Interface Extension
I’ve been programming an alpha-beta AI to play variants of connect-k games. For example, connect-3 on a 3×3 board with gravity off is tic-tac-toe, connect-5 on a 19×19 board with gravity off is the basis of go-moku, while connect-4 on…
Designer Graphics
I have the misfortune of owning all of Ed Tufte’s books. Reading and enjoying these books has given me a sensitivity to data display that now makes me cringe whenever I see a terrible chart. Even in academic papers, benchmark…
Mormon Resignation
Today, I met with the Bishop of my local ward. He’s a really nice guy, and has some personal reasons for disagreeing with some of the teachings of official church leadership (he’s got a gay family member). This made my…
Minds from Agents
Recently, I came across this SEED article, Divide Midns, Specious Souls; which has this deliciously anti-religious, pro-science quote: Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to…
Trip to Austria
Recently, I made a trip to Austria, visiting my good friend and partner in crimelab, Christoph. On my first day, I walked around Graz. I saw the alien, though I wasn’t impressed with the art inside. I saw the Armory,…
Typestate and SSA
Since Rust was announced, I looked into the underlying idea of Typestate[1]. The most striking aspect about this paper is its age. The authors consider an extension to ordinary type checking to also verify that the state of a variable…
A small TraceMonkey Contribution
I’ve been working on Mozilla’s Tracemonkey source code for quite awhile now as part of my research. The basic goal is to apply a labeling mechanism to JavaScript objects that will help in tracking information flow. Along the way though,…
Deconversion
Ordinarily I wouldn’t post up a bunch of stuff that I encountered on YouTube, but this collection of one persons account of his deconversion from Christianity to Atheism is so thoughtfully considered and carefully presented that I was absolutely captivated,…
My coming out.
I usually don’t post too much personal stuff on my blog, but I thought this was important enough that I should make an exception. It has been one month now since I came out to my family. So I thought…
Love the RAID
Remember that desktop machine that I assembled way back when? My paranoia led me to arrange the disk layout as follows: 2 drives in a mirror that will hold the primary system, and 4 drives in a RAID 5 for…