Older blog entries for vab (starting at number 102)

Current mood: working

Current music: none

Entry tags: web2.0, timeline, mit, simile, xml

Web 2.0 Goodness

One of the groups I work for, href="http://simile.mit.edu/">The Simile Group, released
a javascript program for visualizing temporal data. It's
called href="http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/">Timeline. It
allows you to plot XML data on a graphic and then to click
and scroll that graphic (like Google Maps).

I have a list of patches I want to write for the program.
One itch is that it doesn't do a good job with layout when
events are non-concurrent but share start and end days.
Another is that it doesn't support the idea of events
happening as part of a larger event in concurrence with
events that are not part of that larger event with out
significant screen real estate consumption. You really need
700px's in height to see my Timeline and use it easily,
already. We'll see if I can find the time for the patches.
Overall, it's a cool app though. The API is well developed
and makes good use of the OO paradigm.

It would be worth while to play with. It would have been
nice to see on CNN.com during Sept. 11, for example. The
documentation and source code are available from the href="http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/">Timeline page on
Simile's Website.

Current mood: busy

Entry tags: cryptography, linux, mit, pgp, security

Speaking at BLU@MIT Sept. 20th 2006

I'm speaking at The Boston Linux Users group on the topic of PGP encryption before a keysigning party. The talk will be given @ MIT E-51 rm 335.

Register your key and drop on by if you'd like to help us build the web of trust. Fun will be had by all. Well, at least the math geeks anyway.

I really need to sit down and force myself to update the PGP Keysigning Party HOWTO. That's officially my mission for today.

A web of trust:

Current mood: nerdy

Current music: 3 Doors Down - If I Could Be Like That

Entry tags: books, library

LibraryThing

After seeing it in xach's journal, I set up an account for myself on LibraryThing. LibraryThing is basically a kind of mix between a Social Networking site and a Recommendation Engine. You put in all the books you own and it will tell you who else also has those books, let you add reviews and ratings, tag your books, give you interesting statistics on your collection, and recommend other books you might like to read. I left my data public, so anyone can take a peak at my collection of books or my profile on the site.

My reaction to seeing my books all listed out like that was "OMG, I'm such a NERD! I'm never going to get laid!". I have them spaced out around the house and many of them stacked at odd angles, some with their spines facing the wall, to keep me from having that reality brought into my consciousness. 8-)

I signed up though cause I need to starting reading again. I need to find some new books I might like. The world's changing. I need something new. Pretty much, the only things I've read in the last five to seven years that weren't online were text books and certification study guides. I've kind of been in this over focused rut. I have done much of anything but work-work (stuff for $ or other people) and waste time. I'm not sure if there's any irony in the fact that rut is a homonym that's alternate meaning is the breeding season for cervids. Probably, if I was vulgar enough to disclose how I've been wasting my time. haha

Here's my Author Cloud:

And here's my Tag Cloud

I have a huge number of books that no one else has. Disclosing stuff about myself always makes me feel like I'm weird because of stuff like that. Hakank has the most books in common with me, closely followed by dkennedy.

[Comments]

MIT is amazing. I'm super inspired. I have lots of big news to post, but haven't had time. Big stuff coming soon.

Some little other stuff:

* I'm speaking at HOPE Number Six. Let me know if you're going to be there and you wanna grab a beer.

* I have some new LDP stuff/HOWTO's coming out soon

* Bill Gates is wicked freakin' awesome

* Bank of America sucks. I got hit with an overdraft because MIT messed up my first paycheck and it took BoA four days to clear a check from them to them! Four days for their own check! grrr

* I'm walking in the Autism Research Walk on June 17th (tomorrow). It's an issue that obviously very close to my heart. If you could sponsor/give a few bucks, and even consider walking in on of their other walks this year I'd really appreciate it. Click here to contribute.

I've taken a new job at MIT. I'll start work there next month. I hope that it will not only enrich me intellectually, but stimulate me to begin making some more significant contributions to the free software community.

I came to my last job mostly for a girl, so I have no strong regret about it - oh, she was soo beautiful! =) But, I have dissappointed myself with my recent lack of productivity. With a slow pace at work, it's very difficult to keep a fast pace at home. I'm hoping that a fast pace at work will translate into, or at least encourage, a fast pace at home. It may have just been the youth, but in my younger days this seemed be the case.

Personal

I'm greatly looking forward to the move to Boston. I've rented a place in Southie, also known as "Little Ireland", which will allow me to take the T to work every day - no more driving for me. That's going to be a very nice change.

Unfortunately, my boss took the week of St. Pat's for vacation so I won't be able to be up there for the parade since I'm covering at work. But, I'm looking forward to the little break inbetween jobs anyway. I'm going to try and make a trip to Ireland and Germany to visit some friends before I start work.

Many years ago I used to hate Bill Gates - passionately. I had a job working for a pediatric cancer research group writing Java Applets to support clinical trials when Microsoft released their own JVM and caused me endless problems and many hours of lost productivity.

Later, I had a job building a single signon infrastructure for a large University with AIX and Linux using MIT Kerberos when Microsoft released their broken version of Kerberos.

I'm starting to really like the guy and respect him allot, though. So, the head aches, lost hours of work, lost nights and weekends spent working around artificial problems - all forgotten. Water under the bridge. Perhaps, a large part of it is that I'm no longer a college kid and my world view has changed a great deal. I understand money much better now.

But the major thing is that I've been hearing a great deal about The Gates Foundation and what Bill Gates has been doing to try and help with the world's most serious problems. I'm especially impressed with, and grateful for, the Foundation's efforts in global health, particularly with vaccines. Gates and his foundation have played a roll in creating a nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and helped with the creation of the DATA organization. From listening to him and reading interviews, it's obvious he actually cares and is very well informed.

I never thought I'd say this, but... I'm going to start developing for the Microsoft platform! (I'll still be continuing to develop software and documentation for the Linux Platform, of course.)

I ordered a copy of Microsoft Studio Beta-2 from Microsoft. The web pages suggested that there would be a small charge for it. But there was none - I'm not sure if it's because I came from a .edu address, a Linux browser, or just that they're not charging. But, it's on its way. So wish me luck in the wild new world of MFC and .NET.

I released, cpcd, a multithreaded daemon written in C. It implements the gWebCache protocol which is used to help p2p programs join the Gnutella Network.

This project is a watershead moment for me. I'm sure that there are bugs, and many things I could have done better. However, this is decent software. It was tested and able to support many millions of connections per day while producing handly any system load at all (0.03 on a PIII 1Ghz).

For perhaps the first time, the limiting factor in what I can contribute to Free Software seems to be the amount of free time I have rater than my programming abilities. I have reactivated my Keyserver project now that I have the skills and understanding to complete it.

(Thanks to eeeeeee@google & pphaneuf here on advogato for the discussions related to a program like cpcd's design.)

I released, rsachal, a little C program to attempt to solve the RSA Labs RC5 Challenges.

I've become very interested in challenges and puzzle games and such things lately.

I've also stopped registering my projects on freshmeat until they hit v1.0.0 just incase I don't finish them in a timely manner, or at all.

I wrote some C code to solve the google billboard challenge. I didn't send in a resume, though.