gwar

Fall is sliding in,
Trees aflame, and I asleep.
Shiver back the cold.

Continuing to do this much work isn't making it easier.  This OS project may kick my butt.  Not to mention IT'S MIDTERM SEASON.

First, something cheerful: weekly cooking!  This week's feature was Navajo Tacos:

Chili ingredients:

1 pound cubed-like eggplant

2 cans 14 oz. pinto beans

1 large onion chopped

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon oregano

2 tablespoons chili powder

1/2 teaspoon red pepper

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

2 can 12oz. tomatoes

1 teaspoon sugar

2 teaspoons cocoa

Cook the eggplant until it's kinda soft.  Add onions and saute until tender.  Add everything else and simmer until you're happy with it (I did about 1.5 hours).

Fry Bread Ingredients:

3 + cups of flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1.5 cups warm milk or warm water.

Mix 3 cups flour with other dry ingredients then add warm milk/water to make a sticky dough.  Add additional flour to make a firm dough then cover and rest for approximately 30 minutes.  Form pieces of dough into thin (less than 1/4 inch thick) disks and fry at approximately 375 degrees F.  I didn't have a candy thermometer for the oil, so I just jacked it up almost to high on my stove.  That worked okay.

Toppings:

Onions, Shredded cheese (co-jack), shredded lettuce, tomatoes, avocado

Top hot fry bread with a layer of cheese followed by a layer of chili followed by a layer of cheese followed by a layer of lettuce, onions, tomato, and avocado followed by a light sprinkling of cheese on top.

It's yummy.

Play practice was pretty fun, too.  I learned that my character is basically a crazy old woman who gets to play with anything and everything on stage when she's bored.  Sweet.  If anyone has old lady clothes that they don't mind parting with for a few weeks, I'd be much obliged.

The new networks project is to implement a longest prefix matcher for IP addresses.  This basically means that we take IP addresses (those things that look like 129.79.245.103, which is where I happen to be at the moment) and decompose them into bits.  A router's job is to figure out which router a packet heading towards a given IP is supposed to go to next, so it goes through and sees how much of the address it can match with its tables.  IP addresses are assigned in a semi-geographic way, but the important thing is that "close" addresses will be "close" physically.  Chunks of addresses are designated for certain entities, so IU owns a chunk of addresses (65,534) in the 129.79 family.  So that will be fun.

The OS assignment is to implement fork() and exec() for threads, which essentially means taking a process (loosely defined as "a program in execution") and making a copy of it which can then be turned into another process.  Operating systems don't pull processes out of nowhere!  The other part of the assignment involves setting up the filesystem, i.e. making it possible to read and write files.  WOO.

Piano is going well, too!  We learned the chromatic scale this week, and the most recent songs we've played are "Great Balls of Fire" and "It's My Party."  Hahaha.  :)

Anyway, it's like 23:30, and I'm definitely still in Lindley.  I think that means it's time to head home and get some sleep.  -____-  Blargh.  Any volunteers for doing my work will be welcomed?

less hurried, more ninja (?)

Point and dereference,
Then index, convert, and print.
What am I doing?

It's been a shockingly productive day here in Bloomington.  I finished up that OS assignment, wrote some proofs for analysis (which I am still not a fan of... hand-waving gets my goat, and we don't seem to have formal definitions for half the things we are trying to prove statements about), baked a pizza (dericious... recipe below), worked through most of the packet-sniffer for networks, practised piano, and bathed.  Crazy, I know.

Ok, elaborations, for those of you still reading:

Analysis:  So the prof for this class is a topologist who is teaching analysis.  If you are unfamiliar with these words, it's not really important to know what they mean, just that that is a very weird thing.  Those fields are, while not diametrically opposed, quite dissimilar in focus.  This leads to the prof sometimes deciding that we don't know and don't need to know something, whereupon he promptly draws a picture, waves his hands, says some semi-meaningful things, and moves on.  It can lead to very frustrating homework sessions with Chas where we realise that we have no idea what we are actually trying to prove.

Pizza: It was my cooking night tonight, and I didn't have anything particular in mind.  On this occasion, that meant that I just took a bunch of things I love and threw them on dough, put it all through the oven, and called it pizza.  I don't know how many of you have made pizza crust before, but it's super easy (and way tastier than bought crusts).  Venus asked me for the recipe recently, so it's basically like this:

Run water until it gets pretty hot.  You should still be able to touch it, but it should get rather uncomfortable quite quickly.  Put some of this in the bottom of a bowl or cup or whatever you'd like (about 1/2 cup or so).  Add a tablespoon-ish of sugar and swirl it around in the water a little, then get some yeast and sprinkle it over the surface of the water (probably a teaspoon of yeast is plenty).  Shake that around a little bit and let it rest for 5 minutes or so until it gets all frothy and yeast-looking.
Put some flour in a bowl.  Obviously how much varies directly with the volume of bread product you hope to produce.  I used about 4 cups today, I think, for two big pizza crusts.  Add some more sugar (maybe 1/2 cup, probably a little less), then add the water and some more hot water.  Mix it up and add flour or water as necessary until you get a nice doughy consistency.  Mine is usually a little stickier than most people like, but it should be such that there's no flour stuck in the bottom of the bowl and the lump of dough doesn't stick all over your fingers.
Put some olive oil in the bowl and roll the doughball around in it.  This isn't strictly necessary, but it is yummy.  Put the bowl "in a warm place" to rise.  I actually hate when sites say that.  I usually turn the oven on and set the bowl on one of the back burners (oven heat escapes through them on most models, except probably the kind of stoves that have the flat little doodads cooker thingies).  Let it sit for an hour, then abuse it a little to get some air out, then let it sit another half hour.  Then bake it!  I usually bake at 425.

The pizza toppings were just things that I like, as I mentioned: chunks of butternut squash (which I pre-baked for about half an hour before I baked the pizza), garlic (minced), spinach leaves (rough chop), and mozzarella cheese.  It was a hit.

Networks: Georgi and I are chugging away at this packet sniffer.  It has to do things like determine how many packets use which protocols (network layer and transport layer), count occurences of flags on packets, calculate overhead, and check data validity.  Anyway, there's one line that we wrote that I particularly liked:

printf("address %s : %d\n", inet_ntoa(((struct in_addr*)(ipaddrit->first.c_str()))[0]), ipaddrit->second);

inet_ntoa takes a number and turns it into a nice, printable IP address string (like 129.79.247.5, which is one of the machines in Lindley).  struct in_addr is a struct that is essentially not a struct at all, but instead an integer representing an address.  Unfortunately, some of these addresses don't play nice with the string functions: they print crazy characters and change all the following output into crazy wingdings.  I just really liked the shitty way we had to access that data to make it printable.

Piano: hearing is on Thursday!  Yike!  We learned what sharps and flats are this week, so now I know what all the keys are for.  ;)

Bathing: god, I love that claw-foot tub upstairs.

the tubes: no longer clogged

O, Internet, o!
Wherefore art thou digital?
A rose... whatever.

So I didn't actually feel like finishing that haiku.

Anyway, we once more have the Internet flowing through the tubes to the Llama School, and that means an update!

For my cooking night this week, I made bagna calda, which seems to be a pretty unknown dish, at least among the people I associate myself with.  It was a staple (oh, Lordy, no) in my childhood, and it's pretty delicious.

For one batch (I made three to feed 7 hungry college students):

1/4 cup of butter or margarine (that's one stick of butter)
2/3-3/4 head of garlic (chopped up or run through a garlic press)
2 black olives (chopped up... usually this is anchovies, but we're veggie here)
splash olive oil
1 pint half and half
1 pint heavy whipping cream

Basically, melt the butter and let the garlic simmer in it and get all yummy.  Then add everything else and let it reduce--this took about 2 or 2.5 hours for my batch--over low heat until it's really thick and saucy.  Eat it with chopped vegetables and bread.  Voila!  It's a dip.  :D

Anyway, that stuff's awesome.  I don't have too much else to say... I posted some photos on Picasa of the Bloomington Bike Project and stuff.  Guess that's all for now.  Those of you who are in Bloomington should come to the HHC Coffeehouse Night at the Art Museum tonight: I'm hosting from 19:45-20:45, and you get free delicious Haitian coffee and snacks.  ^____^

hiatus

Leaves fall silently,
Don't break, don't bother, just ghosts,
Mem'ries of summer.

So I have to say that I really like the new Blogger text editor.  It's way cuter than the old one.

Other than that, I guess it looks like I haven't put anything on here for a while, so here's some things that I've been thinking about/doing in no particular order:

• Alex came to visit me over the weekend.  We went caving (Sullivan's Cave, for those of you in the know), I gave him a tour, he met some of my friends, and we went out one of the nights with "the crew" (hi, Thabang, Brett, and Matt).  We saw Comedy Caravan at Bear's again, and this time it was improv.  A couple of the dudes came over to chat our table up after the show, and Alex had the somewhat dubious pleasure of experiencing drunk guys hitting on me.  I don't recall if I mentioned, but I got asked for my phone number in a very sly (and somewhat amusing) way last weekend at the same bar.
• I read an article recently about "anonymizing" healthcare records.  I can't, unfortunately, find a link to a full paper, but the gist of the article was that 87% of Americans can be found uniquely by using just zipcode, birthdate, and gender.  Maybe you're just as unique as you think you are.
• I am performing in a play on Friday!  It's about a family of three: a woodcutter father, an imaginative mother, and a pushed-around daughter.  I am the third.  The script is here, and for those of you who do not read Spanish (and don't like Google translator's version :) ), it's basically a story about the father coming home, saying, "Oh, wife, I thought about planting an olive tree today."  The wife saying, "Man, this is going to be great!  We can sell that shit!"  Then they bring me in and argue about how much they are going to charge for the olive oil (when the olives are barely thought of and certainly won't be ready for many years), eventually getting so into it that they slap me around a little and our neighbour has to come over and point out how ridiculous we all are.
• There is a lot to writing an operating system.  This OS class that I'm in is going to be pretty intense.  Our assignment for this week was to look through the source code and answer a few questions about it, and it's a crapload of C.
• I'll be awesome at C by the end of term.  My networks class will all be in C, too, so EXTRA PRACTISE.
• I'm still looking for an internship/short-term job for spring, for any of you out there in real-world-land who might happen to know recruiters.  ;)
• I was recently informed that I am not too tall to be an astronaut.  Also that Bill Stone, the guy who I was all excited about working for, is a total jerk.
• I forgot a lot of parkour over the summer, but Roy is whipping me back into shape.  We'll see how that goes.  :D
  
• My roommates are thinking about fostering a puppy!  We can't adopt one, mainly because we have no idea what we would do with it after the school year ends, but fostering is totally doable, and our house would be so puppied and happy.  ^____^
• There is going to be a live-action Akira movie?  That should be interesting.
• I saw Ponyo (the new movie from the Miyazaki, the guy who did Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, etc.), and it was pretty trippy/awesome.  Also recently, I saw Up, Coraline, and Jabberwocky.  All of these are great.  Up is by Pixar and is soooooo cute, and parts are really hilarious.  Doug the dog is awesome.  Coraline is really weird and disturbing, but it's by Tim Burton, and that guy's gold.  Jabberwocky is by Terry Gilliam, and I don't think I need to elaborate on that.
• I'm planning my grad party, and it looks like it's going to be an excursion up to Chicago for New Year's.  It seems dumb to have a grad party before I actually graduate (plus I'm going to be absurdly busy before that), and there's no way to cram it in between graduation and Christmas, and I have a lot of friends I want to see who are from far away, and I like Chicago, and I don't have plans for New Year's.  So I think that's going to be it.
• Moebius strips are always more awesome.  A friend shared a link to a moebius strip music box on Google Reader recently.
• Grad students don't always seem more dedicated to their degrees than undergrads.  Being in some grad classes, I've been exposed to people who are really just in it for the paper.  :-/  It's sort of disappointing, but I guess you never get away from some kinds of people in real life.
• I gotta decide what to study in grad school.  I'm leaning towards some kind of engineering, maybe?  I want to do something thoughtful but not entirely sedentary.  Doing some kind of natural science would be fun, too.  Really, I still want to just be Bill Stone, just not an asshole.  Getting paid to be an adventurer still ranks highly on my list of priorities.
• Cooking is awesome.  Not only am I treated to the dinner rotation creations of my roommates, but I've been hanging out with another friend the past couple of days, and we made anise (basically licorice-flavoured) ice cream root beer floats.  Mmmmmmmmmm....
• Funny things are changing their legality status.  Facebook's TOS was determined to violate Canada's privacy laws (didn't they just get in trouble for that earlier this year?  Jeez, guys.), certain amounts of drugs are being legalised in Mexico (I believe the language is an amount appropriate for "personal and immediate use"), parts of California are raising taxes on their medical marijuana sales (a fairly sound economic idea if you look at the numbers), and I'm endlessly amused by international copyright laws, of course.  While in Germany, it was like pulling teeth to find a fecking Youtube video that I could listen to music from that wasn't blocked due to copyright, and things like Pandora didn't work their, either.  I've been reading a little bit about Canada's changing copyright laws for music distribution, and a bit about the DRM blocks that Apple had put on their iTunes tracks, but that stuff's just so silly.
• What's up with people accusing celebrities of hiding their genders?  It's all the rage, of a sudden.  Lady Gaga, that African runner, who next?

Anyway, that's really just a braindump of some general things that I've been pondering.  I felt like I should make a blog post, and... well, that's what came out.  :)

last fun before work?

Splash!  Head-first, a sea
Of work, a pool of pals, and
Enough to keep busy.

Two days down (three, really, since I'm done with class for today, now), and everything is still going smoothly.  I just officially switched from taking 2 undergrad and 2 grad courses to 1 undergrad and 3 grad courses.  I think the real work starts next week.

My Operating Systems class is going to be awesome.  Andrew Lumsdaine (he was the guy who ran the Cluster Challenge stuff the past couple years) is the professor, and he's quite a guy.  Plus I'm stoked about learning exactly how these damn things that I program on every day actually work.

Analysis will be a little less awesome, I think... the professor seems like he's a little confused (and he's quite furry, in a nice way :P), and this is his first time teaching the course, but he seems to know what he's doing, and I hope that things will turn out alright.

The trend of excessively large classes hasn't ended... there are like 35 people in each of my Tuesday/Thursday classes, too.  Argh.

I went to the Honors Seminar this week, too, and my networks prof was the speaker: she talked about cybercrime and DNS cache poisoning and fastflux IPs and all kinds of cool things.  I wonder if we will learn hax in Networks.  I friggin hope so.

Other than that... I've been keeping myself occupied.  There's not much homework yet, so I got time to hang out with Roy and Chet and Jill in a pool for a while, and Roy happens to have an underwater camera (like mine!), so we got some pretty glorious photos.

My roommates continue to make delicious food, including lasagna and curry.  And the food attitude here is "everybody please eat stuff before it goes bad, because right now it's delicious."  The sharing is way cool, and I'm glad that people are actually home when I'm home this year.  Last year we were all way too busy to ever hang out, but living so close to campus really facilitates it this time around.

Tonight brings play practice, volunteer sign-up (for the Honors College and some of their events), and more delicious food, although I don't know what yet.  School!