Category: Uncategorized

“you ALWAYS pay”

Lately I find myself frequently pointing to this USENET post by Vladimir Butenko. Since it is a rather long post, I quote here the parts that really make it worthwhile, without having to read the whole thread:

If you need something, you pay. Either in cash, or in your own time, or in consequences of not having what you really need.
:
Bottom line: you always pay. You need a simple thing – you pay a small amount, you need a big thing – you pay more.

People tend to underestimate the value of their personal time invested.

Update (2011/12/10): Spotted this comment on LinkedIn by Valdis Krebs:

When choosing “free” software consider how much your time is worth. Unless you have a friendly local mentor who loves spending time with you at all hours of the day, you will spend many many hours learning and making mistakes… alone… while waiting for on-line groups to respond to your pleas for assistance. In the end, software is never free. It always requires an investment to use it correctly.

Observations from a house broken into

  • Schneier’s Law holds for households. No matter where you’ve hidden it, the burglars will find it. They’ve seen it before.
  • If you want a post assessment on what inside your house has some street value, just make a list of what is missing.
  • A friend observed that people probably do not upgrade their locks as frequently as their software.
  • Why did this happen to me? Why not, indeed.
  • Every day you discover another thing missing. Confusion: Was it stolen or is it just misplaced?

11/11/11

The date is not 11/11/11. It is 2011/11/11. Have people forgotten Y2K? Do they really try to find meaning in every number, even if this means devising it? The only dates that matter are (reasonable) deadlines.

In other news, today Lucas Papademos assumes his new post, as Prime Minister of Greece, charged to do the impossible. And he is to do so by using the same bloated, inefficient (even after downsizing) and resisting to change Public Sector machine. So the question arises:

– If he succeeds, what does this tell us about all our previous leaders?

On separate networks and air-gaps

If anything, Stuxnet and Duqu have proved that separate (via air-gap) “more secure” networks do not exist. There exists only one network, the Internet, with some parts labeled as classified and with various degrees of slow connectivity to the rest of the World. And yes sometimes the networking device is just a human with a (USB) stick.

This and exceptions that I have to deal with daily drive me closer to a firewall-less world. I am not there yet though.

06:16

Δεύτερος. Και με το χαρτάκι Α002 στις 08:03.

– Παιδιά σήμερα έχει Α και Β. Α για επισκέψεις, Β για φάρμακα και επισκέψεις, λέει μετά μια φωνή.

Κρατάς το Α μια και δεν εντάσσεσαι σε καμία κατηγορία. Ο υπάλληλος σε λέει αγράμματο γύρω στις 08:07. Ο φύλακας για να προλάβει την ένταση σου δίνει το Β032. Πλέον υπάρχει και χαρτάκι πάνω από το μηχάνημα. Και παρατηρείς πλέον τον κόσμο να κόβει χαρτάκι Α και χαρτάκι Β για να πάει όπου του κάτσει η σειρά.

Άντε λοιπόν εγώ είμαι αγράμματος μια και δεν είμαι στο μυαλό σας. Η δικιά σου δικαιολογία μια και στα πρώτα δέκα λεπτά δεν έχει προλάβει να σε κουρδίσει κανένας ποια είναι; Δε μπορεί να είναι όλοι αγράμματοι και να κόβουν και από τα δύο χαρτάκια. Φυσικά κάποιος που στοιχειωδώς αντιλαμβάνεται ουρές αναμονής θα έγραφε:

– Α μόνο για επισκέψεις, Β για οτιδήποτε άλλο (συμπεριλαμβανομένων και των επισκέψεων εάν έχεις και από αυτές). Το έχεις ξανακάνει άλλωστε και έχει δουλέψει καλά.

Αλλά είπαμε, δεν ξέρω γράμματα.

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A trip from theory → hack → theory

Word is out that John McCarthy (father of many things CS) has passed. The sad news of his death reminded me of digging and pushing out this draft. While doing a “digital excavation” browsing through “Defending AI Research” I got to read about Joseph Weizenbaum (Chapter 1, “An Unreasonable Book”). That is how I found out that Weizenbaum is the creator of ELIZA (I think I first met Eliza around 1990 running at a friend’s Amiga 500). Eliza in turn was written in SLIP which in turn was implemented in FORTRAN. Curious as to why SLIP did not have the visibility of LISP which seems to be the eternal programming language, I got to read the paper too. The brilliance of the hack amazed me. But then again the fact that SLIP feels like a hack may explain why it never really took off.

For me this was one of the happy instances where theory beats practice by far. I do love these cases, even though most of the times I am on the “implement a quick hack to get going” side, being a system administrator and having to deal with unreasonable deadlines. It was only a few days later that I learned that McCarthy himself did not intend for Lisp to be an actual programming language. Steve Russell did that by realising that he can code eval in some other language and then use it to code Lisp. Sometimes the brilliance of the creation exceeds the expectations of its creator.

I could go on ranting about how Lisp (and not necessarily Common Lisp) influences how one thinks about dealing with programming problems but Greenspun’s 10th rule suffices. And remeber that newLISP was covered by 2600 (Winter 2006 – 2007) as a system administrator’s tool.

Thank you Professor McCarthy for Lisp, Circumscription and the Situation Calculus among other things, all fully theory backed stuff and mind openers even when not directly applied in my everyday practice.