repak shawahb
your little sister's cesspool tea party

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rsw@jfet.org


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Tue, 31 May 2005

it's a wrap

I just got back from turning over the keys to my old apartment. It's official, I am no longer a North Austinite. I have to say, that thirty-second commute this morning was HAWT.

Another thing: the Gold's I now go to has substantially better-looking women than the one to which I used to go. I first noticed this when I went in yesterday, but chalked it up to the fact that I was in there late (10a) on Memorial day—the place was truly packed. This morning at my regular time (6a), however, I was stunned to note that the quality hadn't declined any on account of the early hour. Damn.

Oh, one other thing regarding last night: apparently I'm now "the little guy," or at least that's what the waitress noted as I shattered the previous second-place record: "it's always the little guys..." I dunno, though; it really took all my fatty powers to pack away those last eight.


[ permalink | 7 comments ]

Mon, 30 May 2005

...like giving birth in reverse

Tonight Mike, Cyrus, and I went to Pluckers for all-you-can-eat wing night. Prominently featured on one wall (the "Wall of Flame") are the top five wing-eaters of each gender. The women's records are somewhat unimpressive—first place is 50, and second through fifth are all in the 30s. The men, on the other hand, put away substantially more. In particular, when we arrived, the records were 119, 77, 75, 74, and 71.

I'm happy to report that 71-guy is now off the list, and yours truly holds second place with 78 wings.

I'm gonna kill the next chicken I see.


[ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ]

Sat, 28 May 2005

move: defeated

I'm now basically moved. Everything from my old apartment is now in my new apartment, and I've transferred everything between my garages as well. The only thing that remains is cleaning up my old apartment a little bit (to ensure that they don't try to withhold some of my deposit), dropping off a shitload of clothes at Salvation Army (why didn't I do that last year?), and shuttling my unreasonable number of vehicles to my new place.

Since I don't have DSL any more, I'm not planning on having a land line at all this year. I guess this means I'll need to be more diligent about charging my cell phone...


[ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ]

Thu, 26 May 2005

that's where I keep my stuff!

I'm now in the process of moving. Tonight, I moved most of my non-furniture stuff into the garage in preparation for tomorrow, when it will actually be moved from here to there.

Observation: milk crates are still the king of moving supplies.


[ permalink | 5 comments ]

ddns is cool

Now that I'm not going to have a static IP at home, I'm probably going to use dynamic DNS so that positron.jfet.org still points to my home address. It turns out that this is pretty easy with bind9.

The first thing to do is generate yourself a new dnssec key: 

[kwantam@positron ~]$ dnssec-keygen -a HMAC-MD5 -b 512 -n HOST positron

This generates two files, one called foo.private and one called foo.key. Take the key (a base64-encoded mess) from the foo.private file and put it in /etc/named.conf on the static machine: 

key positron {
        algorithm "hmac-md5";
        secret "<your key here>";
};

Now, in the zone entry for the domain you want to dynamically update, add an appropriate allow-update clause: 

zone "jfet.org" {
        type master;
        file "named.jfet.org";

        allow-update {
                key positron;
        };
};

Now you're all set. You can use nsupdate to perform the updates from any client machine on which you have the foo.private and foo.key files: 

[kwantam@positron ~]$ nsupdate -k /etc/bind/tsig/foo.private
> update delete positron.jfet.org A
> update add positron.jfet.org 1200 IN A 18.243.0.246
> ^D

For more info, see the dnssec-keygen, nsupdate, and named.conf manpages.


[ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ]

now I can relax

Everything seems to be working fine. ...except that I forgot to alias rsw to myself, and have been bouncing lots of email for the last 12 hours or so. Oh well. That's fixed, and cypherpunks seems to be working. What more could I ask for?


[ permalink | 2 comments ]

Wed, 25 May 2005

the waiting begins

All necessary setup is (should be?) done; at this point, all that remains is for dns changes to propagate. The name of my CoLo'd machine is proton.jfet.org, in case you're wondering.

Here's to getting it right on the first try...


[ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ]

Mon, 23 May 2005

nope, just dead

After much celebration last week at the fact that I was to become a Speakeasy customer, it turns out that I'm, well, not. Apparently the loop on which I'll be living just doesn't support DSL, period, so I'm going to have to get a cable modem instead.

This is good and bad. Good because now I'll actually have cable instead of stealing it, and bad because I won't have a static IP at home.

ServerPronto to the rescue—I now have a dedicated machine at a CoLo (dedicated means I'm basically renting an entire machine plus network from them, so I'm root and they're not). This has the additional benefit of letting me transition pretty much seamlessly from my current situation without any downtime. I just have to get everything working on that machine first.

To do:

  • kernel
  • dns
  • mysql
  • sendmail
  • imap
  • apache2
  • svn
  • horde2
  • cypherpunks
  • ???
  • profit


[ permalink | 7 comments ]

Fri, 20 May 2005

revenge of the Sith

I went and saw Sith yesterday. (No, I wasn't insane enough to go to a midnight showing.) It's certainly the best of the first 3, but I still don't think it's as good as 4, 5, or 6. (OK, maybe it's about as good as 6.)

But it is nice and violent—lots of severed limbs—and Yoda and Windu are both badasses.

Be warned, Mar: Natalie Portman hit a wall. Hoooooooooooooooooooooooly crap. Also, she can't act for shit.


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Thu, 19 May 2005

vader is everywhere

...or at least, he's hiding in some very strange places.


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dsl is dead! long live dsl!

Looks like I can't get SBC service at my new apartment. Fortunately, I can get Speakeasy! It's cheaper, and I don't even have to have a working phone line (they now offer "dedicated" packages). Hot.


[ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ]

Wed, 18 May 2005

fancy footwork

After literally months of saying to myself "I need a new pair of shoes," I finally went to Nordstrom's and bought me some Puma NuMostros. I highly recommend them to all y'all; they're fucking comfy as hell.


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deep thoughts

(19:33:09) scrap1r0n: layout is kind of like masturbating to thoughts of an ex-girlfriend---it's the kind of guilty pleasure in which everyone participates at some point, and you're just not supposed to admit to doing and/or liking it.
(19:33:29) truculent eunuch: ?
(19:33:36) truculent eunuch: i admit both to doing and liking layout
(19:34:03) truculent eunuch: and, for that matter, masturbating while thinking about ex-girlfriend(s)

Look out, Sherra.


[ permalink | 2 comments ]

taking out the euro-trash

I hate when people spam all of campus. That's why I always respond, also spamming all of campus. Cognitive dissonance rules. 

From: Rachel Ingwer
Subject: Ask MIT to Divest from Sudan
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 08:59:53 -0400
To: (lots of people)


                                       WWW.MITDIVEST.COM

                        Don?t let MIT support the Sudanese government.

                       Sign the petition and Speak out against Genocide.



For more information, see www.sudanactivism.com or www.divestsudan.com


Never again, pledged the international community after the Holocoust
Never again, it repeated after Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda
Now, a genocide is being committed again
DARFUR, SUDAN
Since February 2003, the crisis in Darfur has killed more than 380,000 and displaced almost 3
million.  UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan calls Darfur little short of hell on earth.
While governments and the UN stall, 15,000 people die every month.
Citizens can and must take a stand against this genocide.


From: "Riad S. Wahby"
Subject: Re: Ask MIT to Divest from Sudan
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 08:34:55 -0500
To: Rachel Ingwer
    (lots of people)

Rachel Ingwer <ingwerr@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> [snip]

Perhaps you should put your money where your mouth is and go volunteer
or something.

Hopefully you'll become another statistic.

--
Riad S. Wahby
rsw@jfet.org


Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 08:57:04 -0500
From: "Riad S. Wahby"
To: "Dustin J. Rabideau"
Subject: Re: Ask MIT to Divest from Sudan

"Dustin J. Rabideau" <rabideau@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> So, sure.  List spamming--not that cool.  Wishing someone dead?
> Pretty much off the scale.
>
> Grow up.  Take a minute to think about the shit that's coming out of
> your mouth.

You ought to consult a dictionary for the definition of hyperbole.

--
Riad S. Wahby
rsw@jfet.org


Subject: Re: Ask MIT to Divest from Sudan
From: Heather M Pressler
To: "Riad S. Wahby"
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 09:51:23 -0400

Cheers,
I was thinking the same thing when I got that email and just didn't have
the balls to say it. The website is ridiculous... MIT "might" be funding
companies that "might" be funding the Sudanese government. The petition
is a waste of time.
Heather


Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 10:42:31 -0500
From: "Riad S. Wahby"
To: jesseg@alum.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Ask MIT to Divest from Sudan

Jesse Geraci <jessegeraci@gmail.com> wrote:
> Totally unnecessary. You should be ashamed of yourself.
>
> ...and, yet, as much of an ass as  you have made yourself, I wouldn't
> wish death upon you.

Hmmm, perhaps you're a better person than me?

No, wait, I've got it: you're weak-minded and unable to discern sarcasm.

--
Riad S. Wahby
rsw@jfet.org


Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 11:08:17 -0500
From: "Riad S. Wahby"
To: jesseg@alum.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Ask MIT to Divest from Sudan

Jesse Geraci <jessegeraci@gmail.com> wrote:
> whatever helps you sleep at night, dude.

You imply that I have a guilty conscience, yet you're the one spewing
sanctimony.

--
Riad S. Wahby
rsw@jfet.org


Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 10:38:01 -0500
From: "Riad S. Wahby"
To: Ben Ward
Subject: Re: Ask MIT to Divest from Sudan

Ben Ward <benward@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> You're a jerk. Just because you don't like someone sending a message to
> you, you spam everyone a second time.
> No one wants to hear you spewing malignant thoughts about a tragedy
> involving millions of people.

Actually, I was spewing malignant thoughts about Rachel.  I could care
less about your so-called tragedy.

--
Riad S. Wahby
rsw@jfet.org


Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 10:38:50 -0500
From: "Riad S. Wahby"
To: Shankar Mukherji
Subject: Re: Ask MIT to Divest from Sudan

Shankar Mukherji <mukherji@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> You really thought that your two line little comment was so beautifully
> insightful that you had to send it to virtually every student on campus?
> Holy hell, I think I see the light now!  God..thanks man, if only you had
> responded I little earlier - I wouldn't have wasted my *thirty seconds* (!!!)
> helping out a cause I have spent 2 years working on!!111!!!
>
> How come you right-wingers never know when to just shut up?  Just do me a
> favour - next time you feel like showing off what an incredible moron you are
> to thousands of people, remember that without liberals like us there would be
> no America, no precious freedom of speech that allows us the pleasure of
> learning what a pathetic excuse for drivel passes for discourse on the right.

Do me a favor, stop breathing.  You're wasting valuable oxygen.

--
Riad S. Wahby
rsw@jfet.org


Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 11:34:38 -0500
From: "Riad S. Wahby"
To: Shankar Mukherji
Subject: Re: Ask MIT to Divest from Sudan

Shankar Mukherji <mukherji@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> The oxygen's only valuable because you wingnuts keep burning trees.  Hey I
> hear there's a war going on Iraq, I bet the military is looking for smart
> people like you to go blow themselves up "for freedom" - interested?
>
> Stop sending e-mail.  You're wasting valuable electrons.

You're so cute when you're pissed off!  The women must go CRAZY!

--
Riad S. Wahby
rsw@jfet.org


[ permalink | 2 comments ]

the end of an era?

Last night the right hinge on kung-foo broke. I'm definitely going to have it fixed—it's still under warranty, so it's free—but this has me thinking that maybe I ought to get a new laptop.

Maybe an IBM this time?


[ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ]

Tue, 17 May 2005

nude no more

Yesterday I got my new I Am Analog t-shirt from threadless, so today I wore it to work.

Shut up. My co-workers already know I'm a nerd.

I really want Ctrl + Z, but unfortunately it's sold out at the moment. Maybe the'll reprint it.


[ permalink | 5 comments ]

Fri, 13 May 2005

embrace the dark side

I like being pissed off. I don't think that's quite normal—most people are upset when they're, well, upset. For the most part, when I get angry, there's an undertone of amusement.

This isn't always the case—when I really lose my shit and my vision goes red and I actually want to kill, that's different, but that doesn't happen more than once or twice a year. You might think I'm in this state when I'm repeatedly punching the steering wheel while shouting "I'll fucking KILL YOU" at the sonofabitch in front of me going ten below the speed limit, but even that doesn't count as truly losing it. (Hint: those of you who witnessed me nearly tear apart one of my Kinesis keyboards in Destiny Kitchen have seen the real thing.)

Anyway, back to "normal" pissed. Let me give you an example. I walked out of the gym today and found that some fucking bitch (not an assumption—her purse was clearly visible on the passenger seat) in an Eddie Bauer edition Explorer had parked about six inches from me. I was pissed. Then it occurred to me—I have paper (and not just any paper—my emergency stash of engineering paper) and a pen!

next time
why don't
you park
even closer
you dumb

cunt

I hope she's crying right now. I smiled all the way home.


[ permalink | 9 comments ]

Mon, 09 May 2005

surrounded by midgets

If you watched the heart-wrenching idiocy of the 49ers in the draft this year (I was subjected to substantial discussion on this topic because Mike is—though after this draft he claims was—a die-hard 49ers fan), you were probably completely appalled at the fact that most sports analysts actually gave them a good grade on their draft performance.

It's a painful fact that basically everyone in a position of power in the NFL completely misunderstands the correct way of running a draft. Yes, there are exceptions—but they generally pick at the bottom of the draft, since they tend to be the good teams. Teams at the top, on the other hand, tend to stay there, because they overextend their cap in an attempt to pick up a magic pill of a player who will carry the rest of their pathetic franchise to—being optimistic here—a better than 50/50 record.

If you've gotten this far, you'd probably have some interest in reading Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League, an analysis of the draft which concludes something basically anyone with half a brain should be able to intuit—picks at the top of the first round are just not worth it.

Some day I'll fix this, though I haven't figured out how to become the GM of an ailing NFL team just yet.


[ permalink | 4 comments ]

badass 101

If you want to look cool in the gym, be sure to wear a t-shirt prominently featuring Horowitz and Hill's transistor man on the front.

For extra style points, add the simplified LM741 schematic to the back.


[ permalink | 1 comment ]

Sun, 08 May 2005

...it's highly addictive!

I went into 7-eleven today and bought two cans of sugar free Mad Croc and a couple summer-sized (translation for non fa-ites: 20 oz.; other possibilities include term-sized, i.e. 1 liter, and diabetes-sized, i.e. 2 liter) diet Mountain Dews. The cashier sort of looked at me funny—"that's a lot of caffeine," she said.

"Once you get locked into a serious caffeine habit, the tendency is to push it as far as you can," I replied without pause. She was confused for a second, then she chuckled when she decided I must be joking.

In other news, here's another candidate for bachelor chow:

  • 1 can tuna
  • 1 can Great Northern Beans

    Open tuna, drain water. Open beans, drain fluid. Transfer contents of tuna can to bean can (yes, there's enough room) and mix well. Add condiments to taste (I recommend pepper, garlic, and vinegar, though some of you will doubtless opt for mayo instead).

Note that on top of requiring no cooking, this requires the use of nothing but a can opener and a fork. You don't need a dish at all—a sign of true bachelor chow greatness.


[ permalink | 3 comments ]

Sat, 07 May 2005

heaven in a handbasket

Tonight I went and saw Kingdom of Heaven with Tim, Mike, Katie, and Alida. I went into it expecting Braveheart, but set in the crusades. It wasn't that exactly.

First of all, the ratio of battle to not-battle is way too low. Don't get me wrong, there's some high-quality medieval gore in this movie, and the siege machinery is delicious, but at times it really drags. Also, and maybe this is the towel-head in me talking, it's hard care that much about the Christian army—I really wanted Saladin to crush the Crusaders.

On the upside, Jeremy Irons is a badass as always, and Liam Neeson, though his role ends pretty early on, is sweet, too. If you read the credits, you'll see that Edward Norton plays the king, but don't get your hopes up too high, ladies—he's a leper, and his face is always covered by a mask. Whatever... you're all gonna swoon at Orlando Bloom the whole time anyway.

By far the best part of this movie is Sibylla, played by Eva Green. Her eyes are, in a word, breathtaking—think Jennifer Connelly in Hulk.

If you haven't seen it yet, my vote is you can wait for it to come to DVD.


[ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ]

Thu, 05 May 2005

fuck it dude, let's go bowling

OK, you have to admit: a movie theater that has a wait staff serving food (and alcohol!)—during the movie—is pretty sweet. That's the Alamo Draft House.

Check this out, though: they also do a "rolling roadshow." They bring a projector, sound system, and screen somewhere thematic and show a movie. Currently, that would be The Big Lebowski—at a bowling alley. Admission includes a lane.

Other entertaining rolling road shows of the past (according to Tim): raft down the river to a remote undisclosed location and watch Deliverance. Better yet, float on a tube on Lake Travis with a screen set up on the shore and watch Jaws.


[ permalink | 1 comment ]

MASTer blaster

OK, I have to vent a little bit.

At work I'm using a simulator called Saber to do mixed-signal simulations (Verilog code alongside analog circuits). In place of some big nasty analog circuits I'm using behavioral models. These models are written in Saber's modelling language, MAST.

An aside: have you ever considered that creating a good circuit modelling language requires a decent knowledge of mesh theory? It's actually kind of cool, when you think about it...

OK, so here's what I need to bitch about: the MAST parser requires a particular bracing style—what kind of crap is that? 

if (output_state == l4_0) {
	// ummm... do something
}

Yeah, it doesn't matter that much, but it just bothers me on general principle that their parser is so bad it can't accept any other kind of bracing.


[ permalink | 1 comment ]

Tue, 03 May 2005

something cute

At work recently, I was trying to make a bunch of ratiometric resistors robust against systematic process variation (of, e.g., poly sheet resistance). A good way to do this is to build all of the resistors out of identically-sized subunits. The problem was, I had to make some rather inconvenient values, e.g., 25.3666...

After some reflection, a rather elementary method of synthesizing an arbitrary resistance occurred to me. Now, I'm guessing that this is not a new discovery, but since I'd never seen it before, I figured some of y'all might appreciate it, too.

Basically, you normalize the desired resistance by the unit resistor. The integer portion of the quotient tells you how many unit resistors to connect in series; you then invert the remainder, resulting in a normalized conductance value. This tells you how many parallel branches you need, plus the remainder, which you convert back to resistance to get more series branches, et cetera.

For example, let's say I want 8.7k out of 2k units. Then:

  • 8.7/2 = 4.35, so I put 4*2k in series.
  • 1/.35 = 2.8571, so in series with the above I put 2*2k in parallel.
  • 1/.8571 = 1.16666667, so in parallel with the above I put 2k.
  • 1/(.16666667) = 6, so in series with the above I put 6*2k in parallel.

So we have 4*2k+(2k||2k||(2k+(2k||2k||2k||2k||2k||2k))) = 8.7k.

Note that while this will always give a solution, it's not guaranteed to be a minimal one.

In perl: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

$unit = $ARGV[0];
$res  = $ARGV[1];
$precision = $ARGV[2] || 1e-2;

unless ($unit && $res)
{
        print "Usage: $0 <unit> <resistance>\n";
        exit(-1);
}

$norm = $res/$unit;

for ($i=0;;$i++)
{
        $whole = int($norm);
        $norm -= $whole;

        print "(" . ($i%2?"1/":"") . $whole . "x";

        last if $norm<$precision;

        print ($i%2?"||":"+");

        $norm = 1/$norm;
}

print ")"x($i+1) . "\n";

By the way, the above syntax highlighting was done using code2html.


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dear santa...

I already sent this to fort-awesome, but I'm going to put it here anyway.

You know what I want? I want to be able to synthesize board layouts directly from Verilog. Also, I want the synthesis tool to be able to use different logic families—including families based on discretes.

A 64-bit carry lookahead adder in 2N3904 ECL would be like the Raquel Welch of circuits.


[ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ]

Mon, 02 May 2005

a great molecule

On Saturday, Mike, Cyrus, Matt, and I celebrated the first of what promises to be the greatest holiday of all time. Initially it was called "Man Day," appropriate because it was celebrated at Mike's house, a.k.a. "The Man House." In the tradition of Fort Awesome, however, I suggested that we instead dub it "Misogyny Day."

The inaugural Misogyny Day went down like this: get up, cancel plans to go biking because the weather was rainy in the morning (I went to the gym instead), grill up some meat in Mike's back yard (utilizing copious quantities of lighter fluid and strike anywhere matches—you know, for kids—in the process), watch Fist of Legend (quite possibly the greatest Kung Fu movie of all time, though Iron Monkey would also be a strong contender), then watch a bunch of battle scenes from other movies (including The Last of the Mohicans, Braveheart, Gladiator, and The Matrix). After that, we wasted several hours playing video games, then finished up the night by going to The Yellow Rose (no, "Joanie" was not working).

Ahh, 17-ß-hydroxy-4-androstene-3-one, how we love thee.


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