The Cubs win a playoff game on the road for the first time since 1945. It was really a good game and shouldn't have been as close as it was. The Cubs wasted a couple of chances to score.
Kerry Wood was just amazing which bodes well for the North Side'ers.
Cathy and I finally got around to watching the Alias premiere. Definitely a good one. I was a little concerned about they were going to deal with the missing two years but it seems they are on the right track.
So the Bears opened the refurbished Soldier Field last night, it wasn't pretty. The game that is, not necessarily the new stadium.
But enough of the negative, today is Game 1 for the Cubs. Woo!!!
If only there were more hours in the day, I could start reading the Handbook of Applied Cryptography as well as the various papers found in this bibliography.
Raw blog points to an interesting proposal about bringing the Web of Trust to FOAF.
The idea is that you would be able to segment the information found in your FOAF file so that you would only be making certain things available. From there, it is up to your friends as to whether or not they make similar information public. If they do, then someone will be that much closer to getting access to my privileged information.
This introducer key sits in a secured portion of my friend's profile. The simplest approach is for my friend to include it directly in with his secured profile such that if he's willing to release the information he considers non-public to someone, then he's also released a third of the information necessary to get my profile key and email address. In effect, if 3 out of 5 of my friends are willing to share their semi-private information (e.g., email address) to someone, they can then also get my email address.
One problem I see in this is that you are saying your information is much more important than the same information from your friends. Your email address is private but you'll be more than happy to give it out if three of your friend's don't value that same privacy. That seems a bit odd to me.
Along those same lines, if everyone keeps information private, then there won't be any way to gain access to it. But these are very good things to think about especially as more people start to make FOAF-type information available in machine-readable form.
For those who don't understand I'm so excited, let me say this: this is only the fourth time that the Cubs have made the playoffs in my lifetime.
Bill gives an inside account of moving some projects from using CVS to using Subversion. This is great! Lots of quality advice and ideas.
In a post from earlier in the year, Matt Biddulph gives some great advice on how to be a much better HTTP citizen. This would be a must-read for anyone writing spiders, scutters or aggregators.
Leigh Dodds has released a Java API for the MusicBrainz web service. Basically, MusicBrainz keeps track of metadata related to music. This API will allow you to query / search for all sorts of things. Yet another thing to check out soon...
Sean Palmer has released some source code for two note-taking programs. Note-taking is one of those holy grail-type ideas for many coders. We all jot lots of things down and want to come up with an easy way of keeping track of these things.
I know that I've started at least three programs which were going to help me with all of my pieces of paper lying on my desk. I currently use roughly 3x5 notepads to write things down. The larger pads were too big and anything smaller would be basically a Post-It note.
My ideal system would allow me to write from anywhere on my computer and also be able to look for things anywhere. The problem with Stickies is that it's on the Desktop so if you have lots of windows open, you can't really get to it. One idea would be to write the app such that it was a Service which would make it available from the Apple Menu anywhere. Of course, then I get into the fact that I want something which can be run from the command-line instead of having to start up another application.
As you can see, I haven't come up with a solution which works for me yet. Don't worry though, I'm sure I'll start working on at least one more idea for taking notes before the end of the year.
Libby Miller talks about the use of RDF with regards to the iCalendar spec. Lots of interesting things could be done with that.
Also, check out the post about using FOAF and iCal to create a sort of decentralized calendar.
Kellan has put together a couple of great links with tons of info about calendars, events, RSS and more. Lots of discussion has been caused by the launch of Upcoming.
The first post is an overview of the calendar issue while the second is a collection of links from other blogs.
Hublog shows the proper syxtax for what iCal expects. Dynamically creating this info in order for someone to be able to import into their iCal would be quite cool.
Sammy hits two but the Cubs lose. Unfortunately, the Astros won so it's all tied again with three games to play.
I sent in a proposal for the Emerging Technology Conference O'Reilly is having in Febuary. I had debated whether or not to send it but finally I took a chance and pressed the Submit button.
I should know whether I'm in or not in about a week.
In a nutshell, my topic was creating an application which utilized both FOAF and Rendezvous in order to create intelligent agents. Others have come up with similar ideas in weblogs but I've only seen one actual implementation and that was something done via the command-line.
I think I'm going to try and build something regardless of whether the proposal is accepted or not.
In my wildest dreams, I wouldn't have seen Shawn Estes throw a shutout against the Reds.
I am in no way going to speak the P word. Must not anger the baseball gods this close to the end of the season.
If you need to figure out what your next crypto paper is going to be about, check out this generator.
So far, I've been given A concurrent, strong-RSA-based contract-signing protocol, A boomerang-attack-resistant, universal family of pseudorandom permutations and A practical, collusion-resistant authenticated encryption scheme.
If you would have told me back in April that with six games left in the baseball season, the Cubs would be tied for first, I'm not quite sure how I would have reacted. Probably a mixture of disbelief with lots of laughing. But that's the situation going into the final games of the season.
The Cubs and Astros are tied for first. I really don't know how I'll be able to handle the disappointment of the Cubs missing the playoffs so hopefully I won't have to deal with it.
Ray Ozzie has some great questions after reading about Upcoming. Upcoming is an event calendar which can be commented on by others.
Sunday's match between these two foes should be a great one. Plenty of bad blood between them which has bubbled up to the top in their last few matches.
Seeing the Gunners' striker Henry go against the Red's keeper, Tim Howard, should be fun.
For those not up on their English soccer teams, just think of these two as the Yankees and Red Sox and you'll understand the rivalry between them.
Author Orson Scott Card has a great essay on the silliness of the crocodile tears being shed by the record companies.
Ray Ozzie points to a new book released out into the open by the CCRP (Command and Control Research Program). It's part of the Department of Defense but don't hold that against the book. According to Ray, it's a must-read for anyone interested in decentralization and the social and organizational relevance of shifting power to the edge.
Aaron posts about creating a reliable compulsory licensing system. Basically it would have a small tax on CD/DVD burners whose money would go directly to the artists.
A great interview with Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptology and other security-related books.
Some snippets from the web pages
Rubberhose is a computer program which both transparently encrypts data on a storage device, such as a hard drive, and allows you to hide that encrypted data.Rubberhose is a type of deniable cryptography package. Deniable cryptography gives a person not wanting to disclose the plaintext data corresponding to their encrypted material the ability to show that there is more than one interpretation of the encrypted data. What deniable crypto means in the Rubberhose context is this: if someone grabs your Rubberhose-encrypted hard drive, he or she will know there is encrypted material on it, but not how much -- thus allowing you to hide the existence of some of your data.
Rubberhose was originally conceived by crypto-programmer Julian Assange as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field, particularly lists of activists and details of incidents of abuse. Repressive regimes in places like East Timor, Russia, Kosovo, Guatamalia, Iraq, Sudan and The Congo conduct human rights abuses regularly. Our team has met with human rights groups an heard first hand accounts of such abuses. Human rights workers carry vital data on laptops through the most dangerous situations, sometimes being stopped by military patrols who would have no hesitation in torturing a suspect until he or she revealed a passphrase to unlock the data. We want to help these sorts of campaigners, particularly the brave people in the field who risk so much to smuggle data about the abuses out to the rest of the world.
It looks like Tim dove into some code recently. He offers some great suggestions for the next time you are writing code.
This work has reinforced my conviction that you never really understand the problem until you?ve written some of the code.
Simply by hanging out in #p2p-hackers, I found two great collections of papers on various network, peer-to-peer and cryptography issues. The first is the Stanford Database Group Publication Server. The other is an index of the papers from the recent ACM SIGCOMM conference.
For the curious, I'm going to read Quantum Cryptography in Practice and Anonymity vs. Reputation in P2P Systems first.
The October From the Editor in Linux Journal exhorts us to start making P2P better by moving away from Kazaa.
P2P systems have enormous potential to free independent artists and Web sites from big ISP bills, sneak political information past censors and, perhaps most importantly for our readers, provide a challenging new platform to develop software ideas. But, Kazaa is proprietary, mostly unencrypted and, with a little work, can be filtered out....
However, there's another, more important reason to block Kazaa. The gap between what P2P needs to do in order to be a useful free and anonymous speech system and what Kazaa bothers to do, is shocking. If you can detect Kazaa traffic, repressive regimes certainly can. Help encourage the development of strong P2P by blocking inadequate P2P.
I think this exhortation comes at a very important time. With the RIAA suing and settling with 12-year-old's and now bringing child pornography into the equation, it wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a concerted effort to try and ban P2P networks and applications.
Stat of the Week, No. 7: The Bears had more turnovers and punts (13) than first downs (8). Gah! Thank goodness for the Cubs.
I finished The DaVinci Code last week. I really liked it though any book with religious symbolism, secret codes and heretical ideas generally has a good chance to make it into my library.
I'm looking forward to checking out some of the author's other books. Hopefully they'll be just as enjoyable.
BTW, you can take the web quest for even more secrets.
The Irish sure know how to keep me on the edge of my seat. It wasn't pretty but they did come back from a 19-point deficit.
Next week, they head to the Big House and continue their rivalry with Michigan.
I'm sitting in the San Jose airport waiting to go home. I spent the early part of the week at the office and then all of engineering went on a retreat to the Chaminade. It was actually very nice and the retreat itself went well.
Brian got James Gosling to come in and chat about his use of SourceCast on java.net as well as some of the cool stuff he is working on. I know Leonard was excited about giving a bit of tech support.
One thing I'm wondering right now is why I am going to have to show my ID before I get on the plane. I don't have to do that in Burbank or Oakland so why here? These are the sorts of things which drive people nuts who have to fly. You'd think this could be standardized. Ugh!
Matt has created a site which uses a wiki as the backend.
Very interesting stuff..
Atom4J is a library which can create and read Atom XML files. It isn't for clients but for the server-side.
Rogers is looking at JXTA and seemingly likes what he sees. He mentions how it is language-agnostic which I think most people don't realize.
JXTA is really just an XML-based protocol for communication among peers. The reference implementation of that protocol has been written in Java but that shouldn't stop anyone from trying to implement in their language of choice.
He also mentions that idea of a P2P RSS aggregator which is something that has been swirling in my mind for a long time. I tried to get involved in Reptile but I could see that Kevin's attention was on NewsMonster.
Overall, I'm looking forward to Rogers' column.