Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.

September 17, 2004

The Month of Firefox

Its time to take back the web. Many of us have had to fight with the dominance of IE for years now. We had to accept its security holes, outdated standard support, and terrible rendering. We had to live with Popups, Active X Viruses, and random crashes. Some of us did not know what alternative browser to use, or thought it too complicated. That time is over. Every day now, newssites are full of reviews of the excellent Firefox browser....
Posted on September 17, 2004 04:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 14, 2004

Linux Networking

I'm currently reading through the documentation for the Linux Networking Code, and having read the TCP/IP Illustrated Series is really helping me here. It is now more than a year since I read those 3 books, and I did not understand all the details of the code in Volume 2. But I remember enough to be able to get acquainted with the code quickly. Most importantly, I just found that Linux does something that was not a good design back...
Posted on September 14, 2004 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 13, 2004

Understanding Advanced x86

After focusing on the Linux Kernel for the last few days, I am now going back to the "basics" and looking at how exactly advanced x86 features work. Programmers who have read about the x86 ISA have probably heard about real and protected mode, and understand the basics of segmentation. Really understanding these features is, however, difficult which is why many of them are used as little as possible in modern code. Unfortunately, programmers must still understand these concepts when...
Posted on September 13, 2004 02:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 10, 2004

Useful and L33t ;-)

Last year I always admired Max for having a Emacs command reference card posted on his wall. For those of you who often surf the web looking for ever illusive gdb, Emacs, Html, or CSS commands, shortcuts or tags, I have a useful solution that will also show off how much you value your coding. Simply go to refcards.com and print out some of their Coding Reference Cards and put them up on your wall. You will never have to...
Posted on September 10, 2004 06:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 19, 2004

XML & Friends

After delving into FOAF two days ago I spent yesterday reading about on XML, RDF, and related technologies. I have always considered myself to have unsufficient knowledge of many XML based web technologies, and the emerging field of webservices, and want to change this. Before elaborating what I have been looking at, I should not how prevalent this is among CS Students (at least at Stanford), and large groups of academics as well. Much of what is happening in webservices...
Posted on August 19, 2004 04:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 19, 2004

Weird Threading Bugs & Assembly

Today was spent entirely on coding. I started out with fixing my distributed file reading implementation, which took a few hours. After that it got really difficult, with fixing weird threading bugs where context switching somehow ate up memory, which I was unable to track down, even though I worked on it for hours. There are large parts of the kernel I did not write, so I was unable to figure out what exactly was happening. I then switched to...
Posted on July 19, 2004 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 16, 2004

Stupid Compile Problems

I just spent 3 hours trying to figure out why I was getting compile errors in a file called /usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h that I had NEVER heard of before. It turned out it was caused by me accidentally putting the word www in the first line of a completely unrelated .h file, while trying to open a website (I selected the wrong window). All compile time errors are now fixed again, and I am working on getting networked file reading working, while...
Posted on July 16, 2004 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 12, 2004

Excellent Nachos News

It turns out that the Synchlist used by the Nachos PostOffice class to store messages uses a linked list, and therefore has no limit on the number of elements. This means that the current implementation reliably transmits packets and doesn't lose them once they are received. I can now implement arbitrary sized messages tomorrow, and probably get file reading working by the end of the day. This is immensely excellent news....
Posted on July 12, 2004 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 12, 2004

The First Step

This introduction to sockets is simply amazing. How else would I have learned that on systems with AFS (such as Stanford's Leland), Unix Domain Sockets have to be created in the /tmp directory, otherwise operations on them simply fail with Not a Socket but a File? While reading TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 3 might have helped, my copy of the book was not currently available, and reading through it would have taken too long anyway. Whoever ported Nachos to the Stanford...
Posted on July 12, 2004 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 10, 2004

Nachos PostOffice

I spent Thursday and this evening playing around with the provided Nachos Networking classes network.h/cc and post.h/cc, which are based on BSD Sockets. These did not come with the Stanford version of Nachos and took some time to adapt. My real reason for downloading these in the first place, instead of immediately writing my own replacement, is to see how these interact with Nachos threads. Monday I will start rewriting these network basics and will hopefully be able to get...
Posted on July 10, 2004 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 07, 2004

Starting to Code

Coding on my research project started today. My plan is to finish fixing bugs and adding the distributed paging, file operations, and process migration by the and of the month. By that time I should also be done with all outstanding reading (finishing up Solaris Kernel Internals, Distributed Systems, and Computer Networking). Today will mostly consist of getting reaquainted with the code, figuring out what versions of things I currently have, and cleaning things up a bit. SSHing into the...
Posted on July 7, 2004 04:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2004

Installing Fedora Core 2

Today I finally managed to install Fedora Core 2 Linux on my TravelMate 613 TXV. Make no mistake, the actual installation was extremely easy, and wonderful. After selecting a few options and choosing which packages I wanted to install, I had a running system. Even my Netgear PCMCIA wireless card worked out of the box, and Linux automatically connected to my home wireless base station. Fedora Core 2 (because of changes in the 2.6 kernel) does of course have problems...
Posted on June 24, 2004 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2004

P2P at Stanford

Apparently there is a lot of P2P research going on at Stanford, which is highly interesting. P2P is an issue which is highly important to me, but that I know far too little about (especially discovery and security). Professor Garcia-Molina and his PhD students Neil Daswani and Beverly Yang are doing a lot of research on this issue, and I will keep up with their work in the future. It turns out there is even a website about people at...
Posted on May 27, 2004 01:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 26, 2004

Trading Latency for Bandwidth

Walking back from ISIS yesterday I realized the importance of Mazières LBFS paper to my research. The LBFS associates hashes with file chunks, and before a client requests a chunk over the network, it asks the server for the hash of that chunk. If the client realizes it already has this sector (since many files share chunks), it is done and has saved bandwidth, otherwise it requests the sector, thereby taking twice as much roundtrip time. By selectively using this...
Posted on May 26, 2004 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 08, 2004

Receive Livelock

Travis got a new CPU last week and just sent me a large file over AIM. This almost sent my computer into Receive LiveLock. Receive Livelock means that user programs are not making any progress, and packets are being dropped due to the large number of interrupts when the computer is receiving large network loads. More about this can be found in the original paper Eliminating Receive Livelock in an Interrupt-Driven Kernel by Mogul and Ramakrishnan. Though my computer was...
Posted on May 8, 2004 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 07, 2004

This Conference is Great

I was just reading the reference list for one of the papers presented here, and the name P. Dinda sounded familiar. It turns out, that he is currently sitting behind me. Carl Waldspurger (see my post on ESX Server), who won 2 out of 5 of the best paper awards at OSDI is sitting in front of me. Miguel de Icaza is on stage, preparing for his keynoe. This is amazing....
Posted on May 7, 2004 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 06, 2004

Analyzing Java Apps with Hardware Monitors

This very much reminds me of what Professor Rosenblum is doing with Operating Systems in his summer CURIS research....Actually, this is different than what the title makes it sound like. They use Hardware counters in order to track their performance, and then use a program to analyze this information. Hm, definitely not CS 240 material....
Posted on May 6, 2004 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 06, 2004

The First Keynote

Professor Rosenblum is giving his keynote right now. Miguel de Icaza registered at the same time as I did (as the last person). Right now I am still feeling slightly lost, but things should improve soon. Update: The keynote is quite interesting, mostly material I already know from CS 140 and the recent reading I have been doing, but I am just fascinated by how exactly conferences work, and how people interact. And I really need a new battery....
Posted on May 6, 2004 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 05, 2004

More on VM'04

I told Dawson Engler that I could not attend class on Friday because of VM'04. Unfortunately I phrased it rather poorly: "We can miss up to 2 classes without being downgraded, right?" instead of "Is it OK if I miss class because I am going to a USENIX conference." Once I clarified that, everything was OK, and Prof. Engler said that if I see any interesting papers, we might read them for class, which is absolutely amazing. I am now...
Posted on May 5, 2004 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 05, 2004

Going to VM'04

Yesterday I got confirmation that my grant request was approved, and that I can proceed with my project as planned and attend the VM'04 conference. Due to the amount of work, and other meetings I have today, I've decided that it is probably better not to go to today's welcome session, and finish everything and get up early tomorrow, in order to account for the fact that I will not have been to the San Jose Hyatt. Though I am...
Posted on May 5, 2004 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 04, 2004

The Original Nachos Paper

While browsing through the best papers from all USENIX conferences starting 1990, I found the original Nachos paper. It turns out that it won best conference paper at the USENIX Winter 1993 Conference. There is very little in the paper that I have not read about before, but it was nice to see some of the ideas that went into the exact makeup of Nachos. I can also see the reasons for the decisions the Stanford professors made in giving...
Posted on May 4, 2004 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 02, 2004

More About BlogTalk 2.0

I just heard that Loic Le Mur, a European Social Entrepreneur, who's weblog I've been reading for quite a while now, is also attending BlogTalk 2.0. Though it seems like David Weinberger is not attending this year, there is still going to be a large group of very interesting people, and I am looking forward to the conference a lot. It is good to see that social innovation is starting to affect Europe, and that Austria is a part of...
Posted on May 2, 2004 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 27, 2004

Label Your Module License

The current controversy about people mislabeling their kernel modules by declaring them with MODULE_LICENSE("GPL\0"); has angered a lot of developers (Kerneltrap, Slashdot). I absolutely agree that this is a despicable practice. However, for somebody learning about kernel module programming, finding out about this macro was quite useful, since I don't have to live with "Your kernel is now tainted" error messages any more. This story also led me to the Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide, which should make for excellent...
Posted on April 27, 2004 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2004

When to Reclaim Resources

I have been busily studying for my CS 240 midterm, and realized that a passage in the paper Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server by Carl Waldspurger has an excellent scheme for when to reclaim resources that is well suited to my project. This scheme, presented in section 6.3 dynamically reclaims memory depending on how much is left, using different measures, depending on how much memory is available in the entire system. Most Operating Systems on the other hand...
Posted on April 25, 2004 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 20, 2004

The Final Research Project

I am finally done planning my research project, now simply titled "Distributed Operating Systems". The programming project will remain the exact same. I will design and implement: automatic process migration paging over the network (including memory mapped files) distributed file operations (files are addressed as :) some form of IPC, without which real evaluation would be impossible many different schemes of speeding up these actions algorithms on how to route to process to maximize performance This will take quite a...
Posted on April 20, 2004 12:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 18, 2004

Things are Falling into Place

I can't even begin to explain how excited I am. All parts of my research project are finally coming together. This is going to be great, if it works out. More very soon....
Posted on April 18, 2004 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 05, 2004

CS 240 Reading

I have spent most of the afternoon reading papers from past offerings of CS 240. These include some of the most important and interesting Operating Systems papers published in the last few years and are a must read for anyone interested in Systems Programming and Design. I for one am profoundly inspired by many of these papers. Together with today's announcement that the Linux iPod port is making progress, this makes for a day of much thinking about Computer Science....
Posted on April 5, 2004 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 01, 2004

I missed Knuth

Donald Knuth gave a talk today and I forgot about it and missed it. I was thinking about it before lunch but forgot to actually go. The foolishness... At least I know that he will give more talks in the future, but I am quite disappointed that I forgot. I will definitely remember the next time....
Posted on April 1, 2004 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2004

What would SCO do?

I am currently reading Open Sources and found the following passage in the first chapter: The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) has gone from a leading Unix vendor to an afterthought in the span of a couple of years. SCO, the company, will probably find a way to survive, but will its flagship product, SCO Unix, be another casualty of Open Source? We now of course know what happened to SCO and how they are suing everyone in order to save...
Posted on March 31, 2004 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2004

Narrow Focus in Research Projects

I have been thinking about my project quite a bit more while studying for CS 140 and have worked out a lot of details. With something like this there is always the urge to include more and more things. That is an urge that is important to resist, as a project grows in scope it becomes exponentially harder to complete it. For something that is meant to be summer research it is best to write everything in a modular way...
Posted on March 16, 2004 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2004

Distributed Shared Memory

I think I will spend some time (either next quarter, or over summer), extending the VM assignment of Nachos. In addition to paging to Disk, I want it to be able to page to a different physical Machine on the Network. Though this is generally not too useful (less efficient than VM), unless both Nachos are on the same machine, when it becomes redundant, it would be an interesting design and programming exercise. This would of course be combined with...
Posted on March 16, 2004 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 01, 2004

Neat Google Trick

I just realized that Google can give definitions of words using define: word syntax. define: blog brings up the definition of what a weblog is. Though this service still has some quirks with varying search results (blog shows up, while weblog does not), it is quite useful. I should really read Google Hacks, a great book for finding other cool ways to making full use of all of Google's capabilities....
Posted on March 1, 2004 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 29, 2004

Advice for CS Group Projects

Some of these things might be obvious, but are often forgotten or disregard: Plan in the beginning Know what everyone else is doing Read the provided code Take a short break when you are stuck Do not procrastinate if you have free time, you will regret it later Team projects must usually be split, 3 people working at one computer, are slower than 3 people working individually Communication and Coordinating are crucial but will slow you down, plan accordingly Try...
Posted on February 29, 2004 03:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 20, 2004

Operating Systems: A Reading Approach

I am currently designing a President's Scholar Research Project called A Reading Approach to Operating Systems. The project will mainly consist of reading the most influential and relevant books on Operating Systems and related topics and then writing a paper or giving a presentation about what I learnt. The books below are those that I have currently selected. If any of you have other suggestions or think that I should remove one of those books, please comment. Thanks for the...
Posted on February 20, 2004 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 11, 2004

Dashboard and Orkut

I was reading through this entry on Edd Dumbill's blog, and had an idea for the use of the Graph button in Dashboard. Right now I feel that displaying the graph of clue's might be interesting to look at, but is not particularly useful to a user. Replacing this with a graph of the relationship of the displayed person to other people you know, using input from social networking tools like Orkut would open many new possibilities. This led me...
Posted on February 11, 2004 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 09, 2004

Faculty Night

Today we had Faculty Night with Mendel Rosenblum, my CS 140 professor and co-founder of VMWare. We talked about VMWare and OS research at Stanford, and it was quite interesting. I have been immensely enjoying CS 140, irrespective of the grade I will get, and am generally excited about Systems programming and Computer Science right now. I had my CS 140 midterm this morning and have CS 161 tomorrow. I also applied for several CURIS, summer research projects, we will...
Posted on February 9, 2004 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 05, 2004

Code Dammit!

I have 23 hours till my Operating System project is due. I have to study for a midterm the majority of tomorrow, and want to go to a talk by Larry Page tomorrow as well. Though the code is crashing all over the place, I will not surrender. This assignment will show who is master, the machine or me....
Posted on February 5, 2004 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 02, 2004

Declaring Computer Science

I will officially declare Computer Science as my major today. This is of course only a formality, but a rather important one. Choosing an advisor, on the other hand, is an important issue that I thought about for the last few months. After long considerations, I decided to declare with Julie Zelinski. Julie was the first CS professor I took a class from at Stanford, and I have only heard good things about her and her advising group. Now comes...
Posted on February 2, 2004 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 24, 2004

Brilliant Save

I assume that most of you have heard about Microsoft's plans to sue teenager Mike Rowe because of his domain name MikeRoweSoft.com. This was obviously a terrible idea from both an ethical and a marketing perspective. However, Microsoft's solution to this marketing dilemma shows a sense of humor they usually lack. Instead of settling for an obscenely large sum of money, (like the RIAA often does) Microsoft paid for all costs of the domain transfer and the registration of a...
Posted on January 24, 2004 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 09, 2003

Smart Environments

I was talking to Tristan about Bill Gates house where the rooms adjust the type of music to your personal taste, based on a wireless transmitter. Tristan said that his phone could do the same, and related it to the uselessness of Kevin Warwick's research. However, wouldn't it be great if your computer could automatically play music according to your mood? There could be various ways of recognizing moods, cameras, sensors, etc... Even more importantly, there needs to be a...
Posted on December 9, 2003 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 09, 2003

Googlicious

I am (like most people), a big fan of Google, and am wondering, what they are planning in the future. Google is central to web applications by providing tools to look for information, and tying things together. Tristan and I have been talking about interface issues lately, and I think I need to concern myself with getting him into blogging. For now I want to post a quote by Marc Andreessen about Sergey Brin and Larry Page, that I find...
Posted on December 9, 2003 01:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 29, 2003

Lectures on HCI

I've been spending the day watching lectures on Human Computer Interaction on the Stanford Center for Professional Development. The class the lectures are from is CS 547, and is offered every year. I will try to watch all the interesting lectures in the future, because there is so much to be learned from there while I am working on other stuff. I think there is something for everyone here, so look through the list and watch the lectures....
Posted on November 29, 2003 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 01, 2003

Guido van Rossum & Python

Guido van Rossum gave a talk about Python 2.3 at Stanford this Wednesday. Till then I had not seen any Python code, and the only thing I knew about it was that it was usually grouped with Perl and Ruby (I know the first, not the latter) and that it was very easy to learn use. I was very impressed by the talk, both by Guido and by the language. Meeting great people in CS is one of the best...
Posted on November 1, 2003 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 29, 2003

Here Comes Longhorn

Tristan was worrying about Microsoft Longhorn this morning, and how it might have a real chance of competing with Apple based on technological merit, not just competitive advantage. I think that it is good for somebody to bring out an OS as good or even better than OS X because it would drive competition and result in both systems improving. Unfortunately I do not believe my reasoing holds true for Microsoft, because Longhorn will most likely also contain tons of...
Posted on October 29, 2003 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 18, 2003

A Musing by Knuth: Notation

Today Donald Knuth had one of his famous musings on Computer Science. The topic was mathematical notation, which was very interesting, even though I am not a math major. The topic was also a lot simpler than the proof that Knuth presented in his last lecture, which was incomprehensible for me and most of my friends, and it seemed that even Knuth was slightly confused, mostly because he was skipping parts of the proof, and forgot what he was doing....
Posted on October 18, 2003 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 16, 2003

Installing SkyOS

After reading an article on SkyOS today I felt the urge to go ahead and install it on Virtual PC. SkyOS is a hobby OS and one of the most popular hobby OSes there are. It is also written by an Austrian, Robert Szeleney, which I find very impressive. SkyOS runs on x86 hardware only and has some interesting software available, including a browser, DVD Player, and OpenGL renderers. It has a TCP/IP stack, though the TCP layer apparently needs...
Posted on October 16, 2003 02:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 29, 2003

"Polly Want a Cracker" Internals: Perl 6 Parrot

A while ago I read Miguel de Icaza's analysis of Parrot's internals, and why some of their design decisions are not quite justified. Now let me first admit that I am in no way an expert on this topic. But I just found a great Introduction to Parrot Development that I will look through as soon as I feel better about the state of my CS 140 assignment. There is also an O'Reilly book on topic, which I will read...
Posted on September 29, 2003 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 23, 2003

Involvment in Mono and Dashboard

I'm starting to get involved in the Dashboard/Mono scene again. For now I am pretty passive, just reading up stuff and talking to people, but more will come some time in the future. After I finish CS 143: Compilers, I definitely want to contribute to Mono. Hm, maybe I should get Michael to look into Mono, he might like it, and he is really good at Compiler stuff. Today I read through the new Dashboard mailing list and will join...
Posted on July 23, 2003 07:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 12, 2003

Dashboard Becoming More Popular

I just found this article by Tim O'Reilly, where he writes about Dashboard. It looks like the program is making good progress, and that important people are starting to notice it and liking the idea. I hope that things continue to go well for Dashboard. I think it's just about time for me to get a running Linux Box and install the thing....
Posted on July 12, 2003 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 09, 2003

Network Aware Apps + Dashboard = Great Combination

Tim O'Reilly is undoubtedly right about the importance in having all applications Network Aware, or even better Message Aware. This would mean that applications would support an interface for sending and receiving messages and talking to other interactions. Users do not want to deal with incompatibilities. It should be easy to use your Word Applications to exchange data with others (similar to Hydra). It should be easy to play Games over the Network (our BattleFungus game will support this), and...
Posted on July 9, 2003 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 09, 2003

The New SGI Altix 3000 - Nice

"SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters are the most scalable Linux® systems on the planet, running a single Linux OS image with 64 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and up to 8TB of memory. The SGI Altix 3000 family takes Linux to new altitudes of scalability and performance." SGI, one of my favorite companies, released a new supercomputer, running Linux. Although I am a fan of IRIX (unparallelled scalability), and do not want it to disappear, I am now very glad...
Posted on July 9, 2003 06:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 03, 2003

Some Advice: 2 comes before 3

I started reading TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 3 yesterday, to prepare for Volume 2. Apparently Volume 3 does require Volume 2, so I started reading it today. For anyone who wants to buy the books: buy them in order. Reading Volume 1 (The Protocols) was easy, now I'm reading The Implementation and I am a bit scared. I hope it won't be too difficult, it is about 1100 pages, making it the longest book I have ever read, and at 15000...
Posted on July 3, 2003 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 03, 2003

"Spring" Cleaning on my Windows Desktop

My Desktop PC has become so slow that it is completely unusable. While this is mostly due to the defects of Windows 98, it is also in need of a thorough cleaning. I've been spending the last few hours deleting unncessary files, uninstalling programs, and messing with startup files and some registry stuff. The speed improvments are moderate for now, there is still too much stuff running in the background. I already cleaned out all the Spyware, so there is...
Posted on July 3, 2003 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 01, 2003

News from the Ximian Open Source Front

It looks like Nat Friedman is working on a really interesting project called Dashboard. It has a todo list and looks very very interesting, but unfortunately I have little experience with the neccessary frameworks. For now the only thing I can do is read the progress reports. It seems like there are some very interesting search algorithms that could be used. Hm, maybe I need a Linux Box again. My Home PC seems like the perfect choice, it even had...
Posted on July 1, 2003 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 25, 2003

From Unix Programming Reading to Understanding TCP/IP

I've been making good progress with Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, but after 510 pages I really needed a break. The only part of the book that is left is the 4 large programming examples, that span 140 pages, but I need something else to do, before starting those. Because of that I started reading TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1, another great book by Richard Stevens. My plan is to read around 70 pages and then finish the Unix book,...
Posted on June 25, 2003 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 17, 2003

Reading Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment

Today I started reading Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by Richard Stevens, which is a great and interesting book. For now I'm only up to the chapter on files and directories, having read the chapter on standard I/O, and am looking forward to the more advanced chapters. In a few days I'll be ready to look into the source of Michael's webserver mhttpd....
Posted on June 17, 2003 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 15, 2003

New Design!

So as promised, here is the new design for my blog. It's still not finished, but it's a lot nicer than what I had before. This is the first time I have used CSS in 2 years, so I'm naturally proud of it. Be beware, however, that none of the tab links work yet, but I will deal with that very soon....
Posted on June 15, 2003 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 12, 2003

Blogging From The Airport

I might be paying money, but this wireless at the airport thing is great and cheaper than using my cell phone. I checked in all my luggage, without any problems, even though it was really heavy. I am now sitting at a wireless hotspot browsing the web and waiting, till people come back from dinner. Once wireless acess becomes even more widespread, devices get smaller, and prices drop a little, great things are going to happen. IMing people all the...
Posted on June 12, 2003 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 21, 2003

ISIS RSS and BlogTalk

Tristan has been working for a group called ISIS for quite some time now, and today I went with him to their meeting, to help with setting up RSS for their website. ISIS manages events.stanford.edu, which offers information about everything that is going at Stanford. It is a really innovative project with lots of creative people. Hopefully I will be able to set up a first experimental version by the end of the week. Stay tuned for updates. In other...
Posted on May 21, 2003 01:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 16, 2003

If you had to write The Matrix, what language would you use?

Yesterday I was wondering what language the Matrix would be best, if one had to write something like the Matrix. This seems like a good thought experiences, because it is in somesense the ultimate large scale computer system. Although speed would be important, using low level languages seems like a very bad idea. Programs have to be changed rapidly, usually while they are running. And for such an incredibly complex system, with so many different difficulties, compiled languages do not...
Posted on May 16, 2003 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 14, 2003

UNIX Networking

I have been feeling very unmotivated today, for a number of reasons. The last half hour, however, I have been reading about UNIX Networking. Although the article was very brief, I am fascinated by it. Fortunately I already have Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment and the TCP/IP Illustrated series, and I will read it this summer, if I find a bit of time, during the first few weeks. I am very much looking forward to learning more about this,...
Posted on May 14, 2003 03:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 26, 2003

File Backup Epiphany

I just found this on bbum's rants, code & references: Yeah, yeah, the real unix admins make backups of any file they're going to delete. And if they're just testing, they don't actually delete the file, they just move it or rename it. I, on the other hand, am still waking up and got a tad enthusiastic. I will definitely create a Backup folder on my Desktop now, and copy anything I delete or edit there, in case I make...
Posted on April 26, 2003 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 26, 2003

Computer Game with Cocoa

My friend Tristan is working on a game using Cocoa. He has been working on it for 2-3 weeks and he is making great progress. It's amazing how fast programs can be developed, considering that Tristan does not spend too many hours a week writing it. The game allows playing over Rendezvous, connections over the net and local game play. Right now the biggest missing feature is the computer opponent....
Posted on April 26, 2003 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 25, 2003

Hydra, great for teamwork.

Since a week or so, i have been using Hydra. Hydra allows many people to work on the same document at the same time. This is great for taking collective notes, discussing and editing papers, and writing and editing programs. Hydra supports Rendezvous, as well as tradtional connections over the web, and spouts a nice and clean interface. It can highlight text by different users in different colors, to better distinguish them, and also supports syntax highliting for many languages....
Posted on April 25, 2003 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 25, 2003

Alan Kay's Mindblowing Croquet

Alan Kay, one of the main people behind the Xerox Alto PC and the Smalltalk programming language gave a talk about his new project Croquet. To make it short, croquet is just incredibly amazing. Croquet is a breathtaking 3D world, in which users collaborate, but it is also a "a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work. There is no distinction between the user environment and the development environment." This means that users can make changes to...
Posted on April 25, 2003 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)