technomancy

If you've never studied computer science -- move on, nothing to see here.

But if you have, you'll appreciate Mike Davey's realization of a Turing machine.

A Turing machine, for those non-geeks who still with me, is a theoretical entity that models the process of computation. In 1936, Alan Turing -- one of most brilliant mathematicians ever, who helped break the Nazi's "Enigma" code and save Western civilization, and for his reward was prosecuted and sentenced to "chemical castration" via hormone injections for his homosexuality, but I digress -- proposed a mathematical model of computation that every CS student still studies today.

Imagine an infinitely long tape, divided into cells, where each cell can hold one symbol. This tape moves back and forth under a read/write head (or the head moves over the tape, it's equivalent), which can read the symbol under it and/or write a new one. The machine has just enough memory to hold one number, its "state", and a finite set of rules that tell it what to do when it seems a given symbol while in a given state: for example, "in state 17, if you see a 0, move the tape 23 places to the right and write a 1".

Anything that can be computed, can be computed by a Turing machine. You might think, for example, that a machine that used a two-dimensional grid of cells could do more than a Turing machine, but it can be proven that a "TM" can simulate such a 2-d machine, and so compute anything that it can. I wrote a lot of proofs involving TMs when I was in grad school.

Of course this is not a practical thing to build. Turing meant it only as a sort of thought-experiment. That's part of the beauty of Davey's construction: it's absolutely useless, completely a work of math art.

This is minor, but god(dess)(s/es) how it annoys me...

Look at one of your credit cards. Notice how the digits of the card number are displayed in groups of four, something like "4111 1234 5678 9011".

Now, try entering the digits in just that way on some website where you want to buy something using that card. Odds are 50/50 that the site won't accept the input, that it will require you to type them in as the much less legible "4111123456789011".

There is absolutely no reason for this other than laziness or incompetence. Telling the program to remove spaces or dashes is trivial -- a decent program should be able to accept either format. (I've done it for my employer.)

Modern programming languages have a rich array of functions and methods for string manipulation. Learn to use 'em or go home and leave the programming to the grown-ups, kids.

I've got a fairly slow DSL line out here at the Secret Headquaters: a 384k symmetric DSL line. Now that's faster than dial-up, but a lot slower than cable or other DSL services. (I have my line with Cavalier, and other than the speed have been generally satisfied.

I'm just barely close enough to the CO (the telephone company "central office") to get DSL service, and because of the distance have been told I can't get a faster line. So I've been looking at options.

There's cable, but a) Comcast sucks, and b) a cable connection is shared with everyone on your block. There are performance and security concerns with the whole setup.

So I was thinking about Verizon's FiOS. Now, yes, Verizon also sucks, so I was reluctant to consider it, but I figured I'd at least check it out.

So I sent them an e-mail with some questions: technical ones like the availability of static IP addresses, and billing ones about the fees they might tack on. (I do not understand how it is legal for telcos to advertize a $49.95 price and then add a whole bunch of unmandated "fees" on top of that, as much as $20 more. Not taxes, mind you, that their competitors would also have to charge, but "fees" that they choose to charge but don't include in the price you sign up for. How is this not fraud? Grrr.)

The response from Verizon? "In order to provide you with the best customer service, please contact our Verizon FIOS Sales and Customer Service department at (800) 837-4966 Monday through Friday, between 8:00 AM and 6:00 PM Eastern Time."

Uh, no. I took the time to write out my questions so that we could have precise communication. I do not want to wait on hold to talk to a salesdroid in your customer service department. If you are not willing to answer my questions in writing, if this is how you treat a potential customer, then thank you, but no, we will not be doing business.

(So now I'm considering Sprint's 4G wireless. Not as fast as FiOS, but they did get right back to me when I e-mailed them questions.)

I have fond memories of Omni magazine -- I think there might be some old issues up in my attic. Slate looks back at Omni's look forward into the future world of 2010:

For anyone who was raised in the '70s and never had a date in the '80s or who thought the 2000s would look like a cross between a Yes album cover and Journey concert T-shirt, Omni magazine was essential reading—one with a ready answer to all your robot and rocket questions. And to a 10-year old getting a subscription for Christmas in 1979, Omni was The Future.

The magazine was a lushly airbrushed, sans-serif, and silver-paged vision dreamed up by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and his wife, Kathy Keeton. It split the difference between the consumerist Popular Science—which always seemed to cover hypersonic travel and AMC carburetors in the same page—and the lofty Scientific American, whose rigor was alluring but still impenetrable to me. But with equal parts sci-fi, feature reporting, and meaty interviews with Freeman Dyson and Edward O. Wilson, Omni's arrival every month was a sort of peak nerd experience.

There are reports of POS credit/debit card terminals and cellphones jumping from 2009 right past 2010 to 2016. The problem seems to be the interpretation of what's intended to be a BCD value, as a hexadecimal one.

(For non-geeks: remember way back in school when you learned about different "bases" for numbers? Because computers use on-off signaling -- two possibilities -- we need to use base-2, "binary" arithmetic a lot. But because base-2 is a pain, we often use base-16, "hexadecimal", which is easy to convert to and from binary. In hexadecimal, the string of digits "10" actually means the value sixteen: instead of the ""one times ten plus zero times one" that we usually mean, we read it as "one times sixteen plus zero times one".)

Alan Turing was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the Twentieth Century -- indeed, one of most brilliant mathematicians ever. During World War II he was instrumental in breaking the Nazi's "Enigma" code. In the process, he developed much of the theoretical framework for the field of computer science. The mathematical model of computers that every comp sci major learns about, the "Turning machine", was his invention. Every time you use a computer -- such as reading this -- you are benefiting from his genius.

But let's get back to the fact that he helped defeat the Nazis and thus helped save the UK, and all of Western civilization.

Usually, people who help save a nation are treated with gratitude. But Turing was gay.

In the homophobic society in which he lived, that was a crime. His security clearance was revoked, he was prosecuted, and sentenced to "chemical castration" via hormone injections. In 1954, he committed suicide.

Over 55 years later, the UK has finally apologized for its wretched treatment of this heroic genius.

So here's another loopy conspiracy theory: the right-wing National Legal and Policy Center found (cleverly hidden right out in plain sight at www.fbo.gov) a Request For Proposal "to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites." The blogosphere is abuzz with how this is an attempt by Obama's secret team of socialist fascist secret Muslims to create an "enemies list"

Or, as Hot Air exposes...not.

The Presidential Records Act (PRA) essentially requires each administration to keep every pixel and keystroke ever published for later review by Congress or investigators, in case illegal activity takes place. We have seen this invoked ex post facto to the Clinton and Bush administrations, in the latter over e-mails sent and received outside the White House mail system. At that time, legal experts and investigators insisted that everything produced by an administration for anything remotely concerning official business had to be archived within the EOP. [Executive Office of the President]

A more careful reading of this RFP shows that to be the project. The contract directs the contractor to archive the “information posted on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence“, including social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter, and so on. It doesn’t call for everything on those networks to be archived, but only “information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence[,] both comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites.” In other words, the archiving will include interaction on EOP websites and pages, but not anything else.

In other words, this massive spying effort is nothing more than applying the retention requirements for Presidential e-mail to Facebook and Twitter messages.

Somehow I'm sure that if the Obama administration didn't do this, these same folks would be complaining how he was using social networking sites as an attempt to get around the PRA. (Like, say, how Bush administration crooks used an e-mail server run by the Republican National Committee to circumvent the PRA.)

So over at the day job, it looks like we want to upgrade the firmware for the RAID controller on our web server, a Dell PowerEdge. So I poke around support.dell.com and find the file. Great. I'll use wget to download it to the server...

xkcd on how to be a tech support guru. Seems about right.

From emacs-fu.blogspot.com:

Emacs-users like to stay in their own little world, even when interacting with the Others - and they are right of course. Why leave the comforts of your well-configured emacs for the inconveniences of yet another app? For example, when using twitter, I prefer to do that from within emacs. There are different ways and packages to do so. My favorite so far is twitter.el.