While digging around for something in google, I stumbled across this:

ldxp            4042/tcp   LDXP
ldxp            4042/udp   LDXP
#                          Craig Calef <craig@katmango.com>

Boy, that takes me back.

Privacy Enhancing Technologies is coming up in April, I'm thinking of plunking down the registration fee. It looks like I might be attending Emerging Fads. We'll see. I'd be pretty excited to do so since several people I know are giving talks. I owe Marc Steigler a few drinks for missing him at p2p '01. Oh, that feels like such a long time ago.

I read blogs from the Airport-enabled Downtown SF CompUSA earlier. I think that classifies me as a member of genus Loserus Getalifeus. Next time I will try to read blogs with my powerbook from the bakery next door. At least that way I'll be Loserus Withbagelus.

I received a voicemail today from the new landlord, I need to pick up my keys and sign the lease to my new place soon. Especially soon so I can get phone and DSL hooked up. I think I'll sneak a new fridge into the place, the existing one is older than dirt.

My dad played his first golf tournament last weekend and scored 4th place. Way to go, Dad! That PGA Pro Tour game I got him along with the Game Boy Advance must've really made a difference.

I've been working on a beginner's guide to E programming. I'll post the URL late tonight after I make some hefty revisions and merge dnm's notes into the fray.

Gratiutious Bullet Point List Relating to my Hobby Coding Plans:

• Finish E paper
• Get MNet working on OpenBSD 3.0, contact Python port maintainer about rolling in changes.
• Clean up Momoko parser, check it into CVS.

I'm still not really sure how this parser will fit into the general Momoko mindshare so it's best if I just take what I have, check it into cvs, let Brandon ponder it, tell me his ideas for how to fit it in. I figure it will be an iterative process looking like this:

• fit parser into one Interpreter
• see if how I envision it being handed Strings to parse is consistent with how Brandon feels that Strings should be handed to it.
• our seperate visions battle it out Thunderdome-style. (I guess Hume-style if you want to get all philosophical 'n shizzat)
• fit parser into now unified vision.
• fit into next Interpreter
• rinse, lather, repeat.

Stacy and I had a lot of fun at Ev's party last night. I finally met jason in person and this other guy made me laugh so hard that I nearly (or mostly) cried.

We only stayed about 3.5 hours due to BART but this should be the last time that I ever have to worry about missing the train back to the East Bay again. Soon I'll be back in My City. She made out with Joey in my absence. Bitch.

I'm stuck in that usual 2am funk where I can't sleep but I know I need to. Stacy came over after work and we watched a '48 Hours' episode regarding sleep disorders. I think I've gotten a lot better as old age (I'm nearly 24. hoo-ah) has set in but for 2 long years I lived, or existed I should say, on 4 hours a night. I think stress was a very large factor, I was much younger than the median age of the little community college I could afford to attend and saw no real way of ever paying for a "real" degree at a "real" University. I was too young to realize that sheepskin really didn't matter very much. In fact, I really didn't understand that until I got a call from Tom Cannon and an offer to move to San Francisco based purely on my mastery of an idiotic scripting language.

Anyway, so while I do sleep 6-7 hours a night, I feel I need more and Stacy complains that I wake up frequently. She emphatically suggested that I see one of the Sleep Therapy centers that Dan Rather is yammering about. My dad still laughs at the time when I was caught eating Cocoa Pebbles at 4am. I laugh because I don't remember it at all.

Boy, it's nostalgia night here in my little blog. I was waxing poetic earlier about my first experiences with Unix, which happen to coincide when I first met punk rock, and first saw somebody get tattooed up close and personal. James and I took a little trip up to a stinking city called Pasco in south-east Washington state. We were up there to meet with PuNKeR, somebody about 8 years older than me, who had run a local BBS and appreciated VMS security. He had just hitchhiked back to Pasco from Phoenix, hobo-style, and invited us up to shoot the shit and bring some crap for trade. Punker was at his girlfriend's place getting tattooed on the couch by one of the local kids. A 9" skull with a mohawk, I guess to match Wattie from the Exploited's tattoo. I watched for a couple of hours while this kid used a gnarly looking tool straight out of The Dentist on P's back which was covered in a nasty mixture of ink and blood. The tattoo artist noticed I looked a little pale and said "you next, kid?" "oh, fuck no!" elicited some laughs. Punker later told James "Just wait, that kid'll have a mohawk and more ink than me in a few years". (He was actually right even though I scoffed at the idea then.) After that day's inkwork ended, I traded P the bag phone for a few books on "UNIX"; one on arcane shell script wizardry couched in D&D phrases and stamped with "Public Library of Phoenix" on the inside cover, the other a reference guide to the "Top 50 UNIX(tm) Commands", and a few floppy disks full of stuff I couldn't find at the time since there was no ISP anywhere on my side of the state yet.

Books in hand and curiousity piequed, I set out in search of a real live Unix machine so I could try out all this crap that had only run on the idealized Unix environment living between my ears. Luckily Ray had just acquired a Unix mini[1] from his dad's CPA firm which had recently migrated to an early version of Novell. Nobody wanted to house it so it eventually found it's way into my bedroom. It wasn't a physically large machine, certainly smaller than dnm's LispM but if you wanted to use it effectively, you needed to keep several tty terminals connected. (Luckily we had been able to score some ultrahip vt320's). I could only fit three on my desk at once and kept the reference manuals it came with on my knee while I did stupid things like cat binaries to the screen, not know how to reset my terminal (physically resetting the terminal's power wouldn't do the trick, obviously), reboot the machine, watch as the boot partition told me to go fuck myself (I can't blame it), and then reinstall the entire system from tape. I loved it.

So what's the connection between unix and tattoos? Arcane. Painful. Wonderful.

I suppose you're wondering what happened to that old monster? I used it until the SCSI bus gave up the ghost and then threw it in a trash compactor the day before I moved to SF. The system tapes had all broken years earlier but I never needed to reinstall until then. I still own my main vt320 terminal and the DEC manuals for it are on my bookshelf.

Saturday night Ev and Jish are throwing a big bash at the EvPalace. I'm such a geek, I'm wondering if Dave Winer's going to show because I want to hassle him about RSS 1.0 vs 0.93.

There's this thing I need to find. It's called a "life"...

[1]: Hardware specs for those that care: 68020, 12M, 340M, 16 RS-232C's, and some big-ass tape drive i've never stumbled across again. It ran SysVR4 and came from a company called Convergent.

I added some RSS wonderfulness just for tav. enjoy.

Oh yeah, I left a logical trapdoor in my argument. :-)

Find it and I'll owe you dinner.

I feel the need to take Wittgenstein to task.

Wittgenstein, according to this book I'm reading [1], is quoted as saying "Suppose you had all done arithmetic within this room only and suppose you go into the next room. Mightn't this make 2+2=5 legitimate? If you came back from the next room with 20x20=600, and I said that was wrong, couldn't you say 'But it wasn't wrong in the other room.'"

Yes, you could say that. You wouldn't be correct, though.

2, 5, 20, 600 are all natural numbers. These numbers arise from the human brain's natural ability to atomicize objects into countable entities. Let's say you have a bunch of stones in your hand. When you look at your group of stones, you would unconciously atomicize that group into either the number of stones in your hand, or into groupings based on their shape, size, color, etc.

This isn't merely because you were taught to count as a child but because counting is innate. The fact that the theory of natural numbers and basic arithmetic developed in multiple cultures entirely independant of each other is evidence of the human instinct to atomicize. I have a hard time imagining any human (of average intelligence) who couldn't logically deduce that 2 stones added to 2 stones isn't the same as a group of 5 stones but is the same as a grouping of 4 stones.

Since counting is such an innate ability, I wonder if Wittgenstein's theory is an example of the P-and-not-P paradox.

Wittgenstein might also be playing games with the names of numbers (i.e. xxxxx isn't 5 x's but some other "number"), although that seems far beneath his abilities. Although he was into linguistic puzzles I'm not sure I would classify that as such.

Like usual, email on the subject is welcome. Or even an argument in your own blog! Blog Battles are fun.

[1]: Wittgenstein's Poker ISBN:0-06-6211244-8, pg 14. Whether Wittgenstein actually said this could possibly be in dispute but it's poor philosophy regardless.

hooray! I got the apartment I looked at on Friday after con.

I left out another notable person: Darius Bacon! Sorry!

I left out a few notable people who I got hang out with at codecon: AccordionGuy and Cory Doctorow.

Today I picked up Wittgenstein's poker and so far have mixed feelings on it as somebody who has some exposure to both Wittgenstein and Popper (I had read Wittgenstein's Blue Book long before I read the Smalltalk Blue Book).

Yes, I was caught reading Sophie's World a while back. I have no shame.

That was really cool of Ev to post about my househunt. You're my apartment-helpin' cuz. (that's an obscure Pavement reference)

The apartment hunting is looking up, I met with an actual landlord after codecon friday and he seemed to really like me (and my sidekick, the ever-schmoozin' stacy). He seemed mostly concerned that I wasn't a flasher (fooled him, eh!). It was a nice place, near Golden Gate Park, hardwood floors, lots of window, great view of the bay and the top of golden gate bridge. Not to forget the rooftop access of the building next to my window, affording more of that aforementioned great view. A little far from grocery stores and places to eat but I think I'll manage.

So codecon has come and gone and damn, I had a good time.

I finally met many of the people who I've been conspiring with; zooko, bram, blanu, coderman, look, jillzilla, gabew, paulb and most of us engaged in some post-con booze olympics. At least I remember getting home and I definitely remember my hangover. I also remember dancing in front of National Lampoon's Vaction being projected onto the wall. The one-man-dance as I like to call it. It's my own invention, somewhere between the "robot" and the "stumbling idiot".

Hopefully many of the crew will show up at defcon or some other similar event between now and codecon 2.

On Friday, the source code to the Freedom server was released to the public under an RSAREF license and announced at codecon. It was encrypted with 3des (IOW, use gpg or pgp to decrypt) and the password is fairly easy to remember if you know your crypto history. For those few people who actually read this deep into my weblog and are interested it's "squeamish ossifrage" (no quotes but keep the space). If you're wondering where squeamish ossifrage came from, It's the answer to the first RSA challenge. In 1977, a 129-bit RSA (usually just called RSA-129) encrypted piece of text was supplied for the public to crack. In 1994, the answer was supplied and those two words were the most memorable parts of it.

Did I mention that I had a great time at codecon? Besides the one-man-dance during the alcoholics pseudonymous meeting, the thing I remember most is the great conversation. Not that it surprised me at all.

The hunt for an apartment isn't going so well. I'm really sick of dealing with Property Management Groups. If a landlord doesn't want to pay his due diligence to meet and shake my hand then there's probably a pretty good reason 1/5 of the apartments in that building are vacant.

Landlords only from now on.

You'd think it'd be easy to find an apartment with a good job and such high vacancy rates. This seems very strange to me.

codecon is tomorrow. Zooko needs another laptop to demo on, there's nil chance of Crypto++ working under OS X on this powerbook within 12 hours. Luckily Darius' idel project builds cleanly under OS X, zero sweat.

I'm really stoked to see that Rael Dornfest added FA:OSX's RSS feed (thanks cory!) to Meerkat.

hot dog!

Wow, I had no idea the world of acting was so full of nastiness. Damn that Mike Farrell, I never trusted his moustache.

Today has been full of interesting, heated debate regarding the uid-lamportwritingproofs issue. I don't think we're going to change each other's minds but I do think it brings to light many issues that are often unspoken. Maybe I'll be allowed to post the full discussion.

Also, I spent the afternoon with my cousin Chris and his wonderful children, one 4 years and one 4 months. Fun!

Darius informed me that David Freidman had a question similar to mine; what if anarcho-capitalism had occured before the evolution of the nation-state? I can't seem to find it anywhere on the net, though.

Some people were concerned with my dental hygeine story; I explained that I really had flossed extremely hard. Yeah, I probably should see a dentist one of these days but it's been a while since I've had health insurance.

Dear Lord, this baby's vodka collection exceeds my own. I guess the kids in 4th grade gym class were right, I should be wearing a diaper. kids are funny.

As I was finishing off a big plate of tasti-veg*, I got some brocolli caught in my teeth and all the tonguing in the world wouldn't get it out. So I flossed, spat it out, and noticed that it was considerably redder than when I had feebly tried to consume it. Brocolli piece: 1, Bleedin' Gums Jenson: 0.

Speaking of which, the Simpsons gave me some good ha-ha's tonight.

I spent a great many hours staring at the momoko cvs tree this weekend while rewriting it's command parser. I'm still trying to grok the entire code structure, which isn't small by any means, after which I'll have some proposals for changing interface structure to make extending the parser (more importantly, it's targets) much easier.

I watched Alias again tonight. It's the first hour of TV I've watched in many many weeks and I'm not missing it at all. Stacy and I are amazed at how much ass she can kick for being barely 100 lbs.

Damn my mouth hurts.

I've been feeling that I've been riding bareback for too long (jeez, nearly two months now) and I could stand some more structure in my studies. I might as well enumerate what I feel my concurrent paths of study should be for the next 6 months:

• Computer Science
  • Finish my lambda calculus studies
  • finish Interpretation of Object-Oriented Languages
  • work through A Theory of Objects
  • work through Basic Simple Type Theory
  • wait for DrScheme for OS X to be completed
  • work through the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and it's Instructors Guide.
• Programming (more concrete than CS)
  • learn more from Darius' idel project
  • finish Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice
  • read Virtual Machine Design and Implementation in C/C++.
  • start mapping out my own basic E virtual machine.
  • I'm waiting for the Promise of E's SturdyRef persistence to be finished after which I can continue work on Whisper and will feel sufficiently motivated to finish writing my E texts.
• Math
  • finish up Concrete Mathematics.
  • finish up Number theory text, being sure to stare at complexity theory more thoroughly.
  • work through examples in calculus textbook, especially involving Anti-Derivatives (Integration).

Enough goals for you? Yeah.. what am I thinking? I figure I'll need to re-read the second and third sections of A Theory of Objects after I do write a basic E compiler and virtual machine. These formalisms will require body for me to feel happy with my understanding.

6 months? This could easily stretch into 2 years.

* Tasti-veg is the term I came up with for prewashed vegetables in a bag.

Lately I've been pondering how the world would be different if a global information sharing network had evolved before the concept of a nation-state evolved. If everyone had a shared eidantic memory but still retained the total awareness of self. I don't think this is entirely unplausible, unless you believe that electricity could only have been invented in a society in the Industrial era or higher.

So far, I've cornered a few of my friends and we've battled the idea out, Karl Popper-style but I need to wiki-ize it. Some deep insights arose.

I drug stacy apartment hunting with me. I'm hoping for this place on 36th ave and Geary, with a nice view of Golden Gate Park and a view of the ocean from the bus stop. Not to mention walk-in closets and almost no street noise for being so close to Geary. What a difference three houses in between makes.

I also had a typically Seinfeld-esque moment when we were touring a brand-new building. I'll only say this; Just because the apartment door is locked doesn't mean that the touring group won't find a way in while you're "testing" the john. I always seem to find myself in the middle of these "capers" It didn't help that the bathroom door lock was broken. "Oh, what's this room?" oh my!

I got the hell out of there.

Also, I've been studying lambda calculus pretty heavily, finding out fun stuff like (x.not(xx))(x.not(xx)) is the paradox of the untyped lambda calculus. I wonder why it took me so long to find this out.. I guess I never tried _not_ in my notebook.

Just so people don't think i'm a total nut: there were 30 empty apartments, all unlocked for touring, in that building. Yet they picked mine...

fyi, λ doesn't seem to work on all browsers for whatever lame reason.

Referral fun factoid: Somebody found my blog by searching for "holy fucking jesus i can't find jack shit". This is relieving 'cuz holy fucking jesus, I can't find jack shit either.

I've been reading this graduate textbook in Number Theory and Cryptography, and it's surprisingly readable. Cannon wants to start a reading list for some of these crypto books to help build some more levels for his homegrown crypto challenge, this is a good one to throw in the mix. I should start populating my wiki with my notes from re-reading my crypto books. It might be useful to other people and perhaps will answer some of my questions. Oh yes, Handbook of Applied Crypto is now downloadable in PDF format.

Sometimes my blog is more stream-of-conciousness than I'm sure some of you appreciate. mmmm.. pie.

By the way, the thought of using a big huge string in order to make sure that you're the only hit on a search engine when you search for that string is ridiculous and that namespace deserves to be polluted. [Steve's Note: I self-censored the "uid-lamportwritingproofs minus the -" string. My critic was right, it's not my place to pee in the pool just beacuse I don't agree wth it. The criticism still stands. wrong. bad. eviluidstring.]

fyi, if you're looking for the papers, here you are

This whole uid-lamportwritingproofs issue has made me rather irritated. Lamport's a smart guy but this is really moving boundaries in a way that is not only unnecessary but excessive. Google will still find his paper if one searches for "Lamport Writing Proofs". I refuse to acknowledge it any other way. Trying to control information flow is like trying to herd cats. C'mon Lamport, give into the emergent properties of the web, don't be a Hypertext Caveman.

Hmm, the anti-bloggies have finally arrived. Now here's an award show I can get behind. I probably am most likely to eat a cheese sandwich, so please feel free to vote for me if so inclined. Also, vote for AccordionGuy, he definitely has the best hetero blog. Not to sow any confusion, my blog is hetero as well (yet still gay-positive somehow) but he has pictures of hot chicks and Knight Rider. err.. hot chicks != gary coleman.

Joey suggests that people vote him Blog of the Millenium. I obliged. Now go, my army of salad-powered slaves and conquer the anti-bloggies.

this collusion brought to you jointly by steve and joey

Damn. I don't like the New New Economy. i've dubbed it "Dude, Where's My Job?". While I happen to still be in gainful employ, my housemates are not and they exercised their rights to sell. I have 30 days to find a new place to live. Or chain myself to the front door. Chains chafe my delicate skin so I'll just move.

I'm interested in moving to the richmond district or the inner sunset. Someplace close to my [affectionate pet nickname], close to public transit to {work|friends}, and close proximity to wonderful asian-cooked (non-sea) beasties. And coconut milk soup.

Hoo Ah, San Francisco! Prepare for my karate blow to the privates!

The Richmond Sluts are on Duane Peter's label and are from the Richmod district. The Richmond?! Is this some kind of joke? Regardless, I'll see if I can find some of their mp3's online and if I like what I hear I'll purchase.

So the new Austin Power's movie is untitled. Fucking MGM. Parody is expressley considered "Fair Use", jerks.

I'm listening to Pink Floyd and trying to crack an unknown crypto scheme based on it's behaviour plus ciphertext and known randomly generated key.

Update:got it. Once I figured out the scheme, forehead slapping occurred.