Monday, March 25, 2002
11114319:: 2:59 PM

Before leaving for class today, I heard a sound in the kitchen. Rustling. Too frequent. Not human. -- Upon opening the door, I saw a pigeon trapped: frantic: Alternately flying into the window and knocking my dishes about as it stumbled in the sink to recover. It is unnerving to see a creature at its limit of desperation. Humans rarely get to this state. The traps that we find ourselves are eased into over months or years, and by the time the door is shut we're ready to put locks on it.

The entire proceeding (I eventually got close enough to open an escape route for the bird) triggered an odd thought in me: that humans are domesticated animals. Few of us who could survive in the wild starting with nothing: no modern tools, clothes, shelter. We were essentially wild at some point, but through a thousand generations of sheltered living, we've forgotten how to extract a living from nature. Somewhere, somehow our food gets to us :: And while this food is cultivated and harvested by humans, an individual's ability to supply that food for themselves is roughly equal to a dog's ability to make dog food.

This perspective changes a lot of things. Just like a dog can't eliminate (except through conditioning) certain natural behaviors like digging holes, sniffing booty, etc, human's face the same deal.

Tuesday, March 12, 2002
10663732:: 10:43 AM

I just had a thought. The reason that building secure software systems is so difficult is because programmers are fighting the second law of thermodynamics. Namely, that in a closed system, entropy increases (or occasionally stays the same). As an example, consider a toaster. How does one make a *secure* toaster? Well if an attackers goal is simply to make the toaster malfunction, there are a myriad of attacks that will be successful. He could cut a wire, bend the pop-up spring, tape the toast opening shut, physically hide it, fill it with sawdust, pull the plug, or just smash the thing with a baseball bat. There are many many ways to make the system fail because an attacker is going with the natural flow of entropy. For this reason, the work of one can topple the efforts of many.

This viewpoint would say that open source software is inherently no more secure than private code. while a large network of open source developers might be able to patch a found bug more quickly, this fact doesn't keep a system from being attacked.

Monday, March 11, 2002
10630067:: 1:34 PM

25 Years. Not bad.

Wednesday, March 06, 2002
10473829:: 6:55 PM

Myanmar?! Why wasn't I consulted?
::
Anyway, yesterday I discovered a growling, clucking/grunting squirrel. I had never known squirrels to make any noise at all really... until yesterday :: I heard this deep growl/grunt from a tree as I scaled a wall on my way to class. It caught me off gaurd, but when I looked up, lo and behold a regular looking squirrel in a branch a couple feet above my head. We stared at each other for a bit, all the while it continued with its noisy business, and then I began to mimic it. This caught the squirrels attention, and we had something of a short conversation -- not really too much different than most day to day smalltalk. I was late to class though :: so we only talked for a couple minutes.

Tuesday, March 05, 2002
10429482:: 5:14 PM

I just destroyed a mouse. wool jacket, electrostatic arc -- :p :: I searched in vain for another one, then decided I would try to use windows XP without one. hm. The entire experience was a great demonstration of how dependent we've become on the WIMP (windows, icon, menus, pointer) interface. This is not just against windows either, since Macs is just as dependent.
::
Really though, the mouse is a suboptimal I/O device. While WIMP does cater to human understand of space and place, it hardly makes use of motor memory and its degree of "throwness" -- maybe 0.2.
::
In other news, just got back from an EE colloquium where Gene Frantz talked about pervasive computing and wearable devices. After seeing the talk I have some ideas for how to implement a PAN (personal area network)... might be good.