Oh, hey, it's snowing.

One of the cooler things about living in Belgium is that it is basically impossible to live in a reasonably-sized town and not be within a couple of blocks of a bakery. (We're a block from one, and within four blocks of two more.) This has had a really positive impact on my life in terms of breakfast. Every morning, post-caffeine, I hike over to our nearest bakery, which is also a candy shop, and pick up a bunch of fresh pastries to start enochsmiles' and my day.

This morning, the baker -- a short, apple-cheeked woman who in thirty years will look like every cartoon Mrs. Claus you've ever seen -- was laying out a tray of Santa-shaped chocolates as I walked in. "Oh, Sinterklaas?" I asked. "Nee," said the baker. "Kerstman!" This threw me, since I knew that the English "Santa Claus" is a borrowing of the Dutch "Sinterklaas", which of course is a contraction of "Sint-Nicolaas" (St. Nicholas). Come to find out, after Anglophone culture borrowed Sinterklaas and morphed him into Santa Claus, Dutch (and, by extension, Belgian) culture borrowed him right back as Kerstman ("Christmas man"). So now we have two St. Nicholases (Nicholi?), one who brings presents on December 5th, one who brings presents on December 25th.

libevent is the second best thing that has ever happened to me. If you are doing asynchronous programming of any kind whatsoever¹, you should be using libevent or an appropriate interface to it.

(The first best thing that's ever happened to me? Diverting a long walk through Iowa City with ylla into the gym so that she could use the bathroom there. While waiting for her to finish up, I randomly found a newspaper and flipped through the classifieds, which led to me finding an ad for an internship at Integrated DNA Technologies, which I applied for and got; that led to me presenting at CodeCon, which led to my meeting enochsmiles and a bunch of other awesome people who have improved my life considerably, including, appropriately enough, one of the authors of libevent.)

¹Ok, fine, maybe not AJAX.

I did not know that there were so many alternative lyrics to Frère Jacques out there, including ones in many different languages.

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, recommended by shabda and available free on the web from the University of Virginia.

On that note, what's a good serious economic analysis of post-scarcity systems? This reading list is rather long, but also dates to 2000, and a lot has happened between then and now. Soddy's Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt looks like required reading, especially these days, but only has bearing on what I'm looking for. Also, emphasis on serious; goshwow predictions and wouldn't-it-be-neat-if have their place, but Vernor Vinge, Cory Doctorow and Murray Bookchin are all too handwavy.

(SCENE: the couch. SASHA, the cat, is asleep across my forearms while I code.)

(maradydd frees an arm from under the cat and pops open a can of Red Bull.)
RED BULL CAN: *crrrack*
SASHA: Mrap!
(SASHA wakes up and starts nosing at the can, with intent.)
maradydd: Sasha. You're a cat. Cats don't need caffeine.
SASHA, attempting to bite the bottom of the can: Ack mrack.
maradydd: No. You don't get Red Bull because you don't have opposable thumbs to open the can with.
SASHA: Hrrrf. *gives up and lies down again*

An enterprising open-source hacker who goes by the moniker Famulus, using polywell plasma confinement, has achieved desktop-scale nuclear fusion.

There are some really lovely photos of plasmas and lab equipment on the blog, and all the STL files for the polywell itself, plus Ruby source code for running the thing, are available on github. Go to.

ETA: That's fusion full stop, not "a sustained fusion reaction producing more energy than is consumed by plasma containment". I'd wager my left temporal lobe that he's running at a net energy loss. However, polywell confinement is one of the more promising technologies out there for net-gain fusion; interested parties should check out the work that EMC2 Fusion is doing.

In my email this morning:

Dear Meredith Patterson,

I am delighted to inform you that your submission
127 - PKI Layer Cake: New Collision Attacks Against the Global X.509 Infrastructure
has been accepted to appear as a FULL PAPER at FC 2010.

Out of 130 submissions we accepted 19 as FULL papers (acceptance
rate: 14.6%) and 15 as SHORT papers (acceptance rate: 26.1%).

It's shepherded, meaning that we get to do some back-and-forth with an editor to beat some of the rougher bits of the paper into shape, but that is totally okay. I'll post publicly with a link to the tech-report version once the camera-ready is done, which will be no later than 15 December.

Mad props to my coauthors, Dan Kaminsky and Len Sassaman. Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to go dig that bottle of champagne out of the back of the fridge -- this is the most competitive conference I've ever been accepted to.

By way of ernunnos, the dollar is now the currency of choice for carry trades.

Poll #1482906
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

Do you know why this matters?

Do you care?

(SCENE: our bedroom, this morning)
maradydd: Sweetie, it's time to get up. You've got a doctor's appointment this morning.
enochsmiles, not opening eyes: Can't the doctor come here?
maradydd, suppressing giggles: No, sweetie, he doesn't do that. It's time to drink a Red Bull.
enochsmiles, still not opening eyes: Can't the doctor drink a Red Bull?
maradydd: No, baby. C'mon, open your eyes...
enochsmiles: Will we play chess?
maradydd: While wearing cheese pants?
enochsmiles: You have cheese?
(at this point I picked him up bodily, and he woke up)

Those screams of rage you heard over the last few hours were me relocating several hundred inline-declared variables to the top of their scope in order to convince a library to compile under Visual Studio. And that was after I spent half an hour finding out that "error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before 'type'" means that a variable was declared inline. Thanks a whole fucking lot, Microsoft.

Some day I will find the person whose decision it was to make VS2005's C compiler enforce the C89 standard and refuse C99. When he's discovered lying in a dark alley with a dozen copies of Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language forced down his throat, well, y'all will know who to send the cops after.

Sometimes when I'm hungry but don't feel like making anything complicated, I'll whip up a batch of fry bread. It's one of the simplest things I know how to make, consisting of a 16:2:1 ratio by volume of flour, shortening (or other non-dairy hard fat, e.g. lard or coconut oil) and baking powder, with a dash of salt for every tablespoon of baking powder. (Blend dry ingredients well, work in shortening, knead in some water until dough sticks together, knead till smooth, make into fist-sized balls, squish balls flat, fry in oil till golden brown on both sides, drain and serve.) As it's such a simple recipe, it lends itself well to being a carrier for other flavours; you can add shredded cheese, herbs, crumbled bacon, or pretty much anything savoury and not too wet to the dough, or you can serve the plain breads with jam, molasses, maple syrup, chocolate sauce, or just about anything sweet. Also they keep for days and you can warm them in the oven or, if you've just woken up and are too bleary to work the oven, on the radiator.

Today's experiment was a simple one: while frying, add a couple of dashes of Worcestershire sauce to the hot oil. I was frying in a blend of olive and coconut oil (ran out of olive oil -- I know, I know, inexcusable), and did not expect the Worcestershire sauce to cause the oil to foam, which was a little startling. However, it did not foam over, and I am pleased to report that the sauce adds a very pleasant tamarind-and-anchovy tang to the crust which goes very well with the ginger tea I am drinking right now. Next time I find a ridiculously sharp Cheddar, I'm going to try grating it extremely fine, adding it to the dough with some rosemary, and doing the Worcestershire trick again.

The obvious text-mining homework I posted about yesterday is in fact an assignment for the Pattern Processing course at the University of Sheffield, as confirmed by one of the professors for the course. Somebody's going down.

Because the rent-a-coder websites become clogged with bullshit requests like this and this.

Protip: if you're so incompetent that you have to outsource your homework assignments to an Indian codemonkey for $50 a pop, maybe CS is not the major for you.

Well, I know what I want for Christmas now.

It would be so cool if McMaster.com had a wishlist feature like Amazon's. Absent that, however, I really ought to check out wishlistr and pop all the parts into that.

Google Analytics does some pretty cool stuff, but has one major drawback for mobile web application developers: it's Javascript-based, meaning that hits from mobile devices that don't speak Javascript silently go untracked. Recently, the Analytics team released some code that does server-side tracking; the linked ZIP file contains source and examples in ASP, JSP, PHP and Perl. Why not Python, you might wonder? I wondered too, particularly since an AppEngine project I'm working on is at least somewhat intended for phones (hey, you never know when you might be away from your desk but really want to know if a certain BioBrick exists), so I did a little poking around to see if it was possible to instrument an AppEngine application using server-side Mobile Analytics.

( The short answer is no. )

Oh, don't get me wrong, I laughed, but it's horrible:

I once saw a C++ filesystem driver that overrode the / operator to mean "append". So you could do something like:

directory = "/tmp/subdir1";
filename  = "myfile.txt";
full_path = directory/filename;

and end up with full_path being "/tmp/subdir1/myfile.txt"

And no, Stroustrup's not going to hell for designing a language that lets people do this. The sheer fact that people can do this means he's already there. And so are we.

Man, I feel tired just looking at him.

Via mellowtigger, up before Congress this session we have H.R. 3501, the Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years Act. It's super short -- you can read it in the time it takes me to explain it -- but I'll summarize anyway: if this bill passes, if you itemise deductions you can deduct pet care expenses up to $3500. This means vet bills, food, litter, a cage, &c for your cat, dog, bird, lizard, fish, hedgehog, whatever -- it just has to be domesticated and alive. Buying the pet does not count as a qualified expense, research animals and animals "utilized in conjunction with a trade or business" (uh, a mascot?) don't count, and you can't double-dip if you've claimed deductions for the animal in the last three years, but that's it.

It's a tax cut that helps individuals first and foremost. It encourages people to take good care of animals. I like these things. If you do too, write your representative and ask him or her to support this bill.