Impostor syndrome:

The recurring feeling that you don't know what the hell you're doing, regardless of whether or not anyone else knows what they're doing. Brought on in this case by reading blogs written by people while they were attending TWU.

Right now, my flatmate is watching... some show... about cops, I think? In her room. So that's cool, although I can hear it pretty well.

Passport: I lost mine. I spent most of today and yesterday looking for it and trying to figure out where it could have gone. if it were in my apartment, I would have found it. But I'm reasonably sure that it hasn't left my apartment since September. We haven't been burgled or anything, so... where could it have gone? I have no idea.

On Tuesday (the earliest appointment available) I have to go downtown and get a new one (in person, for a painful amount of cash). Then I can send my Indian Visa application, which will be lovely. In fact, there is a faint chance that I can even make the hoped-for deadline that Lily from TW sent me, or at least not miss it by more than a day. Sigh. I'm very upset with myself for misplacing my passport. I don't know how I did it; it was in a safe logical place... and now it's not there. I obviously moved it while cleaning, or used it for some purpose which doesn't come immediately to memory.

I was going to go to RHoK today but instead spent the day looking for my passport (and being somewhat ill from the typhoid vaccine). It snowed somewhat excessively earlier. Biking in snow is difficult; it would help if I had larger tires...

I wish I had gone to RHoK. But at the same time, I know that opportunities for communal freeware opensource coding are not all that difficult to find. And I can always just scout github and request a fork of something. The human interaction is valuable, but it can be worked without.

Right now I'm trying to make a coherent summary of what I think would be good to learn while at TWU. Messy version is at http://notepad.cc/share/SQnRYrimN5 for now.

Oh hey. I should have used http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html#uh-0 sed to deal with euler 13.

Southwest database fail

Linda: So it turns out that the reason that I've been locked out of my account is that when I booked your ticket their database subbed your birthday for mine, therefore no validation with my birthday would work. Database flaw, they have one. Also, it seems likely that all of my password reset emails are in your spambox somewhere.
(1:29:32 PM) ce: oh, that's ugly :(
(1:29:54 PM) ce: at least it's fixed now?
(1:30:59 PM) Linda: No, it's not. The database also subbed in middle name and gender and I can't fix them from this end for some reason. Unless I get this fixed, there's no way I can get through security again if booking travel through my SW account.
(1:31:03 PM) Linda: Sigh.
(1:31:27 PM) ce: that's fucking terrible.

When I booked a trip for him using my account (and the rewards and vouchers in my account) the database must have inserted his information instead of mine in the fields of: middle name, birthday, gender, and email address. And there's no way to fix it from the consumer side of the webpage.

However, the good news is that, thanks to someone on the help line, I have a password to my account now. The bad news is that I can't book travel yet, unless I want travel booked for a male with my first and last names, but Lance's middle name. ...useless, no? So, back to the phone help line.

Edit: Called customer service 214-932-0333. After some initial confusion on the part of the agent, and then a request that I fax her my drivers license (my reply: "I don't have a fax machine... can I email you a picture?"), she simply changed my data to correct data which I supplied verbally. A quick refresh of my account page shows that she changed my middle name and my gender, and although for some reason my account won't show me what she changed my birthday to, I have no reason to doubt that she did that accurately too.

So, where are the security flaws here?

• Initial database flaw- replacing good information with bad. How far does this extend?
• In password reset attempts, sometimes two attempts with the same data had different results, i.e. either "bad data, please retry" or "email sent, please click link"
• Lack of ability to change your own birthday/gender on the website might be an attempt at security? Or just a bug. Inability to see my own birthday in my account info is definitely a bug, because if I can't see it, it might be wrong and I would have no way of knowing.
• Ability for customer service rep to change account info without evidence other than my voice (and confirmation data that I provided, such as address, name, birthday... all things that someone could find out about me).

By the way... the way to add a Southwest LUV voucher to your account is here: https://www.southwest.com/flight/travel-funds-results.html (for the next time that I forget and get frustrated)

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.

Cyberpunk tropes

I was looking for cyberpunk ebooks and began thinking about common themes in cyberpunk literature.

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/

AI evolves out of the internet

nanobots

India / Japan / China (is this just a western thing?)

neotribalism / geotribalism

copyright leads to war

lone hacker

against The Man

nearfuture (at least the beginning of the series)

space (in-system, not FTL)

urban

one-world syndrome / globalization

convergence

tech singularity

social breakdown as tech evolves faster than response

megacorporations

human vs. economy

lack of idealists / idealists die

hacker as protagonist

human mind incomplete without data access

Router, it is now set up

My mother is a sysadmin of a Beowulf cluster with something like five thousand nodes goddammit, why do I get to set up the household router?

Not like it's hard. But seriously.

WRT54G Linksys

Just gotta remember that the setup form is at http://192.168.1.1/ and it's intuitive from there.

However, getting my dad's slow XP home laptop to connect to the damn network was a problem. For some unknown fucking reason, the "Network Connections" dialogue (and all related dialogues that I could find) would only accept a WEP key, not the network password... which my personal laptop accepted just fine. I am obviously missing something important here. Anyway, everyone's all connected to the internet and stuff, so I'm going to go work on my own stuff now.

nothing is installing properly

I will deal with this in just a minute.

Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-25-generic-pae
Bus error
Bus error
rm: cannot remove `/tmp/mkinitramfs_2xhLIe/lib/modules/2.6.32-25-generic-pae/modules.*map': No such file or directory
Segmentation fault
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-25-generic-pae
dpkg: error processing initramfs-tools (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Processing triggers for libc-bin ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
Errors were encountered while processing:
initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Edit: It turns out that I'd tried to switch from kernel 2.6.32-24-generic to 2.6.32-26-generic-pae but didn't do it completely. Fixing that (yay aptitude!) fixed the problem. Also, remember to update GRUB.

Knowing that would've made cs450 a lot more pleasant. Damn.

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.

TW bug

if you go to http://blogs.thoughtworks.com/ then you see a list of blog posts. If you go to https://blogs.thoughtworks.com/ then you see a submission page for code tests.

This is awkward for me, because my Chrome tries to force https on everything (because I told it to). In order to see the "real" version of this page (or any link to this page) I have to either disable my add-on or open it in Firefox.

Random note: My tag for my TW-related thoughts is ThoughtWorks but my tag for my upcoming experience at ThoughtWorks University will be TWU. There will probably not be double-tagging on the TWU posts.

non-forbidden knowledge

So now I know how to recommend someone, or refer them, or whatever, to TW. Cool. useful knowledge.

Things I have heard of today for the first time:

The company factset (financial stuff)

nlp research at bing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

I wrote down a short summary of my hiring process at TW which I don't think will give anyone any clues on how to game the system, but which helps me keep straight in my head what happened. Here it is. (One line per item)

1. Contact w recruiter (for me, at IIT career fair and then again at GHC10)
2. Email test on ethos/writing skills
3. Email code test
4. In-office Wonderlic test, TW proprietary logic test
5. In-office pair programming w/ 2 TWers on prev code test, interview w/ HR re: travel fitness and decisionmaking skills in client situations, interview w/ head of Chicago office
6. Get a phone call. Get a packet of papers to sign. Sign papers, mail them back.
7. In-office Agile workshop (for me it was after signing, but for many others it was before)

non-techie babble

Things I am trying to do right now

1. Research vegan and sugarfree recipes for family thanksgiving dinner so I can practice making them today/tomorrow
2. Set up afternoon coffee hangout today (with crappy cell reception in the canyon)
3. Get an appointment for getting travel shots for India set up (gotta find some relevant numbers on id cards)
4. Set a finalized schema for the code test that's being written
5. Get tix to take me and the parents to HP7 :)

Update:

1. List that my mom may or may not think much of http://notepad.cc/share/iZi2FdAiji
2. Done
3. Done
4. Getting there
5. Postpone

Might get Grandma an iPad for her birthday. Need to figure out 1. what apps and 2. How to help her get used to them

App ideas...

reading stuff

playing games

Sigh.