I wanted to see if the CPU issue would present itself in another music player, and seeing as how Windows comes with Windows Media Player, I tried that. It didn’t have the problem, so I kept listening to music with it. Then I noticed that, of course, it doesn’t work with Snarl, and I was surprised to find that no plugin with that functionality exists. I set out to see what it would take to write such a plugin, and boy is it hairy! There are a lot of ins and outs to it, and I spent approximately 5 hours Googling, reading and piecing together information just so I can set up a build environment with which I can write the plugin. I think I am basically done at this point, but I have no idea if I’ll figure out how to listen to the right events and forward them to Snarl. More to come.

Truthfully, while WMP is not a very full-featured player, and its international text support for tags is not compatible with any other player (though it does support writing non-Latin characters), it looks awesome in Vista with Aero enabled. It also has a very nice view of albums. I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it for long, but I’ll keep it around for a while. Let’s try the full Vista experience, I say.

Here's what I meant when I said I liked the album view.

So here’s where my idea comes in. What if a single contiguous file representing a virtual hard disk volume could be encrypted in such a way as to allow two passwords to decrypt it? One password would reveal the true data, and the other would reveal harmless or, better yet, misleading information. If this were possible, the spy would feel free to reveal the dummy password somewhere into the 24^th hour of torture (so that he or she doesn’t arouse suspicion). I don’t know if this makes good tactical sense, but it is certainly a clever way to get off the hook and buy yourself some time.

When I came up with this, I had no idea if it was technically possible. It is crucial that such double encryption be undetectable and that the knowledge of the dummy password is not enough to give you access to the true data. Well, it turns out that not only is this scheme possible, but it has already been implemented. I just found out about it. You can get your very own kit for buying time under torture by downloading, installing and setting up TrueCrypt — open-source encryption software. It can encrypt whole partitions, even the ones where your OS resides, and it works on Windows.

By the way, I’m not playing with TrueCrpyt because I’m afraid I’ll find myself at the receiving end of torture. I just think cryptography is really cool.

It was written using Mono C# and was, for the most part, gracefully ported over to Windows. However, the UI toolkit it uses is GTK+, which I have found to be very subtly broken on Windows, with bugs that are difficult to reproduce. I’ll just give one example. Tomboy has a tray icon which you can click on, and a menu pops up with a list of your recent notes. If you decide against opening any notes, you might want to click elsewhere on the screen to make the menu go away. You’ll be out of luck though. It won’t go away. This bug was reported to the GTK+ team in November 2006, and it’s still not fixed.

Thankfully, a knowledgeable figure by the name of Raphaël Godart found a way to work around this bug. I tested his patch yesterday, debugged a couple of issues with it, and turned it back in to the Tomboy team. Hopefully it will be included in the next stable release. I, however, can take advantage of the patch straight away, which is awesome.

One last cool thing about Tomboy.

What you see here is a note where I have typed a bit of math. You input it by writing LaTeX code surrounded by \[  \], and when you move away from the code, Tomboy automagically turns the code into a picture. Placing the cursor over the picture turns it back into code for you to modify. It took a bit of effort on my part to get this addin to work on Windows. I hope to finish it up and send my work back to the author, so others can use this.

I used to take notes in math class using LaTeX. At the end of one semester of class, I had 39 pages of notes in a pdf file. Having the notes in Tomboy would have been much cooler though. And more organized.

My computer is fairly slow, so web video causes it some discomfort, but while watching the lectures I found that any other program (apart from the browser) that I try to use at the same time is completely unresponsive. The reason for this is because the moment the page loads the Silverlight component, the priority of the browser’s process is increased from “normal” to “above normal,” and as it pegs my CPU at 100%, no other program can function. Job well done!

Nature only uses the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Dr Feynman is referring to the fact that if you can find a simple mechanism that explains a complex system, then you can expect that mechanism to work in other places, possibly throughout all of nature. You can explain the motion of the planets around the sun with Newton’s theory of gravity and then notice that that same theory works for humans being pulled toward the center of the Earth, and that our solar system orbits around the center of the Milky Way. Thus, an example of the “small piece,” to which he is referring, is gravity.

In my department in grad school (not humanities) we were told by our director of grad studies that we should aim for A-’s because anything less meant we didn’t work hard enough in our classes and anything more meant we didn’t work hard enough at our research, such that we had too much free time to spend on our classes.

I guess the people who program most viruses just like causing mayhem apart from whatever monetary gains they might get from interested parties. But not the ones that invented this virus… I regret to say that I forgot its name, and it is now too late to find out what it was. I wanted to extend my thanks to them for being such gentlemen.

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

• 11.6″ screen
• 1.66 GHz Atom
• 3 GB RAM
• 320 GB hard drive
• NVidia ION graphics card
  • 16 shader processors
  • runs Aero perfectly
  • 1080p hardware video decoding (hells yeah!)
  • supports a max resolution of 2560 x 1600
• Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit

Simply beautiful. A nice addition would be a 20″ screen, so I can work comfortably at a desk at home. Unfortunately, because I am currently broke, and Santa Claus doesn’t exist, I will have to wait a bit before I can get this.