jruderman@gmail.com
Thanks to aebrahim and Biz Stone for the Gmail invite.
Two strange things from the Terms of Service:
"Google disclaims all responsibility and liability for the availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Service."
"You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor, or copy any content from the Service." (Does that include checking my e-mail every 5 minutes?)
Snow and ice festival
Amazing snow sculptures and ice architecture at a festival in Harbin, China (via Mom).
Taking a break by filing bugs
I filed 11 bugs in 6 hours today :) 7 of the bugs required testcases. My "bugs to file" folder is down from 112 files to 73, not counting subdirectories.
Pornzilla update
I updated Pornzilla today. I rewrote the introduction and the About Pornzilla section. I also wrote and added some search bookmarklets, including one that searches Google for pages on the same site that have the same title.
Google makes site: searches easier
Google "site:" searches no longer require search terms. I used to search for e.g. "site:www.squarefree.com -asdf" to get a list of all pages on a site; now I can just search for "site:www.squarefree.com". I don't know how long this has been fixed.
Bad abstract algebra jokes
- A carpool is a group of people who commute with each other. Therefore, a carpool is an abelian group.
- If 1=0 in the zero ring, why don't they call it The One Ring instead?
Yes, I came up with them.
After I graduate
I will spend the summer in Austin, Texas, working in the Mozilla group at IBM.
I will start graduate school at UCSD in September.
Sending encrypted e-mail
I had to install Enigmail and gpg in order to send a vulnerability report to CERT.
I am not happy with gpg's UI. I had to read this page to figure out which command-line options I had to use. GPG gives a vague yet serious-sounding warning if you use an empty "passphrase" when creating your key. (As far as I can tell, a strong passphrase protects you against someone who can read the file containing your private key, but other than that it doesn't increase security.) It asked me to move the mouse around and bang on the keyboard while it generated my keys, but it generated the keys in less than a second, making me worry that it didn't use any good sources of entropy when it created my key.
I was able to figure out how to use Enigmail without much trouble. I encountered lots of warning and error messages, but I think they were all necessary. (I didn't like the text "This message will appear 1 more time" at the bottom of most of the warnings, though. I don't want Enigmail to keep me from making a mistake just because I almost made the mistake 2 times in the past!) Enigmail's options were split between the Options window and the Account Settings window, but that's a problem with Thunderbird in general.
Neither CERT nor Enigmail warned me that the subject of my e-mail would be sent unencrypted.
Choosing a grad school
I have about 2 days to choose a grad school. I got into UCLA, UCSD, and UO.
When I applied to grad schools, I said that I enjoy doing research in computational complexity. That could change, since I've only had half a course on complexity (I understand P, NP and NP-completeness, and PSPACE and PSPACE-completeness). I might end up doing research in Algorithms (parallel? randomized?), Cryptography, HCI, HCI ⋂ Security, Programming Languages, or Programming Languages ⋂ Security.
I visited UO last week and had a great time. Many UO CS grad students play chess and settlers, hike, and have senses of humor I agree with. Most of them speak English. On Saturday, Peter (a Mudd alum) and James took me on a hike up Spencer's Butte, which overlooks Eugene. I feel like I'd have good friends and maybe even be social if I went to UO.
I would probably have fun doing algorithms at UO's Computational Intelligence Research Lab. Right now, they're doing some impressive stuff with... [I'm under NDA and don't know how public this information is]. But I don't know whether CIRL would fund me. And Matt's belief that P = NP scares me, even if he'll settle for merely laying the groundwork for someone else to prove that NP = coNP.
Unfortunately, nobody at UO researches Complexity. Peter went there wanting to study Complexity, but he couldn't find any profs at UO researching Complexity (and his interests changed), so now he's studying graph drawing. I want to at least have the option to study Complexity rather than Algorithms.
I've also visited UCLA and UCSD, but I only spent 6-8 hours visiting each of them. UCSD and UCLA have higher-ranked departments than UO and are closer to home in Palos Verdes. UCSD has an established Algorithms and Complexity group, while UCLA has hired several professors in the last 2 years in an attempt to build a similar group. UCLA seems to be slightly better at Algorithms and UCSD seems to be better at Complexity. Funding at UCLA seemed sketchy, but I might have misinterpreted something.
I think I'm going to go to UCSD.
Grad school visits
I visited UCSD during Spring Break. I'm going to visit UCLA tomorrow (Tuesday) and UO Thursday and Friday.
Hard to reproduce
Nu||:Ive had it happen a couple of times around the 3-26 builds. It was shortly after running a fresh build on an old profile and reinstalling a couple of the extensions that don't carry over. I don't remember what phase the moon was in, hard to reproduce.
RLP #5
- Using "gay" as a pejorative vs. misspelling "you're" as "your" (in a comment)
- Cover of The Economist: anatomy of a wayward administration (via kos; picture via atrios)
- Teen who distributed her own photo charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography (via curious)
Switched to Thunderbird
I switched from Mozilla Mail to Thunderbird yesterday. Two new features I like: toolbar customization, messages I have have replied to are marked in the thread pane with a green arrow. Thunderbird also includes a spell checker, but I probably won't end up using the spell checker until it supports spell-check-as-you-type (58612).
After switching, I changed some prefs (which might have been present in Mozilla Mail too):
- Never send return receipts
- Open each message in a new window
- Don't remember the last selected message
- When you mistakenly think that my message is not plain text, "convert it to plain text" without asking me".
Things that bug me the most about Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird:
- Searching sucks.
- Search defaults to "any of the following" (125631), like Altavista did in 1999.
- Specifying a search seems to take more clicks than it needs to.
- Searching is slow because it doesn't index (bug number?) or even short-circuit (154867).
- Address completion sucks.
- The first address is usually not the one I want to e-mail (208833).
- Autocompletion breaks the backspace key (239558).
- I can't minimize Thunderbird to the system tray for notifications (208923). I would... uhh... set it to check every 2 hours, and I'd never open Thunderbird otherwise, and then I wouldn't be distracted by mail so often!
- Message composition message windows don't disappear until Thunderbird finishes sending the message (126140, WONTFIX).
Gmail (Google) and remail (IBM Research) suggest that there is a lot of room for improvement in e-mail clients. (Gmail screenshot with ads, Gmail screenshots with "related pages".)
