The Rebertian Times

HOWTO: Setup MediaWiki as a Single-user CMS

Chris Rebert — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:31:23 +0000

If, like me, you’re abusing MediaWiki as a content management system for your personal website, here are some suggested options to set in your LocalSettings.php:

#Stricter than normal settings:

#prevent anonymous users from registering
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

#prevent anonymous users from editing
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createpage'] = false;

#disable section edit links for anonymous viewers
$wgDefaultUserOptions['editsection'] = false;

#remove userpage & usertalk links for anonymous
$wgShowIPinHeader = false;

#disable bot API
$wgEnableAPI = false;
$wgEnableWriteAPI = false;

#disable RSS/atom change feeds
$wgFeed = false;

#Looser than normal settings:

#disable 'nofollow' on external links
$wgNoFollowLinks = false;

#allow uploading of non-images
$wgStrictFileExtensions = false;
$wgCheckFileExtensions = false;
$wgVerifyMimeType = false;

#disable copyright checks on upload
$wgCheckCopyrightUpload = false;

#disable anti-vandalism patrols
$wgUseNPPatrol = false;
$wgUseRCPatrol = false;

#allow raw HTML in ... blocks
$wgRawHtml = true;

#allow more liberal redirecting
$wgMaxRedirects = 42;
$wgFixDoubleRedirects = true;

#Other:

#unless your site is multilingual..
$wgHideInterlanguageLinks = true;

#unless you use the Universal Edit Button..
$wgUniversalEditButton = false;

And if you’re using the Monobook skin, add the following to /skins/monobook/main.css to hide the “talk” and “view source” tabs:

li#ca-talk {
display: none;
}
li#ca-viewsource {
display: none;
}

Note that this merely hides the links from view; they’re still in the HTML and are still accessible by anyone who knows how override your CSS or construct the URLs manually (i.e. mere security thru obscurity; I mainly do it to improve the wiki’s aesthetics).

Also, I’ve now finished switching hosting providers! (You may have noticed the site being flaky for a bit.) Rebertia is now proud to be hosted by prgmr.com. Their pricing for VPSes is quite good; I’m now paying less than I was for shared hosting at my previous provider. (Protip: Install Fail2ban and setup its SSH rule to avoid being 0wn3d; I’ve safely observed a surprising number of random SSH login attack attempts on my VPS)

Of Braces and Semicolons

Chris Rebert — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:52:35 +0000

Finally, a post that lives up to the second part of this blog’s tagline by being about programming! (Well, there was C in a (Nutshell)², but my point is it’s been a while.)

Now, I’m a would-be language designer. Programming language theory fascinates me, and to that end I’ve read a number of books on different languages to try and get a feeling for all the various approaches and paradigms. I’ve also read many interesting blog posts found via proggit (and some via Lambda the Ultimate) which argue about language issues.

From all this, I’ve reached some conclusions which I’m going to try and lay out in a series of blog posts.

In this first post, I’ll cover:

The Problem of Delimiting Blocks

All modern languages are block-structured. (Thank you Dijkstra!) That is, code segments are semantically and syntactically organized into a tree. Let’s start with an example of some code in a Blub-average of today’s most popular languages:

class Foo(Object)
{
    void bar()
    {
        if (baz)
            quxx();
    }
}

The first problem we have is which brace style is the “Right One”. This is a perennial holy war. The style in this example wastes lines just for parentheses. On the other hand, it makes it very easy to perceive the block structure of the code. On the gripping hand, in practice, programmers don’t really care about the braces (except when the compiler gives a syntax error about them being wrong), and instead pay attention to the indentation. Secondly, we have the sub-problem of whether one-statement blocks should have braces around them; we have clarity and maintainability (what if the block expands beyond the one statement and someone forgets to add the braces? In many cases, this leads to subtle bugs the compiler does not warn you about.) versus wasting space and causing unnecessary scrolling. At any rate, we are led to the obvious question of: Why not use the indentation programmers insert anyway to delimit blocks and do away with the braces altogether? And indeed, some languages have tried this. The posterboy is Python (my current favorite existing language).

However, this solution has problems of its own:

Copy-pasting code into environments where indentation is not preserved (e.g. some online forums) causes it to become unintelligible (well, in practice, one can apply some heuristics and try and re-indent it manually, but there’s no way to ensure you got it exactly right, and if the code is long enough, it’s a real PITA; whereas code using braces can be automatically re-indented by several tools)
As one sees every so often in the Python community, there are people who harbor unreasonable hate towards syntax-significant indentation. From what I understand, most of these people have bad memories from some early version of FORTRAN and their fear is completely irrational. But if you want your language to be a very popular one, you’re probably going to have to accommodate these people.
We’re still left with the second code formatting holy-war of spaces vs. tabs as the indentation character. (BTW, have you seen *NIX‘s default tabstop of 8? Personally, it makes my eyes bleed.)

Of course, along with braces are their friends the semicolons, and they annoy the heck out of me; they’re just plain unnatural. I should not have to always remember to end a line with anything other than a linebreak, because 90% of the time, statements are only one line long; the other 10% are the ones I should have to type extra characters for, and only then after considering refactoring the line so it’s more readable anyway. This is basic Huffman coding people! Optimize for the overwhelmingly common case, not the exceptional one. (If this was a research paper, I would back up this 90-10 distribution with some empirical statistics, but since this is just a blog post, I’m not gonna bother.)

So, in summation, semicolons and braces are bad design choices. Eliminating the semicolons is relatively simple. As for the braces, our choices for what to replace them with are the off-side rule (i.e. syntactically-significant indentation) or begin-end keywords ala ALGOL or Pascal. Though I personally prefer the former, I opt for the latter due to the aforementioned issues with the former. Now, does this actually solve our problems, or is this a meaningless textual substitution? We’ll get to that in just a sec. There is a downside to vanilla begin-end though, and that is that it looks retro/outdated (i.e. like Pascal) or like a scripting language (using the pejorative connotation; i.e. like sh or BASIC). However, if we do it intelligently, like Ruby does, we can reduce the resemblance and make the substitution meaningful. All we need to do is realize that the begin keyword is technically superfluous and that we can force end to always go on a line of its own. Here’s an example of code in this style:

class Foo(Object)
    void bar()
        if baz
            quxx()
        end
    end
end

Advantages:

No dangling else problem as long as you have a elif construct.
Only one indentation style (Well, you could not indent the ends, but since they require their own line, there’s no particular reason not to.)
No space is wasted compared to the more compact of the 2 main brace styles.
The required ends solve the “what if this one-line code block grows to multiple lines?” problem

Now, in Iguana, I plan to alter this just slightly by allowing 1-line blocks to use colons and skip the end keyword; this let’s us re-special-case one-line bodies without any ambiguity or strain on the parser while continuing to avoid the multiline growth problem. Here’s what this looks like:

class Foo(Object)
    void bar()
        if baz: quxx()
    end
end

Of course, in this particularly simple example, you could also write it like this:

class Foo(Object): void bar(): if baz: quxx()

But I would hope your code reviewers would thoroughly chastise you if you did, so please don’t.

I agree it is not the cleanest or most obvious approach, but it’s a compromise between theoretically-best and familiar-enough-to-be-popular.

The Weather, Man

Chris Rebert — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:59:32 +0000

There was pretty bad rain today, very unusual for San Diego in my experience (hence this post; you know it must be quite bad if I wrote one of my few, infrequent blog entries about it). However, I can probably count on one hand the number of rainy days I’ve experienced at UCSD, and what with the drought, I suppose it’s rather needed…

The wind was the worst part; to quote Dr. Evil, it was re-god-damn-diculous. It’s like the weather knew it was final week and decided to materialize the collective bad feeling in aqueous form, thus further increasing the stressful atmosphere. It particularly pissed me off because my umbrella (thanks for having the commendable foresight to give me one Mom and Dad) suffered catastrophic failure due to the intense wind; some of the metal wire bent and it will no longer close or open all the way (I’m gonna try and get a raincoat tomorrow). I got rather wet walking back from meeting with a TA and needless to say, it’s a tad awkward to be using a busted umbrella.

I’m definitely glad I don’t happen to have a final tomorrow. (And I’m also glad for the dorm heaters for once; 90% of the time, air conditioning would be more useful, but they’re super-nice this other 10% of the time [and no, those statistics were not derived using the sound techniques from the final I took today])

Further but related aside: Prof. Politis is excellent and I wholeheartedly recommend him.

Things that will ruin your life:

Chris Rebert — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:11:25 +0000

Wikipedia editing (oh, the inane and petty arguments no one outside of the ‘pedia will ever care about…and this too)
TV Tropes (it will explode your tabs. Seriously.)
Reading manga online (the wasted night (and day? (days(s)?)) of archive binging)
Watching Bittorrent‘d anime series (at least this one has the natural limiting factor of your connection speed)
Working in student any sort of government (No, really, it’s not quite that bad)

All these are complete time sinks. Trust me, I know. Through personal experience. The hard way.

Avoid them scrupulously. Do not click those links. Really, I’m serious, don’t click them. You’ll be sorry. All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you…

xkcd & tvtropes

Chris Rebert — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:11:03 +0000

Just saw the below xkcd and had to comment on it. It’s oh so true. One time, I got close to exhausting the memory of my 4GB MacBook Pro I had so many tvtropes pages open in tabs. It took a good three minutes to close them all…

xkcd shows the evils of tvtropes

CodeRally

Chris Rebert — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:51:34 +0000

[Meta-note: Yes, I realize this is a bit dated and definitely out of chronological order; So sue me.]

Earlier this quarter, I, in partnership with Nick, participated in a programming contest put on by the CSE Department. It used a Java framework called “CodeRally” and involved programming an AI for a car on a virtual track. The cars start out at random locations and score points by doing various things, such as going through the track flags in order, throwing and hitting other cars with spare tires, etc. until time runs out. We named our AI “King Regicide” (all credit to my Desmondian counterpart for the name).

Our initial strategy we dubbed “tirespamming”; that is, just try and hit people with tires constantly and ignore trying to go around the track circuit. We got it partially working, but then decided that due to the point spread we should focus on writing logic to go around the track circuit. After fixing a particularly nasty bug that sometimes surfaced when turning from say 5° to 355°, we tuned the tire-firing logic and did decently in simulated contests. We also wrote some smart logic for when to activate our emergency shields. We had dreams of writing some code to evade tires, but we never got around to it.

We ended up finishing 19th in the second qualifying round, one short of the top 18 who got to advance to the final round. However, a couple instructors and TAs, who were ineligible to win any titles/prizes, finished ahead of us, and due to the aforementioned random starting locations there was a large random factor involved and not enough rounds were done, in my opinion, to mitigate this, so we got slightly screwed over. Oh well. Se la vie.

This was almost made up for by the hilarity of “Disappointer”, Prof. Dana Dahlstrom’s entry in the contest. I forget the exact details, but I believe that after a set amount of time stuck in a pileup (see next paragraph), it would extricate itself, tirespam the car who caused the pile-up and throw all available tires at it, and then go back to being stuck. All assembled got a grand laugh out of it.

On an interesting note, the biggest problem in the contests ended up being “pileups”. These are when one car runs out of fuel while going around the circuit, and another car hits it and is too stupid to go around it. Yet more cars would then also pile-up behind these cars, blocking the inner cars from moving at all. This would usually cascade until all the cars were motionless and part of the pile-up. Only one or two cars had AIs which were smart enough to deal with this situation, and interestingly they weren’t even the top finishers. We tried to add such a feature near the end of the contest, but completely ran out of time.

In the end, those who actually won the contest admitted that their AIs didn’t do anything particularly fancy compared to the average entrant: just go around the circuit, throw tires occasionally, and activate shields when necessary; I believe this further supports my assertion about the large, unaddressed random factors involved.

All in all, it was grand fun even though we were robbed of our chance to advance to the finals, and I look forward to next year’s contests. Props to the Dini Group for sponsoring the contest and providing caffeine and food!

Obligatory Post-SunGod Post

Chris Rebert — Sun, 24 May 2009 05:16:02 +0000

You knew it was coming. I couldn’t let the biggest on-campus event of the entire year slip by without mention.

So, yes, I attended Sun God Festival 2009, despite my usual aversion towards parties (who am I kidding, social events generally; but I have made progress). Unfortunately, my MMW 3 paper was also due that day in section and I also had an Algorithm Analysis quiz that morning, so it was not ideal. I had almost no sleep the night before, save a brief ~3 hour respite, as I worked on completing my paper, which probably impacted my quiz performance. In a twist of fate, however, my schedule inadvertently let me dodge a serious bullet.

You see, since everyone was anxious about getting into the festival, they started lining up in front of the box office early in the morning; by around 11 or so, this line stretched down from Ridge Walk down to Peterson Hall, turned the corner, went down past Geisel and the Price Center, and, for at least a time, continued into Warren Mall. To paraphrase Garrett Berg, it was as if everyone in school had gotten in line. At once. Needless to say, there was some criticism of the wristbanding system afterwards. The sheer mass of people (in contrast to the usual relative dearth of students) led me to momentarily ponder whether some people enroll just to go to Sun God. Needless to say, the line complicated my movements to-and-from Geisel to research and print. Now finally to the “fortunate” part: due to my classes, I didn’t go to get my wristband until around 1PM, by which time the line had disippated entirely and getting into the festival was a breeze (rumors of insufficient wristbands being available were greatly exaggerated).

So, on to the festival proper: Ironically, I liked the Midway tent and its performances rather than the headliners, which makes sense considering I’d only heard of 2 of the headliners and I’m not a fan of hip-hop. Highlights from the tent include:

Cirque Berzerk: sort of like Cirque de Solei on Goth crack, it featured some amazing fire acts
Kaba Modern: an astounding Asian dance group whose impressive performance just kept on going (every time I thought they had come to a reasonable stop, there was a brief pause and the music changed)
A performance by UCSD’s Cheer squad (IIRC), which featured an (appropriate for UCSD) lab coat-themed suggestive dance
A great comedy routine featuring Horatio Sanz, a guy who was literally butt-naked save for a fannypack, and a good bashing of Communications and Poli Sci majors (hehehe ;-)

The main stage was not completely ignored by me, however. In between a ~3 hour nap to make up for the insomnia, I saw:

Augustana, whose vibe was entirely enjoyable as I laid on the grass listening, although the lead singer’s fangirls were a slight annoyance
Sara Bareilles (I have no idea how you pronounce her last name), who agonizingly delayed her ultimately poppin’ performance of her Love Song…song with less famous filler and finished with an unexpected but certainly unique rendition of Rihanna‘s Umbrella (of all things)

I managed to avoid alcohol and drugs myself (unlike many apparently; suffice it to say I saw a few “men down” in apparent need of aid while walking around), instead opting for a fresh but entirely too large funnel cake. I also been there, done that, got the T-shirt and got dinged for an excessive surcharge at the on-festival ATM.

All in all, it was quite a fun day, sleep deprivation aside, and I look forward to next year. Now I just need to actually visit the beach one of these days…

Broomball – The Official Sport of Fun and Bruises

Chris Rebert — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:52:47 +0000

Tonight, some of us Roosevelt First Years played Broomball; and as a first-time player, I have to say it was a large barrel of fun, even though my side lost (but considering that no one ever declared which color brooms were supposed to go which direction and thus the teams were arbitrary and uneven, it’s nothing to be shamed about).

The only disappointing thing was that the sport didn’t turn out to actually involve brooms (in the normal sense); instead the “sticks” were more like polo sticks with flat, triangular plastic heads; but this minor disappointment quickly pales in comparison to the joy of playing this game as part of a mob

For those who are unfamiliar, broomball is basically like ice hockey, except it uses the “brooms” instead of hockey sticks and a ball instead of a puck, and, most importantly, ice skates are not worn. The lack of proper skates is largely what makes the game so fun — trying to rapidly change direction proves to be impossible and attempting it results in you losing your balance and either falling on your ass or awkwardly breaking your fall with one or more hands, but of course the fast-paced nature of the game demands that you move rapidly to respond to the movement of the ball. Needless to say, Hilarity Ensues (oh wait, I’m not writing a comedy series pitch… hmm. ). The sheer number of people involved, along with the fact that we used 2 balls concurrently meant there was never a lull in action, thus intensifying the effect.

So, I might have a decent bruise on my butt from falling down hard on it once, but it was well worth it. Now if only there was an intramural version of Broomball, I would join in a second and it would be awesome. All in all, the game was quite satisfying and made me harken back to my old glory days as a Fullback in AYSO soccer.

Human Sorting Algorithms Video

Chris Rebert — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:24:51 +0000

A while back in high school (Menlo School to be precise), myself and some other members of The Neighborhood (the math & comp sci club), suggested we try acting out the various sorting algorithms with humans and videotaping it. Unfortunately, we never were able to make the necessary arrangements to actually carry out the project, though I did write choreographic drafts for a couple of the sorts at one point.

However, this year during Knight School, some other Neighborhood members held a course on algorithms and managed to make the dream a reality. Here’s the terrific video on YouTube.

For what I can only assume were time constraints, Quicksort sadly is not shown(!). Neither is Heapsort, but that would be particularly hard to videotape given the necessary viewing angle to show the structure of the heap being made.

Anyway, congratulations to everyone in the “Algorithmic Thinking” Knight School class of 2009! Great job!

[EDIT: Also, I don't remember seeing that Obama clip before. That's pretty funny. I wonder who clued the Commander-in-Chief in...]

C in a Nutshell in a Nutshell

Chris Rebert — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:12:19 +0000

I recently finished reading C in a Nutshell, which I highly recommend as an excellent C reference and tutorial to anyone with programming experience. I previously learned some MS Visual C++ at CyberCamps some years ago, but finding the language a bit clunky, I searched around the web, found Python and have been in love with it ever since. But since every programmer should know (at least most of) C, and I had a C/Assembly course coming up, I resolved to learn C properly; hence the book. Anyway, here are my notes from it, both as a memo to myself and in the hope that others might find it mildly useful:

Interesting trivia

index[array] ≡ array[index] ≡ *(array + index)
arguments to a function may be evaluated in any order by the compiler
The signed-ness of plain char is compiler-dependent

C99 Hotness

Boolean type introduced:

#include 
bool a = true, b = false;

//-comments formally allowed
declarations can go anywhere within a function; C89 forces you to declare everything at the start of the function

Syntax

#include 
#include "your_own_lib.h"
enum SomeEnum {A, B, C};
typedef someDeclaration newTypeAlias;

const keyword, like Java’s final
static keyword means private to this source file, like C#’s internal

Basics

int main(int argc, char * argv[])
char aStringVariable[length];

EXIT_SUCCESS, EXIT_FAILURE defined in stdlib.h

Function pointers

int foo(char);//declare function
int (*funcPtr)(char) = foo;
int result = funcPtr('a');//use func pointer

Objects

Defining

struct Foo
//unions use same syntax, just w/ different keyword
{
    int a;
    char b;
}

Using

/* C99: */ struct Foo bar = {.b = 'Q', .a = 42};
/* C89: */ struct Foo baz = {42, 'Q'};

Defining macros

Function-like macros: #define foo(a,b) ((a)-(b))
The ## operator within macros:
- Given: #define foo(x) MSG_##x
- Then: foo(A) ≡ MSG_A
The # operator within macros – converts operand to string

Useful macros

Assertions:

#include 
assert(booleanExpression);

#define NDEBUG – disables asserts
#error "Message" – causes compile error with given message
Conditional compilation: #if, #elif, #else, #endif

Metadata macros

__func__ – name of current function
__LINE__ – current line number
__FILE__ – name of current file
__TIME__ – time of compilation
__DATE__ – date of compilation

Standards macros

__STDC__ – bool for whether compiler is C89-compliant
__STDC_VERSION__ – 199901L >= if C99-compliant
__STDC_IEC_559__ – bool for IEEE-754 compliance

Stdlib survey

stdlib.h: malloc(), free(), array sorting, binary search, str->num conversion, random numbers
stddef.h: defines NULL, size_t
string.h: also includes general array/memory stuff
math.h, time.h: speak for themselves
errno.h: defines errno global var
ctype.h: ASCII character classification
fenv.h: controls floating point rounding mode, etc [C99 only]
limits.h: limits of integer types
float.h: describes properties of float representation
See also my summary of the essential parts of the stdlib

GCC options

-o exec_name (instead of a.out)
-Idir_name:other_dir_name (places to also look for headers)
-fsyntax-only (just check syntax)
-ansi (use C89)
-std=c99 (use C99)
-Wall (warn about a bunch of stuff)
-pedantic (adhere pedantically to standard)
-Wextra (warn about strange/pointless code)
-g (add debug info)
-pg (add profiling hooks)

F before D, except after C

Chris Rebert — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:25:07 +0000

A public service announcement to anyone taking the Math 20 series at UCSD:

I would strongly advise you to take Math 20F (Linear Algebra) before Math 20D (Differential Equations), despite how that seems alphabetically out of order. Why? Because a few classes into 20D last quarter, my Prof basically said that the current order is weird (she has taught both courses) because 20D uses matrices a lot, yet there isn’t enough time to go over them in detail in 20D, so you basically have to hope learning matrices in a rushed fashion mostly from the book will work for you (it didn’t work well enough for me and definitely affected my grade). And now that I am taking 20F, I can further corroborate this since so far (and looking a bit ahead in the textbook), 20F seems like it could be summarized as “Matrices 101″.

So, save yourself a lot of pain and:

Take 20F before 20D!

If you have any questions, feel free to use the Comments section.

Please Pardon Our Dust

Chris Rebert — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 05:48:19 +0000

Just finished moving the blog off of WordPress.com and onto my own servers, hence why the theme suddenly changed. I’m still finishing up the setup, so don’t be alarmed if things suddenly change over the next day or so.

You may be wondering why I’m going through all the trouble to move things. Basically, WordPress.com quite frankly has a lousy theme selection. Also, using my own server gives me more control. I will applaud them on making moving one’s blog quite easy, with nice import-export wizards and making it simple to delete one’s blog. No service provider lock-in.

Anyway, thanks for reading! New posts are planned and will be on their way Real Soon (TM)!

The Next Generation

Chris Rebert — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:18:42 +0000

I thought this was funny enough to warrant immortalization in a blog post:

Notice the resemblance?

So, apparently my facial hair makes me (vaguely) resemble the venerable Commander Riker. Teh awesome!

Thanks to the mysterious and ingenious “Mr. Zhang” of Desmond for this revelation.

I apologize in advance to my readers for the inappropriate foreign-language comments this post will engender (just you wait and see).

ALL CAPS Laws

Chris Rebert — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:05:08 +0000

My friend does email customer service for a computer company; I worked with him for while. When you work in customer service long enough, you see just how unreasonable people can get (and how little the average person knows about computers). In particular, both angry people and computer-illiterate people tend to use ALL CAPS in their messages, which makes them annoyingly hard to read. Today, my friend quoted to me a recent email from a stupid customer, which reminded me of all this and led me to coin:

Rebert’s Law of Internet Conversations:

Grammar quality and number of capitalized letters are inversely correlated in internet messages.

Not to be outdone, my friend quickly retorted with the more humorous:

Silver’s Corollary:

As the percentage of capital letters in a message approaches 1, the probability of the message making any f*cking sense whatsoever approaches 0.

I like his formulation better. ;)

Pop Tarts – My Disturbing Discovery

Chris Rebert — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:30:51 +0000

I just now went to OVT for some cram study food. After deciding on Kellogg’s Pop Tarts, I needed to choose which flavor to buy. There was Cherry, Blueberry, Chocolate, and maybe Strawberry (it’s late, okay?). Thinking I ought to choose the healthiest flavor, I compared the fruit flavors and didn’t notice any significant difference. Then just for kicks, I compared Chocolate Fudge. And I was shocked. The nutrition facts seemed identical! One would think fruit would be at least slightly better than chocolate! But it gets worse. The one difference I could find between them: Chocolate Fudge had 2% more Calcium.

Chocolate being healthier than fruit!? What is this country coming to??? This probably also says something about Pop Tarts’ nutritional value.

I think I’ll choose baked pita chips next time…

[EDIT] (a few minutes later): And now I can somewhat ironically report that chocolate doesn’t taste as good as fruit. (sigh)

Amateur Fiction FTW!

Chris Rebert — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:57:25 +0000

My friend recently started publishing a serialized short science fiction story on his group blog, and it’s terrific so far. It’s intriguingly titled “Cities of Bronze and Glass”. It’s about a “device” that seeks to find the mysterious “Creator”. In doing so, it buries itself only after making a backup of itself, which it names “Two”. This inevitably leads to a large population of devices (“Forty-Three” is mentioned at one point), all being backups and all trying to find “the Creator”. I don’t think I can adaquately summarize the typical SciFi atmosphere of mystery in it, suffice it to say that no further backstory is given, which is par for the course in Science Fiction. I highly encourage you to read it as it’s quite novel and original. My friend hasn’t finished it yet, so I eagerly await the upcoming parts in order to learn how the story ends.

If you like it, you might also enjoy a considerably longer story from the same blog: “Awakening“. I think my other friend ,the Illuminati Ninja, would appreciate that story, especially considering the vague similarity to his story which was took place on a Pan-Dimensional Waffle, among other settings.

This post has been brought to you by Shameless Plugs Inc.: “(Non-)profit unblushing internet cross-promotion since 1994.”

Tetris: Now proven to be hard

Chris Rebert — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:47:37 +0000

Here’s some random interesting research I came upon:

Tetris is Hard

Apparently Tetris has now been mathematically proven to be computationally difficult. NP-complete to be more precise.

I suppose this means I’ve been solving traveling salesman problems all this time without even knowing it! Now if we could just harness this power…

Frink – The Street

Chris Rebert — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:36:58 +0000

In the course of an epic fail journey I plan to blog about soon, even though I probably would do better instead to forget the event entirely and suppress all memory of it, I walked by and took special note of an honest-to-goodness street with the same name as every nerd’s favorite minor Simpsons character, Professor Frink.

Professor John I.Q. Nerdelbaum Frink, Jr.

I am referring to Frink Avenue, San Diego. Go ahead and click the link to see the Google Map of it and prove that I don’t have mental problems. Have you clicked it yet? Good.

I’m sorry, but that’s just plain fucking awesome. It really belongs on some Simpsons fan blog or a humor blog.

Anyway, just though I’d bring that to the internet’s collective attention.

Biohazard (no, my room isn't that dirty)

Chris Rebert — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:20:37 +0000

I thought I’d chronicle this just because of the sheer weirdness factor.

As I took the elevator up and back, to and from the math homework boxes so I could turn in my MATLAB homework, both times two students got on the elevator wearing gloves and moving a large, wheeled trash bin with biohazard warnings on it, apparently relatively empty with its top cover askew. And if I recall correctly, I noticed on the down trip another sticker which indicated that its contents was used needles. This obviously was a bit unsettling.

Now in the abstract, this isn’t all that surreal; if it had happened in the Biology Department, Medical School, Pharmacy School, or Medical Center, it would have been quite reasonable.

However, as should be apparent by the second sentence of my post, this didn’t happen in any of those places. It happened in the Math building. What the heck? Why on earth should there be used needles in the math building? Personally, I’m at a loss.

I’m reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes comic (paraphrased):

(Phone rings in the house)

(Calvin answers the phone)

Calvin: Oh, hi! Yes, I’d like a large pepperoni pizza please, extra anchovies.

(Caller expresses befuddlement)

Calvin: What? Oh, sorry, must be a wrong number. (Hangs up phone)

Calvin (breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader): I like making a person’s day just a bit more surreal.

Have a surreal day, ADRIAN!

Freakin' TritonLink!

Chris Rebert — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:51:18 +0000

Ok, so I recently experienced significant problems trying to enroll in CSE 15L (Debugging Lab), but finally got them resolved and am now in the class.

Summary

Let me give you a rundown of what happened:

When my enrollment time came around, all the seats for 15L were full, so I put myself on the waitlist.
Some time later, UCSD’s CSE Department sent out a notice that a new section of the class had opened up. Unfortunately, this new section conflicted badly with my schedule, so I did not remove myself from the waitlist. For reasons that I’ll come to in a second, here’s a redacted copy of the email:

This e-mail is intended for students waitlisted in:
CSE 15L (list of sections redacted)

To all students waitlisted in CSE 15L [list of sections redacted]:
A new section has opened for CSE 15L!

You have been cleared to enroll in CSE 15L [section identification redacted],
[identification information about the new section redacted]

If this lab time works for you then you are free to enroll on Webreg.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact:
[contact information redacted]

After the passage of some time, I checked and saw I was now 1st on the waitlist. I thought to myself, “Yay! It won’t be long now!”
A day or so later, at 11PM, I get an email from TritonLink saying that it tried to add me to the class but I didn’t satisfy the prerequisites and thus was dropped from the waitlist.
- (A) WTF!? Why did you even let me put myself on the waitlist then? Or why didn’t I get a warning message about this?
- (B) Liar! I do very much indeed satisfy the prerequisites! Again, WTF!?
I go to CSE Advising to complain. The receptionist says the department is aware of the problem and has me put my name down on a clipboard of affected people.
A day or 2 passes. The deadline for adding classes is drawing near.
I go to CSE Advising again, this time to see my actual advisor. After a long wait (I don’t blame that on the department; I could have gotten a reservation), I am told by my advisor that everyone on the waitlist had been given priority for the new section, which was barring me from adding any other section of 15L. Nowhere was this mentioned in the email above, and the phrasing does nothing to suggest it. She removes the priority and I successfully enroll using a computer in the lobby.

Conclusion

Overall, this pisses me off because:

TritonLink should have been smarter. Its error email should have mentioned this hidden “priority” and its implications. Not to mention that its prereq-checking definitely leaves something to be desired.
The department’s email should have mentioned and explained this priority and its implications. As it was phrased, it did not suggest taking any action if the lab time did not work for you; that’s obviously wrong as action was very much necessary. [EDIT: I want to emphasize that I don't hold the writer particularly at fault and don't think they should be reprimanded, but rather I think the Department would do well to learn from this example in the future.]

Update [added 1/31/09]

I have since sent feedback to TritonLink and got a quick and kind, albeit vague and not entirely satisfying, email response about how their development team is taking all feedback into account (while not mentioning any specifics about my problems), and that my comments were also forwarded to the Registrar’s office since they relate to the Waitlist process, which I appreciate.

I also sent a formal letter by post to the CSE Department regarding their role in this and how they could improve the situation. I have yet to receive a response.

"Phrase from Nearest Book" Meme

Chris Rebert — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 07:29:13 +0000

Via a random blog on Planet Python:

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Here’s my fairly boring quote from Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised – In Brief (which beat out The Definitive ANTLR Reference by mere inches):

If the bylaws are silent on the method of appointing members of special committees, the method is typically set for that committee in the motion creating the committee.

Parliamentary procedure may be dry, but it is truly essential to running good meetings. I got this book just a few weeks ago using overnight shipping to prepare for the first Associated Students Council meeting I attended.

Let’s just hope I never have to move to Object to the Consideration of a Question.

P.S. The naming of the Previous Question motion is just plain confusing, history be damned. Thank goodness we just use “Call the Question” instead.

xkcd is My Homecomic

Chris Rebert — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 08:56:24 +0000

This is quite a bit belated, but about a month ago, on the way back to ERC from the Computer Science Engineering (CSE) building, I ran into a guy wearing the same shirt as me, specifically, the one based on this comic. He was talking on a phone as we walked each other. We looked at each other and complimented each other on excellent choice of shirt. I wonder what the odds of that happening are? If only I had taken Stats…

The Military

Chris Rebert — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 08:30:26 +0000

Apparently UCSD is located near a military base. I’ve seen and heard military jets and a group of Apache helicopters fly by a few times now. It’s kinda surreal, not to mention noisy. Not exactly something they mention in the promotional pamphlet :)

The Six Colleges of UCSD – A Ranking Guide for Applicants

Chris Rebert — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 05:41:00 +0000

[Last updated: March 2010; Hi, College Confidential folks!]

A friend of mine who’s currently applying to college recently asked me about which college of UCSD to apply to, not knowing that you don’t choose one but rather rank them. Anyway, in the interests of helping him and other future UCSD applicants, I’m writing this guide based on my personal experience so far. I wish someone had written this for me before I’d applied; I definitely would have changed my rankings on the application. [EDIT: Just found this great webpage on the differences between the colleges. Now if they'd just link to it on the UC application...][YET ANOTHER EDIT: Here's one more.][FURTHER EDIT: Here's another person's blog post on the subject.]

Disclaimer

I’m a freshman sophomore at Eleanor Roosevelt College and my non-ERC friends are mostly from Warren, so take this all with a grain of salt. I ranked Muir first on my application and ERC second; below that, I can’t remember precisely, except that Sixth was near the bottom. Also, note that the colleges are listed below in no particular order.

Eleanor Roosevelt College (ERC)

Eleanor Roosevelt’s emphasis is on internationalism, politics, and globalization. It’s also got the longest name of all the colleges by number of syllables, hence why everyone calls it either “ERC” or “Roosevelt”. Its logo is appropriately a simple shining blue globe with longitude and latitude lines (such symbolism…). It’s home to International House (I-House), which is where foreign study abroad students live at UCSD. Anyone at UCSD can also apply to live at I-House if they want to be amongst all the various cultures. It’s Core Course (and chief defining attribute) is Making of the Modern World (MMW), which is 6 quarters long (the longest core course of any of the colleges) and is infamous for its difficulty and the amounts of reading involved. Essentially, it’s about the history of culture, society, the human race, and the human world from prehistory to the modern day. Picture a shrunken version of Columbia University’s (in)famous “Core” and you’d have something close to MMW. Except for the first 2 classes, the rest require 8-page research papers in addition to having final exams. ERC also requires that you take 3 courses about a specific geographic region of your choice (your so-called Regional Specialization), which makes some sense in today’s interconnected world. The dorms are low-rise, only 4 stories all. Yearly concert: Rockin’ Roosevelt. [UPDATE: A new, very tall transfer student housing complex has opened up in Roosevelt's hexant of campus. Aside from some dining hall crowding at the highest peak hours, no huge impact so far, but side benefit: they have a combination coffee shop/convenience store called The Village open until 1AM, and it's just a short walk from Roosevelt.]

Pros

Newest and best dorms of all the colleges; unless you’re particularly unlucky, you’ll get a single Sophomore year
Best dining hall: Cafe Ventanas (aka Cafe V), with huge floor-to-ceiling windows and beautiful wood ceiling
Best looking, with a beautiful green quad flanked by the dorms and terminating at the entrance to Cafe V
In close proximity to RIMAC gym and the new athletic field
More girls than guys demographically (not necessarily unique to ERC)
The Village (see “Update” above)
Goody’s (see “Update” under Thurgood Marshall below) is within decent walking distance (though certainly farther away than The Village, but as The Village doesn’t actually offer cooked food…). Apparently ERC is now the place for all you late-night diners (or studiers who need another Red Bull to make it through your no-sleep cram session; I say this from experience :-).

Cons

A bit far away from classes and somewhat isolated from the rest of campus; not much more than MMW classes take place here as far as I can tell, and you have to go up one decently steep hill to get to classes
Having to take MMW; do not underestimate this

Bottom Line

The college for Political Science or International Relations majors, Humanities majors, those very interested in foreign cultures, or people who place dorm and food quality above all else. Beware the intense challenge, or alternately if you’re a raving masochist, enjoy the intriguing delight, that is MMW. If you’re not going to be majoring in one of the aforementioned subjects, I’d stay the fsck away from ERC, unless all you care about is the dorms and the dining hall, which seems rather shortsighted to me, but whatever.

John Muir College

John Muir College (usually abbreviated to just “Muir”), is most frequently ranked 1st on the UCSD application and for quite good reason. It’s named after the famous naturalist John Muir, and is noted for inheriting his ethos of appreciating the beauty of nature. It’s so popular mainly because of its very flexible General Education requirements compared to the other colleges (think Brown University, only less so); just pick courses off long lists for each category (there are a variety of courses to satisfy any given GE and you’re bound to like a few of the ones on the list). Muir is also notable for having the Sun God statue on its college green (ironically because none of the other colleges would take it at the time). In case you don’t already know, the Sun God is a vividly colored statue of a bird often used as the unofficial campus mascot (the official one is the Triton, which there’s now a fountain of at the Price Center, but he’s significantly less popular). Its Core Course is Muir Writing. It appears to have several well-established student groups in its Cave of Organizations (this name might be a bit off).

Pros

Most flexible/lenient General Education requirements
the Sun God is located here
close to the old student center and the Price Center
close to the old gym and smaller sports fields
has its own surf/skateboard shop (EDIT: Muir Skate & Surf has sadly relocated off campus)
[EDIT: Had Sierra Summit cafeteria, which I recently went to and found that it rocked. It even had a fancy coffee/ice cream/fruit drink counter. And the pizza/pasta is self-service (unlike the other dining halls). Also had El Mercado, a decent taqueria. Unfortunately, they're remodeling both these they'll only reopen 2010 or so (bummer).]

Cons

Its dorms are really tall, gray, and from the Art-Deco era (don’t know about the interiors though)
[EDIT: No dining halls within the college. You're gonna have to hoof it further for food than everyone else.]
I honestly couldn’t think of any other cons; just rank it your first choice already!

Bottom Line

Unless one of the other colleges really grabs you, I strongly recommend ranking Muir as your first choice.

Earl Warren College

Earl Warren College (usually referred to simply as “Warren”) is unofficially the college for engineers. If UCSD’s summary webpage had been more helpful, I probably would have ranked Warren over Roosevelt, which is the main reason I’m writing this guide in the first place. All the Engineering and Computer Science buildings are located in Warren, probably due to its aforementioned popularity with engineers (or is it the other way around?). Its GEs are noted to be much easier for engineers than the other colleges, with the possible exception of Muir. Its Core Course is Warren Writing, which consists of 2 quarters of writing essays based on readings followed by 1 quarter of Philosophy.

Pros

It’s where the Engineering and Computer Science buildings are located
Very close to the Price Center
Has Earl’s Place, a combination general store and coffee shop open until 1AM
[EDIT: Canyon Vista cafeteria has decent food and a spectacular view]
Engineers only have to complete 2 Area Studies (3 quarters each) in topics of their choice as their distribution requirements!

Cons

Requires non-engineers to complete 2 Programs of Concentration in areas of your choice (6 quarters each)

Bottom Line

Are you an Engineer or Scientist? Then Warren should be your first or second choice. Don’t make the same mistake I did by not ranking it high.

Sixth College

Sixth College (people just call it “Sixth”) is the newest of the colleges, having been founded only in 2002. This is incidentally why it hasn’t been properly named yet; a college is called by its number until it gets named (e.g. ERC used to be Fifth College). It’s emphasis and Core Course is CAT: Culture, Art, and Technology; it claims to be an education for 21st century modernity. Sixth’s dorms are widely known to be not so great; they’re nicknamed “Camp Snoopy” since they look quite like summer camp housing. Sixth is also off in a corner of the campus and thus somewhat isolated like ERC is, though it’s closer to the Price Center. Sponsors UCSD’s RPG Club and a yearly videogame event whose name escapes me. Yearly concert: Kuncocshun

Pros

Cool name and logo; just say it to yourself: “Sixth College”, the name is a number — that’s pretty awesome IMHO
Modern
High culture
Technology
The dorms are said to be roomy compared to the other colleges

Cons

Founded very very recently; not firmly well-established or defined; might not have all the kinks worked out yet. This was my main concern and reason for ranking it low on my application. Not being a student at it, the situation on the ground may be different.
The dorms (relatively speaking)
A bit isolated
Smallest of the 6 colleges (possibly a Pro depending on your POV)
FoodWorx dining hall – Comparatively small, with basic fare; but you can get custom personal pizzas (!)

Bottom Line

Do you like to try new things? Do you like the idea of being a fearless trailblazer? Are you a technophile who also likes high culture? Does the fact it was founded only in 2002 not bother you? Then rank Sixth College high on your application. Keep in mind that I’m a serious techie and I’m the one who knowingly didn’t choose the 21st Century college; although perhaps I was wrong, who can say?

Revelle

Revelle was UCSD’s first college and as such is very traditional and has the oldest buildings. It’s notable for having its own library with integrated computer lab called CLICS. The physics department and most math classes are located here. This is about the extent of my knowledge about Revelle.

Pros

Close to the old gym and sports fields
Has its own library
Close to the old student center

Cons

Oldest dorms
Oldest architecture/buildings
Supposedly has the (comparatively) worst cafeteria; haven’t confirmed this personally though
[EDIT: Its core course, "Humanities" (abbreviation: Hum), is said to rival MMW in difficulty. <Shudder>]

Bottom Line

If the other colleges haven’t grabbed you so far, research Revelle further, as I don’t know nearly enough to make a recommendation about it. However, based on the little information I do have, it seems like Roosevelt but with less internationalism and worse amenities.

Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall (if you haven’t discovered the pattern yet, “Marshall”) is named after the Supreme Court Justice and emphasizes community involvement and multiculturalism. Its logo is appropriately a drawing of three hands grasping each other’s wrists in unity. Its Core Course is Dimensions of Culture (DOC), which is about race, identity, and the law in the USA, paralleling the historical times of Marshall’s namesake. According to The Guardian (UCSD’s student newspaper), DOC is currently in the process of being revamped. Its freshman dorms are tall, industrial, concrete buildings located right next to OVT (see Pros). Its apartment dorms are a large group of brown and white 2-story buildings located in a cluster.

Pros

Home to Oceanview Terrace Cafe (OVT), which is open until 1AM 9PM (curse you, UC budget cuts!), one of the latest on campus; it’s known for its breakfast burritos
[UPDATE: Now also home to Goody's, a Mexican eatery and convenience store featuring burritos (slightly on the small and overpriced side compared to OVT's no-longer-offered non-breakfast burritos) and mediocre sandwiches that's open until 1AM (somewhat makes up for OVT closing earlier).]

Cons

Insufficient information to know what the Cons are; Probably a decent filler choice to put some distance between your application and ERC.

Bottom Line

Same as for Revelle; I simply don’t know enough to make a recommendation. But if you like its emphasis, you should look into it.

Conclusion

EDIT: It seems my timing is excellent. The Guardian’s current issue has a great article about the difficulty of uninformed applicants ranking the six colleges [Further EDIT: Link unfortunately deadened by the Guardian's website remodel!]. The post has been updated with the article’s additional info.

I hope you found this guide helpful; I know I would have. If you have any comments, questions, or if you went or are currently going to one of the colleges and think I misrepresented it, please feel free to tell me and I’ll update this post. Best of luck on your college applications! Get started early and don’t procrastinate about them.

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Addendum: Switching colleges

[Written in response to a comment on this post.]

The little-known secret of UCSD’s college system: though discouraged and made to sound impossible by the administration, you can switch colleges (a couple of my suitemates from last year who were engineers managed to), but there are restrictions. Here’s the skinny: You can switch colleges, but only if you would be able to graduate at least 2 quarters earlier by doing it (due to differing General Education requirements); if you won’t graduate any earlier, you unfortunately can’t change just because your GEs suck. You also can’t apply for the switch until Spring Quarter of your Freshman year (if granted, the switch is effective the following Fall), so you’re gonna have to take at least the first three quarters of your college’s core course. There are some other fairly minor restrictions.

For details on switching colleges at UCSD, read the Inter-College Transfer Request form (PDF).

iTunes Genius – It's not what you think it's for

Chris Rebert — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:17:55 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you’ve probably heard about Apple‘s latest announcement (apologies for linking to CNET; I couldn’t find a better treatment of the story and didn’t want to waste time), which includes, among other things, iTunes version 8. iTunes 8 comes with a new feature called “Genius”, which is basically a smart playlist generator (or a less good version of Last.fm or Pandora, depending on how you look at it). First, it takes an inventory of your music library and (supposedly anonymously according to the setup screen) uploads this to Apple. Then you pick a song, click the “Genius” button, and Genius autogenerates a playlist from your library of songs that should go well together, presumably basing its selections on users who have similar musical tastes/libraries.

The feature works okay, at least on the few tests I did, though again, I would think Pandora or Last.fm ought to be better at this as they’ve been at it longer, but Genius may ultimately end up being better by being more mainstream and thus getting more data. However, the more interesting thing to me is pondering what Apple is doing with all this data they’re gathering. I’m betting that in addition to using it to generate purchase recommendations (i.e. the Genius Sidebar) ala Amazon.com or Netflix (iTunes Prize anyone?), they’re going to do some statistical analysis on the data and sell it for big bucks, thus becoming a Billboard of sorts for digital music. The iTunes Music Store already provides them with similar data which they probably already sell, but now they’ve found a rather ingenious (no pun intended) way to get people to willingly fork over data about the rest of their music that was acquired elsewhere (e.g. filesharing, CD ripping). Thus, the recommendation and playlist generation services are but a fascade to hide Genius’ true purpose. Nice use of bait-and-switch Apple! (Ok, it’s not really bait-and-switch, but I can’t think of the correct word at the moment). I can already hear the share price rising.

Another component of the announcement was a new iPod touch (or in technical lingo, the “2nd Generation” iPod touch (anyone else reminded of TNG? Really, no one? Bugger.)), which explains why they were giving them away this summer to college students buying Macs (such as myself). I half expected this when I took advantage of the offer, but it still annoys me that my gadget is now outdated. I still had to pay the tax on it as Apple is located in California, so it wasn’t completely gratis for me. Oh well. It’s hard to complain too loudly about something so very cool and useful that’s essentially free. I just hope they continue to support Gen 1 for a good while longer.

And on that note, I recommend “Things” if anyone’s in the market for an iTouch/iPhone todo-list App. Its interface is very good (excepting the anomaly of the “Inbox”, but just ignore it and you’ll be fine), it’s only $10, which is much cheaper than the Omni Group alternative last time I checked, and it’ll eventually add support for syncing to its desktop counterpart (which I don’t care about in the least, but hey, whatever floats your boat.) A friend of mine also has good things to say about “Todo” by Appigo, if you don’t like Things for some reason (I personally haven’t tried Todo). Either one is miles better than using the built-in Notes App, which is not very well suited to To-dos. You can’t even reorder the items in Notes without editing them! Epic Fail.

P.S. Yes, I realize this isn’t a proper first blog post where the author introduces themself, but I tend to procrastinate and wanted to get this out while it was still fresh in my head. I’ll do a proper intro post Real Soon (TM).