I owe the Berlin trip a proper writeup, but some highlights: talk went extremely well, saw many old friends and acquaintances, came up with yet another paper we need to write with Dan Kaminsky, had some interesting discussions about a computer science curriculum that emphasizes security from the get-go, narrowed down the scope of some tools I need ( Read more... )

Yes, I am ignoring you. September and October are when the early-spring conferences have their deadlines, and I have somewhere between four and six papers to finish between now and Halloween. You do the math. (The research is done, I just have to get it out of my head and my notes and into LaTeX in a form that other people can recognise.) Yes, you ( Read more... )

I just wrote an attribute grammar for the general object-encoding rules. (Not all of BER; that's next. Just section 8.1 of X.690.) Unless sections 8.2 through 8.22 throw me a curveball, which it doesn't look like they will, QED. It's fully left-recursive and uses only synthesized attributes, for all your efficient parsing needs. Boo yahIf anyone ( Read more... )

Since my last update, I've picked up the necessary hardware to build a SpiffChorder, Mikkel Holm Olsen's homebrew AVR-based chording keyboard. The circuit is now mostly breadboarded, and one of my winter gloves has been converted into a prototype that looks scarily like something out of Serial Experiments Lain. ph34r my wire tentacles ( Read more... )

I'm building a C++ project for an unusual platform, and am having some confusing problems with my libstdc++. For some reason which I cannot fathom, I am getting an absurd number of "undefined reference to..." linker errors for symbols which are indeed undefined in libstdc++.a, but which are definitely defined in libc.a and libgcc.a. Yes, I am ( Read more... )

I spent my Thanksgiving weekend in a cabin in the woods near Lake Tahoe. Four days of eating well, lazing about in a hot tub, hiking, and sleeping a lot has me feeling much more human than I did last week. However, I had functionally no internet the entire time, and while I am sort of caught up on LJ, I am not particularly inclined to go back ( Read more... )

Today I went to TAP Plastics in San Francisco and they cut me the plastic pieces I will need to build my very own gel electrophoresis chamber. (Service while you wait, by the way. It took maybe ten minutes, during which time the friend who drove me and I wandered around the store looking at all the cool stuff they had on display and chilling in ( Read more... )

Man, it's amazing the kind of stuff you can get done when you wake up at 9am ( Read more... )

The die is cast: my qualifying exam presentation is scheduled for 9 May, so it'll be the second to last major thing I do before I'm out of here for the summer ( Read more... )

My advisor would have me shot if he knew I took out a couple of hours to do this, but I'm vaguely proud of it anyway.