CS books I haven't finished yet

I keep skipping from book to book and finishing none of them. But the one on top is almost done.

quantum crypto

Quantum crypto is what I claim to be interested in. It would help if I took some time and poked around in advanced math. I made it through Calculus 4 (didn't know that existed, did you? Me either) but I stopped there for reasons of practicality- i.e. gotta get the degree, get out, and pay pack the loans.

I don't love math enough to chase it in my free time, but at the same time I like it enough that I choose it over other occupations when it's one of a set of options... and frankly once you get past algebra, math and numbers are differentiated by many factors.

I guess I'll go donate to the EFF and go back to writing Ruby of slowly increasing quality.

what's in the IIT crypto class?

"RSA, DSA, ElGamal, encryption and signature of each. Lots of Modular Arithmetic. Concept work with a number of different other forms of encryption and most recently we've gone over RFID security. A good half the class has been concept work, learning how it's supposed to work."

Hmn. Interesting.

I wish wish WISH that I had 1. known that that class was offered 2. been interested in it while in school 3. TAKEN IT
I'm kicking myself right now. I know that I can learn it all independently with some effort, but structured learning is so useful! And I missed it! Grrr.

Reddit:crypto makes my day

I finally discovered reddit:crypto (and also reddit:ruby) thanks to a guy I ran into at the RubyChicago event I blogged about a few days ago. Actually, he mentioned how much he liked reddit:python, and I went from there...

Anyway.

http://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/

http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/

PHD4: networks/machine translation (notes)

Heuristic word alignment with parallel phrases
Maria Holmqvist
Sweden. PhD student

Word alignment applications: bilingual dictionaries, computer aided translation, statistical machine translation (most likely answer)

Corpus (training sample?) - hopefully millions of sentences w/ translations.
Extract phrase translations from word-aligned texts
Estimate translation probabilities (of different interpretations)
This is unsupervised- does not require human intervention for training.

Gold standard evaluation: % correct links in sample.

Alignment with parallel phrases (Maria's method)
- uses manual alignments to improve alignment quality.
-- find common alignment patterns, match them to patterns in new text.
- generalize phrases with parts of speech
-- replace nouns with noun tag, verb with verb tag- i.e. creating grammar translators!

Limit number of part of speechtags.

Questions to answer with the research:

How does phrase-based compare with statistical alignment?

How can they be combined for good results?

Ongoing work:

comparison of the two methods

comparison of wars to combine different alignments

machine translation experiments

Q: What kind of work has Bing done on getting diverse data? Your data has been academic. How do you verify your data?

A: Verify by comparing to Gold Standard of "manually aligned"

A: On the web, can get comparable text but not parallel text. So it's hard to get and work with "real" data. But work is being done to collect more diverse data.

Q: Have you looked at what the statistical method gets wrong?

A: Infrequent words. I'm doing a deeper analysis. Problem: in Swedish, it's a compound language, so there will be lots of previously unseen words in a given chunk of text.

Ewa Musial

University at Albany, SUNY

Modeling and testing of services-oriented applications

Existing testing methods: single-tier testing (presentation tier, application tier, service tier, data tier)

New approach: choreography/orchestration testing- "web flow in application layer"

- about "Business process execution applications"

- they don't question the incompleteness of current techniques.

Problem: lack of techniques to test ~~

Test model:

~

test study 1~

test study 2:

fault detection by users. 36 test cases, 31 faults.

results:

results show that approach is effective for improving reliability of industrial projects

develop complete tools for automated testing

Q: Just java?

A: yes, but not always

Q: (from guy!) Can you characterize the general faults that you were finding?

A: Yes. People tend to test easy things. If people move, the database won't keep up.

Q: How did you make the complicated dependency graph? Can't all that change?

A: It can change. Sometimes it needs to be adjusted. During testing, the reliances change...

Fariba Khan

U of Illinois- Urbana, Champaign

Assuring network service with bandwidth and integrity-based fairness

Also, DDOS attacks.

Fair-queue- head of line blocking

IP spoofing- can't use IPs as a solution

Graph- testing packet success rate under different attack circumstances. Attack, no defense and Attack, FQ, spoofing were both ~4/100 packets getting through.

Ingress filtering is neither complete not verifiable. IP of a filtered domain can be spoofed either in the same domain or in an unfiltered domain.

Design: integrity levels, integrity token, queue.

Spoofing index table (?)

MAC integrity token

(My worry: would this make communications more tracable? Where does this interact with trueanon and cyberprivacy?)

Q: How did you develop a relationship with an ISP so they will use your algorithm?

A: Haven't yet.

Now: turn in your presentation evaluations!

New books!

1. Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides

I own this, and it is wonderful.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612

Creational patterns, structural patterns, behavioral patterns. This book will blow your mind continuously and repetitively and probably make you enormously better at everything that you do that requires structure of any kind.

I'm reading it, and I keep having to look stuff up. It's wonderful.

These following four are from the "new books" shelves in the university library.

2. LINQ programming by Mayo c2009 http://www.amazon.com/LINQ-Programming-Joe-Mayo/dp/0071597832

LINQ is about databases. LINQ is to databases as web 2.0 is to 1995.

First sentence starts with "C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5 introduce a new set of language features and APIs for working with data called Language Integrated Query (LINQ)." So if you hate it already, go away and be a hater, because that's what the entire book is about. It actually looks pretty cool.

Here, have an uninformative Wiki link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query

3. Eyetracking Web Usability by Nielsen and Pernice c2010 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eyetracking-Usability-Voices-That-Matter/dp/0321498364

Contrary to what I actually thought, this book is actually about what your eye looks at. Right now my eye is looking at the inside of my eyelid, because I'm tired and typing by touch. Dammit, typo. Go back and fix. Zone out while typing again- this time with eyes open but unfocused in the direction of my keyboard. Man, someone could make some serious revenue by sticking an ad in the whitespace to the right of the textbox that I'm typing in right now. Come on, people- the money isn't in ads on the blog, but in ads on the blog interface! Sooo many people blog that there's gotta be some serious money in there.

On the other hand I'd probably go a little mad if there was an ad there, especially if it were moving or blinking.

We're all guilty of immediately clicking the big button, then saying "oops" ...we're pretty well-trained lab rats.

One last note: lots of cool color pictures of websites with eyetrack patterns superimposed.

4. Six Themes on Variation, edited by Hardt. http://books.google.com/books?id=zuWttfJmexwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Six+Themes+on+Variation,+edited+by+Hardt.&source=bl&ots=B7wgOJhzxL&sig=tgH2fBx9W1Jer7m9u6_EFHdjMjs&hl=en&ei=gZqaTO2NCsSnnQfCocntDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Calculus of variations! Little eentsy book. alephomega might <3>

5. Protectors of Privacy by Newman http://www.amazon.com/Protectors-Privacy-Regulating-Personal-Economy/dp/0801445493

It's a nontechnical book with discussions of politics and regulations, expertise as power (in online communities), and makes surprisingly little mention of encryption. it addresses the issue of court cases about what one person accessed that was illegal in their country but hosted in another country. Lots of international law issues. This book is very meta and summarizes itself a little often. The bibliography is long and beautiful. Was this someone's thesis?

I was hoping for more discussion of crypto.

more books

I picked up everything that I passed that looked interesting.

1. Ruminations on C++ by Koenig and Moo.

I was wrong. Put it back. (also, copyright 1996)

2. Ruby Phrasebook by Clinton

Wins best of show. I'm considering stealing it. http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Phrasebook-Jason-D-Clinton/dp/0672328976

3. Object Solutions by Booch

Good narrative style, but you could find as much content by reading blogs for a while. There are some fun sections, including a discussion on how easy it is to build the wrong thing if management is being stubborn. Very dated discussion of project management. (i.e. waterfall is assumed, rather than agile dev)

4. Mastering Perl by Foy (O'Reilly book)

Obviously, anything O'Reilly is more or less worth reading. http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Perl-brian-d-foy/dp/0596527241

Verdict: I think I'm in love.

Advanced regex, untainting data, debugging perl, benchmarking, strictures, Pod (documentation), perltidy ftw, ...

Obviously I'm not a Perl Master. I should probably be reading an introductory text, if anything. But I'm impatient. :) Besides, I'm playing too hard with Ruby.

Lol, "talk to the bear" - the practice of explaining your code aloud to someone- coworker, bear, rubber ducky... usually leads to you saying "Oh, nevermind, I got it."

"Coding is where laziness meets impatience... oh, and competence."

5. Computer Forensics for Dummies by Volonino and Anzaldua

It's very basic. Chapter one will dispell your ignorant ideas (if you had any) about privacy. It has some fnu details. Ch. 2-6 are legalese. Ch. 7 is a transition to Ch. 8, which has some good stuff for people new to the realm. 9-11 are mirros of 8, but about email, docs, drives. Ch. 12 = cell phones. The rest of the book is mostly legalese.

Anyone who thinks that this books qualifies them for something is, indeed, a dummy. But it would be a good starter text for a scifi author trying to branch out into soft cyberpunk. And it might serve to intrigue teenagers (or careerchangers) into giving the profession a deeper look.

"World War Web: The Big One" should be a short story about crypto, legislation, and privacy.

6. Innocent Code by Huseby (Copyright 2004)

Not as dated as some, but the section on SQL injection is a a little old (I should blog about that, hmn), and the bit about sending email with a false address, while fun, is generally protected against nowadays.

p.193-195 is basically the summary of a class I took last year. Yay, packets.

7. Crypto by Levy.

This one, oddly, (none of the others have) has been checked out. Seven times. The most recent one was in 2003, though. So... meh. Makes you wonder why libraries even bother to have books, right?

It actually looks somewhat interesting- humanizing tales of the creation of DES and other crypto firsts.

http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digital/dp/0140244328

8. Open Source 2.0 edited by DiBona, Cooper, and Stone.

Glossy and orange, this book actually looks "modern." It's an O'Reilly, although it's not in the traditional visual format.

It mentions Mozilla and Slashdot by name in the index. In one of the appendixes, it provides the text of a few of the most common open source licenses.

I wouldn't call it worth buying, but here it is if you want it. http://www.amazon.com/Open-Sources-2-0-Continuing-Evolution/dp/0596008023

Right. Enough of that.