progress in putting Free Software on slightly less proprietary gadgets.

It turns out (as I had expected) the idea of combining encipherment and secure hashing in one operation is familiar in the crypto industry. However, the approaches I see published look painfully crude. EAX and CCM, in particular, are no faster than enciphering normally and then hashing with SHA, so what's the point? Kerberos 4 used "propagating CBC" which has the weakness that if you swap two (at-the-time 8-byte) ciphertext blocks, the plaintext is garbled but the checksum is good. That should be fixable with (more-or-less-) simple whitening. E.g, here's 16 bytes of endian-agnostic whitening:


    #define MASK64 0x00ff00ff00ff00ffULL
    #define WASH64 0x005a005a005a005aULL
    sum_lo = ((((sum_lo &  MASK64) +  WASH64) 
                & MASK64)
            | (((sum_lo & ~MASK64) + (WASH64<<8))
                & ~MASK64));
    sum_hi = ((((sum_hi &  MASK64) +  WASH64)
                & MASK64)
            | (((sum_hi & ~MASK64) + (WASH64<<8))
                & ~MASK64));
I kind of prefer the CFB w/checksum approach:

  C(i) = sum(i-1) XOR P(i)
  sum(i) = W(sum(i-1)) XOR AES(C(i))
  sum(0) = AES(IV)
where W is whitening as above.

apenwarr: Automatic variable-type (and argument-type) deduction from initialization value is (1) well-known from Haskell and ML, (2) one of the important new features of C++09, and (3) coming this year or early next to a GNU G++ near you. C# could have had the feature any time, but MS didn't think of adding it until they saw C++ would have it. Of course it's particularly useful only when you have real templates.

titus: Got two helicopters. Shipping seemed a bit dear for UPS ground, but apparently because they were a couple of days late shipping, they sent it 2nd-day anyhow.

One more thing about the NEXBlack: every 10 minutes it pauses for a half-second. Next to try is to see if it will play Ogg/FLAC. I'm betting not. If they'd just release hardware specs to the Rockbox people it would have decent firmware in no time.

6 Jan 2007 (updated 7 Jan 2007 at 21:24 UTC) »

Bumper sticker: "Impeach Cheney First".

The serial number on my NEXBlack is 112. Evidently not quite everybody agrees yet that they represent the Holy Grail of MP3 players. Give it time, I say.

Relative power corrupts relatively.

1 Jan 2007 (updated 1 Jan 2007 at 17:59 UTC) »

My Frontier Labs "NEXBlack" Ogg player finally arrived from New York. (This is the one that runs 30+ hours (yes) on 2 NiMH AAs, and has no memory built in, but has a nice CF slot.) It's a substantial chunk of sturdy black plastic. I got a 2G CF card with it, now 87% full. The sound quality (of my 250kbps Vorbis files) is good. The earbuds are demonaically uncomfortable, and don't stay in, but they're loud. As noted by others, it freezes up (needs batteries popped just to turn it off) when it sees an .m3u file describing Ogg files. The UI is annoying, but I doubt other players are any better. The worst omission is that it won't sort by file date; it insists on alphabetizing, so I'll have to rename the files in album order with numeric prefixes. That, and when you turn it off and back on it doesn't remember where it was. I like it, but I'd like it better if Rockbox was on it.

I finally got my brother's laptop working OK for him under Ubuntu Edgy, but it wasn't pretty. I had to delete (ok, rename) the drivers for his Marvell ethernet so that the ipw2200 would have a stable interface name across boots and ACPI suspends. (Iftab is now completely useless, as is "mapping".) Wpa_supplicant wasn't too hard to get working: the suggested four-line /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf did the job. The dpkg really should install it by default. To keep Flash content from crashing firefox I had to add a line "export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1" to the /usr/bin/firefox script. Other firefox stuff was fixed by "dpkg --purge"-ing firefox and everything related, and re-installing them, but now it won't display PDFs in attachments from squirrelmail without an intermediate "save" step. The SD flash slot now has a driver, but still doesn't work.

To my complete surprise I have found myself obliged to design a cryptographic algorithm. Not a cipher, heaven forfend, but a feedback mode and envelope scheme. The idea is that when sending UDP-grams, without decent crypto anybody can disrupt your session from any cyber-cafe from here to Kamchatka. If you're encrypting anyway, it's wasteful to *also* compute a MAC, when you can use a chaining encryption mode to do both jobs at once at the cost of only an extra XOR.

By blacklisting ethernet, wireless, and audio driver modules, and also all the programs that hold them open (xmms, gamix, etc.), I got swsuspend2 waking my Dell D620 laptop up without bollixing audio and wireless networking. I also got the Dell driving a Pioneer plasma TV, but so far not without it cutting off half the image. Still no success with the Broadcom wireless card (which Dell calls a 1390), despite all lwfinger's efforts, but my orinoco card works OK now.

Last weekend I made a real egg nog for the first time: separate four eggs, whip the yolks to within an inch of their lives, add a half cup each of brandy and cream and four tbsp sugar, and whip some more. Whip the whites until stiff, and fold them in, and add some cinnamon and nutmeg. It makes a surprising amount of something unlike anything you can find in cartons.

Congratulations to njs & crew on releasing Monotone 0.32.

So, Happy New Year, everybody. Time for another donation to Darren Naish.

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