Paul Kuliniewicz

Think we won’t see another election-night debacle in Florida come November 2? Think again.

A few frightening excerpts from the article:

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The Exponent, Purdue’s student newspaper, finally printed my letter to the editor, a rebuttal to their misinformed pro-paperless-DRE-machine editorial from last week. I don’t know why it took nearly a week for it to get published (as I submitted it last Monday night), but there you go.

Thermopoly is a proposed alternate rule set for Monopoly that combines the classic board came with the laws of thermodynamics (together at last!). It started as a misunderstanding of Thermopylae, but an idea like this can’t be allowed to go to waste.

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That being done, all you have to do is call free() slightly less often than malloc(). You may want to examine the Solaris system libraries for a particularly ambitious implementation of this technique.

– Eric O’Dell

Out of necessity, I’ve been running SpamAssassin for some time now, and it’s done a pretty good job of getting rid of spam with barely any false positives. Yet this week, I find out I’ve missed two important e-mails due to spam filtering: one caught by my spam filter, the other caught by the spam filter Purdue’s mail server finally started running this past week. In both cases, I only became aware of it upon being contacted through other channels by the sender.

Note to self: skimming through the spamtrap once a week doesn’t quite work if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. Quit wiping it out on a weekly basis.

In not unrelated news, the outlook for a summer internship improved significantly today.

It turns out I got back to my apartment after class just as the UPS guy was coming down the street. Another minute or two later and I would’ve missed him again. As a result, I’m now reading America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. First impression: I like how it’s structured as though it were a grade-school history textbook, down to the condition log stamped on the inside front cover.

Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.

(Inside: pictures!)

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Behold, what the home computer of 2004 will look like!

Jerome Soyer has just informed me that he has been maintaining Rhythmbox Applet packages for Mandrake Cooker since August 8, 2004. For Mandrake Cooker users, all it takes to install Rhythmbox Applet is urpmi rhythmbox-applet.

Thanks to Jerome Soyer for maintaining this package!

I hate updating my résumé. Yet the job fair this Tuesday and Wednesday are forcing my hand. It seems silly going to a job fair in September when I’m looking for an internship this summer, but thanks to the terms of SFS I don’t have a huge number of options.

Well, at least I personally know one of the recruiters I’m going to be talking to.

Computer security is like an onion: the more you dig in, the more you want to cry.

– Cory Altheide

There’s something strangely satisfying about using Prosper to create presentation slides in LaTeX, a tool normally used for created printed documents. It’s even better when you need to draw a few diagrams, so you use OpenOffice Impress — a tool for creating presentation slides — to draw them, then export them as Encapsulated PostScript so they can be included in your LaTeX file.

Well, I just finished typing up my answers to the first homework assignment in algorithms. I hope the fact that it takes twelve pages of LaTeX isn’t a sign of things to come. And I really hope ugly functions like “(ceil(log n))!” and “n^{log log n}” aren’t going to reappear later on. (Go on, I dare you to visualize what either of those looks like right now. Think fast: which one grows faster?)

On a completely unrelated note, I probably find The Sims 2 Experience funnier than I should.

Special Bonus Link! Does anybody else find this extremely bizarre?

You really should be trying to get behind now. Think of the time you have to catch up. Months. But, if you wait to get behind, you’ll be way more behind because you’ll have even less time.

– Yuri Victor

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Wednesday witnessed no less than two performances from me. First, a presentation in my Insider Threats class. Second, the first big Ship of Fools show of the semester.

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