Firstly, the cutest car license plate of the month:

Secondly, our office mascot, our lord and saviour who died for our sins (from all those years of using Windows):

So instead of repeating this to 3 people, I’ll post here.

I started my first real job. I’m counting this as my first because this is the first job that I enjoy. Enjoy is really an understatement: Aside for the long commute and below average pay, it would be the perfect job. I’m working with one other person on this project, she’s very competent and we get along well. We’re using cutting edge frameworks so learning this is very exciting. The environment is relaxed and I get to tinker with my linux system all I want (as well as others’ linux systems, since I was declared the resident system administrator).

And then there’s the free coffee. It’s somewhat puzzling though: We were told it was free, but there’s a sign that says that “coffee is 25c”. I’d love to pay the 25c, but there’s no where to pay. No bin, no box, no jar. Made me think back to the bagel man from Freakonomics (reference for hyfen).

It’s working out very well so far, I’m having a great time. Bit tired though so I’m going to go make dinner. Byes.

I almost got a job at Google. Sort of.

In the middle of yesterday’s afternoon, I was contacted by a Technical Sourcer from Google who found my resume, and asked me if I’m interested in trying out for a position. My first thought was “who has the incentive to play such a prank on me?” But after googling this thing, it turned out that it was legit. Technical Sourcers are glorified recruiters. They’re hired for the sole purpose of hiring people, with responsibilities including researching candidates, cold-calling, performing interviews, testing the skills of candidates and arranging employment.

The sourcer..er..Err. Sourcer. The sourcer provided me with three positions which precisely matched my qualifications from the resume – I was impressed. I chose two: Software Engineer and Unix Systems/Applications Administrator. At this stage, we begun making arrangements for a phone interview when I asked if she realized that I was still a student with one year left before graduation. She did not. It she had assumed that my resume was out of date and I already graduated, so it all came to a halt. I was suggested to apply for a position when I’m closer to graduating, I apologized for the confusion, she wished me luck, and we went our separate ways.

Tune in next year for Attempt to get a job at Google: Part 3.

I’m sorry but I just don’t know where else to post this. I stumbled upon this. They’re making a continuation series of Quantum Leap! My beloved Quantum Leap which introduced me into the wonderful world of Sci-Fi when I was 6 years old, settled in the lands of Israel, watching it dubbed in hebrew and captioned in arabic with terrible static. Oh wonderful memories.

Although this was announced back in February, the respective wikipedia node hints that it’s still an active project. First Dean Stockwell in Battlestar Galactica, now this. Hoorah.

μ_studying = Quantity of resistance occuring during any attempt to study.
Δ_exam = The time until the next exam.

μ_studying ∝ f(Δ_exam), f(t)→∞ for t≥48 hours.

The behaviour of f is still being studied for 0≤texam11(Δ_exam1), then the values for f₂(Δ_exam2) are increased by some constant.

As there are 10 types of people in the world, there are 3 types of blogs in the world:

1. Blogs that are never updated.
2. Creative blogs where the author writes for the sake of writing, to express an opinion or tell a story.
3. Daily logs where the author regularly iterates through the day’s events, often including inside jokes to make foreigners feel like tumours. (I have dubbed these blogs as “dlogs”.)

Number 3 is the culprit. It leaves nothing to the imagination and it’s wildly addicting, just like porn. Especially when the author is someone you aren’t close to but admire.

The difference is that when you see a really attractive woman, odds are you’re still going to find her attractive when her clothes disappear, probably even moreso. On the other hand, when you read someone’s dlog from start to finish, you realize that most of the respect and admiration you had stemmed from your ignorance. When you find out that the author is human too, it’s just… disappointing.

I wrote a short piece of fiction to exemplify what I said above, but it was a bit lewd, so I neglected posting it.

This blog for one is all three types, in an oscillating manner. Up until now, it was the first type for a while because I was submitting many resumes and attending interviews and god forbid they google me and find something silly written in my blog (like this post). Now that I’ve acquired a job for the summer, I can return to making an ass of myself.

I attended a lecture by Andy Tanenbaum last week, following is my summary and criticism of his ideas.

Andy talked about his baby OS called Minix. It’s Unix-based but it has a microkernel, instead of a monolithic kernel that Linux employs. So, the philosophy of the microkernel seems to be that the kernel should be as minimalistic as possible. Andy wants to reduce the codebase in kernel space to avoid bugs (less code = less bugs, surely a fallacy). So, instead of having things like drivers and modules in kernel space (where the code has virtually unlimited control over the system), it’ll be moved to user-space with some fancy messaging protocol to communicate with kernel-land and administrator-set access limitation per-module. So, if your videocard driver has a bug, it can’t crash the whole system because it doesn’t have that much power. At best, it can crash its own data in userland. This makes the system much more secure, but it also creates some overhead (Andy claims it’s insignficant, but it’s yet another fallacy), of about 6% to 14%, depending on the procedure. A lot of the overhead is constant-time, so it’s not so bad with more complicated procedures.

The neat thing about Minix is that it has a “resurrection server” which looks over all the modules and drivers and decides when to kill them (if they’re in an infinite loop or somesuch), or when to resurrect them (if they died). And you can do little shell scripts to tell it how to behave for each module. So if your ethernet driver chokes on a packet and dies, the resurrection server can resurrect it without the loss of a lot of bandwidth. Benchmark showed impressive results like a loss of only 30% of bandwidth if it dies every 1 second, and almost no bandwidth loss at 10 seconds. This is a great idea as a backup system (like for the Mars rover or somesuch), but at the same time, I think this would promote administrators and driver developers to be more lazy. Why make stable drivers when the resurrection server can just reload it if it dies, right? (I realize this is a fallacy as well, but a reality nonetheless.)

So, how small is this microkernel? Andy predicts that a fully functional version of the kernel will be ~7,000 lines of code (in comparison, there’s ~6 million lines of code in the linux kernel 2.60). It’s not that 5.99 million lines of code disappear, they’re simply moved over to userspace. I have a few problems with this.

1. Drivers: If it’s all in user-space, and access is limited by the administrator, how much more of a hassle will it be to install all of your drivers if you have to manually specify which system calls each driver is allowed to use? Wont this encourage administrators to just allow everything to all drivers (Windows syndrome)? I suppose some installation procedures could be written to handle this and “guess” the required system calls, but still unreliable. Hard to automate.
2. Diminishing the power of bugs: The easiest bugs to squash are the ones that are right up in your face every step of the way. The hardest are the ones that are unnoticeable and hard to find. Moving bugs to userland and automating recover (via resurrection server) makes bugs a lot less noticeable, a lot less likely to get fixed. Hiding bugs isn’t the solution to good code. Surely this is a good idea, if not a necessity, for mission-critical situations like the Mars rover (where I’m sure similar systems exist). But for average usage, this may prove to be counterproductive to development of good code.
3. Andy’s argument for application: He kept saying that the overhead created by this system is insignificant due to the virtually unlimited resources that desktops have today. As computer scientists, we would naturally reject that argument for the sake of optimizations, but let’s play along. Towards the end of the lecture, Andy listed the applications to be things like embedded devices, cellphones, minimalistic devices (third-world laptops), and mission-critical devices (Mars rover example, again). I completely agree with this list of applications (as stated in argument #2), but: These devices don’t have unlimited resources. They are very limited, and such overhead would definitely be something that needs to be considered. This is clearly a faulty argument

Argument holes aside, it’s a “good” system. It’s definitely something that needs to be considered for the mainstream, but with large grains of salt. Hats off to Andy Tanenbaum for being one of the most productive people I know of, as this is all one of his many hobbies while he teaches Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

(15:21:48) shazow: I’m running KDE on max visual effects, and it’s snappier than a trout during mating season.

The fruits of my exploration of the Internet from this passed week:

• Ratty’s Ghost – A well-written blog that came to my attention from this delicious slime mold post.
• Seen On Slash – You all know I spend unhealthy amounts of time on Slashdot – so do the people who post on this website. This is a repository of gems found in Slashdot thread comments.
• Seditious Industrial Press – A recent addition to my list of followed webcomics. Featuring a distinctive art style and atmosphere, it holds a lot of potential. (Found from an under-dugg digg.)
• Linuxcaffe – A cafe, in the heart of Toronto, open in full open source spirit. (Found from a well-dugg digg.)

The .plan for this week (the school-less reading week):

1. Throw monkey feces at Rogers until they submit to letting me use my ebay-bought cable modem.
2. Complete my Web-dev class’s assignment, spend some time giggling, then begin studying for midterms.
3. Change the spacing between list items on this site (hopefully will be complete by the time you read this).

I can’t top those sexy brain pictures from the previous post, so I’m not going to bother. Instead, I’m going to tell you about what shows I started watching lately:

• Scrubs; it’s cute, amusing, fun to watch. Almost like a kids’ version of House (actually, it’s nothing like it at all).
• The Office; why wont Jim just go up to Pam, push everything off of the receptionist partition-desk hybrid thing (do they have a name?), pull her up and consummate right there and then? I don’t know, but I’m going to have to keep watching until they do just that.

On the shazow.net forefront, I’ve GPL’d all the sourcecode but haven’t gotten around to putting it up. Why don’t I do it now? Don’t know, same reason I didn’t do it before. Does anyone really want it? No? Well then, no rush, is there?
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Wiki-style formatting, it’s delicious. Future revisions of shazow.net will definitely include such syntax.

I need somewhere to put these, so they’re going here:
- The table of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software in Linux; (a bit outdated) useful resource for linux-convertees.
- Linux Gamer Guide – Game List; for bored linux users (who are sick of running Windows games).

A Did You Know? moment, brought to you by IMDb:

Remember Bruce Almighty starring Jim Carrey and Jennifer Aniston? Turns out that there’s a sequal in the works, Evan Almighty, starring none other than Steve Carell from The Office (and once upon a time, The Daily Show).

“God somehow contacts Evan (Carell) to build an ark in preparation for a great flood.“

Sounds fun!