Note to Emily — if you’re reading this early, we’ll be calling you tomorrow to wrapup — so avoid the spoilers

So Monday was my 23rd birthday and today was the celebration.

Something was clearly up with Mari and Patrick — I was to keep this afternoon free to do… something…, and after Lindy on Sproul, they hand me a CD case, the cover being a lot of blank spaces and a USB drive and say “here it is!”

Unbeknownst to me, in the past 3-5 days, Mari, Patrick, Bryan, Chantae and Emily put together a full mini-hunt for my birthday party, complete with antepuzzles, a proper round of 5 puzzles, and a meta.

Sadly, I couldn’t scare up much solving help at Lindy on Sproul.

At the end of it all, it was a lot of fun! And I have awesome, smart friends! The party itself was only so-so, but the solving was worth it.

Spoilers and the full hunting story after the jump

Spoilers begin here.

So the USB key contained a mixtape audio file — listening to it provided songs and band names which fit nicely into the blank lines on the CD case, providing in the one specified vertically aligned row “TAIFXUL” (had a little trouble getting the X) but as I pointed out halfway through “well, with nothing else to go on, I betcha it’s a Twitter feed”

(It was clear that this was designed for me, so a lot of little stories or preferences of ours showed up from time to time. Such as using Twitter)

The Twitter feed required campus knowledge I didn’t have; but looking around Flickr found the answer: Taif Xul — which is Fiat Lux reversed (the UC Berkeley motto) — appears under the awning of the Campanile.

So Mari (who’s been following me) and I go there, meet Patrick, who hands me two sheets of paper (Paper Puzzles, or PP as I refer to them later) and that three other puzzles will appear in the Twitter feed (Twitter Puzzles, TP).

And so I begin to hunt. Mostly alone.

I get pretty far on my own, with the authors around me bouncing and trying not to spoil anything. Bryan has the great idea that I should be momentarily uncertain of the answers, and to call them in via Twitter (which seemed fitting)

The Paper Puzzles

PP1 (designed by Emily) was Shakespeare (and one Alexander Pope) identification, which was pretty straightforward. They were all “interesting” names in that they were fairies or other ethereal creatures. As it works out, they are also the moons of Uranus (a great twist moment!) and the one “major figure” missing from the “literary firmament” is the one missing major moon… OBERON

PP2 (designed by Chantae) was “Poetry in the Information Age” — quickly I identified the text as Jabberwocky — with errors. So I start to look at the errors. One word doesn’t match in length, and that’s clearly the “magic” word, with errors. All the errors provide a nice set of letters… which happen to be associated with letters on a phone (eg, only A, B, and C will be switched with each other). This provided a great moment when I made the connection (by drawing lines between the sets) and yelled out “PHOOONES!” (prompting rounds of “KHAAAN!” and “STELLAAAAA!”)… a quick regex search for 6 letter words with these replacements through /usr/share/dict/words yielded WELKIN

Twitter Puzzles

TP1 (designed by Bryan) was the Freebase puzzle. Seen in the Twitter feed, it was a check written out with conspicuous replacements — a lot of the numbers were in hex, prepended with 0s and the owner of the check was “RDF” — These are clearly Freebase GUIDs. Looking them up gave you a set of things that referred to weird sayings (to wit, an odd Earl aka “Bell the Cat”, a song called “Don’t Cry Wolf”, a particular kind of “sour grape”) — this was, also the best funny/punny/groaner puzzle they came up with, in particular, a reference to the stock ticker LION (“lion’s share!”). And just to make me pull out the MQL, the date on the check is a full timestamp, of the creation of a link from “Injury” to “Insult”. All of these are sayings that come from fables, in particular, AESOP.

TP3 (designed by Patrick and implemented by Mari) was the most MIT-hunt like puzzle. It was letter substitution (letters to numbers) into dates/numbers of webcomics I read, and associated pictures from those comics with the text blacked out and one word underlined. The underlined word fits with the greek letters that follow. Following the flavortext, (a reference to the Bob Dylan song “Desolation Row”), where the other thing Einstein does is “recite the alphabet” — you recite the GREEK alphabet, this spells something in the mapping. Doing the same for the letter substitution earlier gives you a Questionable Content comic, the title of which (combined with the phrase in the greek) refers to Frances FARMER

… and it was here that people were arriving for my party. So we party for a bit, but invariably people start to ask about what’s been going on so far in this mini hunt. Now I have help!

Finale

All that remains is TP2 and the overall meta.

so TP2 (designed by Emily), which I looked at only briefly, seemed to be, at first, merely Lorem Ipsum text repeated. But there seemed to be extra things added, particularly a stray C. So, finding a “canonical” Lorem Ipsum on Wikipedia, Roger (now I have help) insisted that I diff the puzzle text agains the canonical text. There are purely Latin insertions in the text, which indicates the right track. Each set of insertions, looking up the definitions online, clue what seem to be illness symptoms. When we get to the very last one (A butterfly rash) Laura calls out “OH! That’s a symptom of Lupus!” We all look at her funny for a second and she explains she recently has been reading a story where someone exhibited this symptom. So we look up the symptoms of Lupus and sure enough these are the symptoms. So I tweet in LUPUS, but the proper response (other than the latin clue) should have been “It’s never Lupus!” — Chris turns around and says “Oh, so in English, that’d be WOLF”

So now we have OBERON, WELKIN and AESOP, WOLF and FARMER. Everyone is crowded into my office by this point. This only took 10 minutes with people, most of it just me at the conn. Googling “aesop wolf farmer” (Twitter puzzles) eventually gets to an Aesop fable: “The Wolf, the Farmer and the Plow”… so “Plow” is a good working term. As for the Paper Puzzles, Oberon and Welkin, well, Google clues Shakespeare again, so I grep for it in my digital Shakespeare, and Oberon says “welkin” once… “The starry welkin cover thou anon”. Plow. OH. There’s the local Berkeley bar, “The STARRY PLOUGH”.

The plan initially was to be done by 7:30 — assuming I had help — and to have a drink there before the party. (1) They underestimated their writing talent! It was genuinely hard! and (2) I had no helpers for most of it. They’ll still buy me a drink there soon.

I’ve been toying with the idea for the past few days since I got inspired by the MapReduce chapter in Beautiful Code. Mostly it’s a cute little project that’s trendy and scratches an itch of mine — namely, how do I utilize the full power of my little cluster of machines?

My end goal is to bootstrap this on top of the raytracer Lin and I did in CS184 as sort of a proof-of-concept, and run speed tests. Other simple ideas include MP3 encoding (split the wav file, give each machine a piece, and then mp3wrap them together at the end) or if I get really daring, video re-encoding (which would be damn cool for saving off my HD streams)

The idea on top of all of this is that: you split up a problem, you do something to the pieces (Map), you can emit intermediate values (to be further sorted or combined in Reduce), and then you can combine the problem back into the original spec in some way (or not, depends on how you write Reduce). So long as there’s a common NAS (Granted, it’s no GFS, but then, I’m not dealing with petabytes) there can be the necessary file output sharing. SSHFS counts too — it’s just slower.

It’s also cute in that it can spread other time-intensive tasks across machines. It doesn’t even have to transfer files if what you want to compute is somehow representable. Since I’m writing it all in Python (or C# where necessary) a good example is to spread minimax subtrees across machines to make a faster, smarter CS188 Pacman (which would merely return the value of the root-node move — all across TCP).

The backend interface looks something like this right now:

[02:37] michener@enjolras:~$ telnet 192.168.0.16 6278
Trying 192.168.0.16...
Connected to 192.168.0.16.
Escape character is '^]'.
Welcome to the PumaCreed Server on fantine.
Type 'help' for details.
> help
help jobs ls newjob stat quit shutdown
> stat
Computer Name   System  Ranking Threads Description
fantine         Linux   9000    1       2.6.21-2-686 #1 SMP Wed Jul 11 03:53:02 
enjolras        Darwin  9000    1       9.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.1.0: Wed O
> shutdown
Connection closed by foreign host.
[02:38] michener@enjolras:~$

Not much, but it’s a start. The machines know about each other, there’s networking and threads and config files going on (praise be unto Twisted) — not to mention the start of a MapReduceProgram class from which all code run on the cluster should inherit (Or at least implement the interface of).

We’ll see how it goes.

Remainder of Amazon’s gift card: -$0.84

$20 bill: -$20.00

(Rings up — Change: $16.64)

36 cents in my wallet: -$0.36

Screwing with the Starbucks cashier over exact change: Priceless

There are some things money can’t buy.

For everything else, there’s MasterNerd

I got myself down to SOMA to go to a justin.tv tech-talk. Sure, they were talking about OAuth (which is pretty much a nice standard for authenticating to share data on the web) but of much more interest was who “they” are. But let’s back up.

The point of my going down there was to answer the question Dad asked me at Thanksgiving:

“Where do you want to work?”

I hadn’t really thought about it in the sense outside of “depends on who wants me”. It started to grow on me, and when I heard about this talk through Karen through Facebook, I found an outlet. Over time, it’s gotten in my head that, (a) there are a lot of tech startups in the City, (b) they do either cool or lame things, or some of each (depending on the startup) and (c) the lifestyle is vaguely like being a pirate: you have a small crew of dedicated folks; much riskier life, but also more rewarding in other ways.

So I figured I’d test the waters.

I found myself chatting after the talk with some of the people I’ve read about in tech blogs and whatnot; people who do crazy and interesting things. I rode back on the BART with a similar sort of buzzing feeling as when I first visited Berkeley as an eighth-grader, and it lasted all afternoon. I may not know exactly with who yet, but I think I’m starting to figure that I’m understanding where I want to work. Or at least how it should feel.

On the other side of the coin, I’m flying up to Seattle in a few days to be shown around Amazon. Amazon strikes me positively in other ways — the benefits of a bigger, more established place. My take on their “corporate culture” as I can see it from here is that it’s roughly a looser, friendlier Microsoft; though part of the goal of going up there is getting a very solid read on it, and what exactly they’d want me to do. They may really surprise me, and I may come back really jazzed.

But now they’ve definitely got that buzzing feeling I got from the cool kids* in the City to compete with. Which is good for all parties involved; if I really want to work at Amazon, I’ll know.

The rest of Thursday was cool in that I helped a friend-of-a-dancing-friend with his computer troubles for an hour or so; and for my time, he helped me brush up my piano skills and showed me how to improv some blues — cause this is what he does for a living. I’ve yet to record myself, but it sounds pretty good when I plunk on my keyboard here.

And then I went to 920, as always. All in one day!

*I say “kids” — I was probably the youngest one there, but the vast majority were 20-something, so I didn’t feel out of place at all.

My Ubuntu install on eponine had been freezing. Just up and freezing. So I built a FreeBSD install from scratch — decided that, for the desktop, it was lame (though the next time I overhaul fantine, my server, it’s going FreeBSD; what I learned makes it kinda rule for non-X11 things). So I tried 64-bit Ubuntu — which had the same problem, but fortunately worked just as well as 32-bit in terms of proprietary functionality (nVidia drivers, Flash, etc). Currently sitting on 64-bit Fedora 8; but it’s not apt to stay too long.

(Mostly, I’m coming to suspect it’s the ACPI — I’ve tried the nVidia beta driver to no avail)

Meanwhile….

I’m downgrading to XP on cosette.

For all intents and purposes, I did so about a week and a half ago — just booted my old XP partition. Hey, sudden burst of comfort, speed, and it worked right. Huzzah. But then I came to remember why I tried Vista in the first place — this old partition is starting to feel “dirty”. I need a reinstall.

The reason I hate reinstalling Windows, of course, is installing the software I like. If ever there were a major plus to Linux, it’s package management; go out, grab your favorite software, all with one command and be up and running just-like-that. I was able to switch distros like mad recently and it shows. You just can’t do that in Windows.

Until I went by the CSUA office today and was told of a magical XP image, with all the greatest hits installed. I grabbed it to my iPod and am now munging my partition tables but good (ntfsresize -P --force --force /dev/sda2) to throw the image over my Vista install, killing it forever. It’ll run overnight. And if it doesn’t work, I’ve got my trustier XP CD sitting here.

Meanwhile, I’m pondering putting a fresh install of Leopard on marius, my old Mac mini.

It’s the time of year to clean house, digitally.

And in case you’re wondering and like my naming scheme of Les Miserables characters; I’m writing this on enjolras, my MacBook Pro.

That’s what was wrong with my Leopard install. I was using (an uncompatible) hack to run Witch, a really nice power tool (which I hope, once they update, will remain Leopard-compatible)

My take on Leopard, now that it works:

• New Finder really beats the pants off the old one. Not a hard task, but an important one.
• You can almost feel the underlying API changes (I recompiled MacVim from SVN because of this)
• It’s a little more shiny. Stupid blue folders are gone, though I’m not a huge fan of the Tango-esque ones.
• Stacks are genuinely useful.
• They got Spaces wrong. I mean, this one should have been hard to mess up, given the precedent, but they did. It’s a fine virtual desktop manager (a feature in the X11 world for AGES) but it could use a few more keybindings — it’s great that I can switch desktops logically, but why must I use the mouse to move applications around? (Needs a Move-Current-App-in-Direction key combo)
• Also, closing a program will switch Spaces on you. This is wrong. It should work it’s way down the apps in the current Space, not bounce all over based on last-usage. arg.
• Time Machine is about as useful as Dashboard — which is to say, oh, it’s cute, but it’s disabled and apt to stay that way.

So you may wonder “What’s the point?” if I just kinda shot down the big features.

It’s for developers.

They’ve added official Ruby/Cocoa bindings. Python TK apps no longer require X11 (as I found out from running Pacman). Both of these are at the current version and include many nifty non-default libraries (Rails, Twisted, NumPy, etc, etc…). Not to mention all the optional dev tools (I recompiled the latest MacVim, as stated earlier. This is UNIX thinking). I’m thinking that interpreted-languages-as-second-class-GUI-programs is coming to an end. Ruby is the new Java. Make the devs happy, and they will develop for your platform.

MS is doing it too. Visual Studio Express was no accident. And today I hear about F# — which is essentially Microsoft OCaml (as C# is Microsoft Java)

The real power of Leopard — as with the real power of Vista — is yet to be seen. It comes down the line, about a year and a half from now, when the freelance dev masses come along. Vista arguably added a number of genuinely useful API stuff — the .NET 3.0 backings come as an obvious example. Microsoft, logically, is backing it’s own horse. Apple knows the flaws of writing in straight Objective-C and so opens up to more casual devs and UNIX devs by backing open, interpreted languages.

In fact, I bet they added PyObjC by default, instead of giving a user guide to it…

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct  5 2007, 21:08:09)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import objc
>>>

Oh look….

So I got Leopard today, and, throwing caution to the wind, decided to upgrade my system.

bzzt Wrong! I am hosed!

So I’m lifting my userdata out onto my iPod — praise be unto the gods of the command line — and am going to do a fresh install.

I guess it all works out; but I would be lying if I weren’t disappointed (so far)

However, playing with the display computers at TSW I discovered that python is ver. 2.5 and has Twisted and NumPy by default. Which is awesome.

Network card works better (maybe when it got the updates something clicked) but the network is SLOWER. I dunno what they did wrong, but my Samba NAS takes forever, until I read this: http://jamespo.org.uk/wp/archives/190 — This seems to make it work fairly well

Still best to get video drivers straight from nVidia. Sorry MS.

I like the new Explorer. It has it’s faults, but it’s an improvement. Sidebar, meanwhile, is stupid and nobody uses it.

Still no major incompatibilities. So far so good.

Just finishing up these few quick notes before I write something completely different.

• UAC is annoying, but thank god you can turn it off (along with other Windows nags, which I appreciate)
• Network fails on boot — but request an IP and it’s good again. Step up from XP, which didn’t have a driver for my NIC by default, but step down in reliability. Maybe fixed if I get a new (non-MS) driver.
• Why do I need to do a full Windows Update to get a (very common) Sound Blaster Audigy driver? You think it’d work out of the box…
• Why can’t I turn off hiding hidden files and keep my desktop clean from desktop.ini files at the same time? XP did this…
• More reboots to get things set up than you can shake a stick at — but this is a failing of Windows in general
• So far, no incompatibility. So far.
• C:\Users! It’s like /home, but not! This is an improvement over C:\Documents and Settings.
• Whatever happened to the Run.. command?

Ubuntu worked out of the box with all this. It got my nVidia driver right. It got the network right. It got sound right. And it comes with a shitload of software. I’m not saying that’s perfect either — it doesn’t like my huge display until i edit xorg.conf, for example. And 36 updates is a light update cycle (in beta, at least) And individual apps break sometimes. But by and large, the fastest OS to install to get to baseline functionality these days is Linux, and that’s not at all the way it used to be.

Microsoft did whiff at Vista. Perhaps not as badly as they could have, but it’s nowhere near what a 6 year dev cycle should produce. Vista would have been about right if it was released with a little less graphical glitz but a similar feature set in 2003/2004.

By the by, I’m not saying Apple is a big winner either. Leopard comes out this month, so we’ll see what happens — but there they go for vertical integration.

More as I figure it out.

This toast is a little nerdy, so you’ll have to excuse me.

Groans and laughs of expectation

There’s an old saying that goes “May your house always be too small to hold all your friends.”

Aww.

Now as we know from thermodynamics:

Laughter

Given a constant volume…

I gesture to the living room…

and a growing number of friends…

…which is absolutely filled with people.

The only way to keep the pressure down is to keep the temperature down.

So I say:

“May your house never explode by knowing only cool people”

The half of the room that gets it immediately laughs. The other half soon follows.

To Mari and Evelyn!

Cheers.

( The best response, moments later, came from Patrick:

Barak, that was absolute zero.

Laughs and groans )