the binary log

Gorgeous minimalist webdesign

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:09:00 +0000

In Jeet Kune Do, one does not accumulate, but eliminate.

It is not daily increase, but daily decrease.

The height of cultivation always tends to simplicity.

—Bruce Lee

Net Neutrality

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Thu, 19 May 2011 14:24:00 +0000

Many of us who care about freedom on the internet care about particularly contentious policy issue: Network Neutrality. This issue seems to be coming to a head very quickly. I've finally collected some of my thoughts.

Net Neutrality entails legal protection of equality on the internet. It covers a range of policy proposals, few of which of become law so far. They aim to ensure that the internet remains a network of peers, free from any central control over which kinds of traffic it carries or limitation on which nodes are accessible. On the other side of the issue, several internet service providers (notably Comcast and AT&T) have claimed that their networks are suffering under the exploding demand for bandwidth. They must be allowed, they say, to prioritize some types of traffic--such as web browsing--over others, particularly P2P.

This issue arose around the year 2000, as the most common form of internet access switched from dial-up to newer models like DSL and cable. Under the old model, ISPs simply maintained local endpoints on the existing phone network. The barrier to entry was fairly low, and there were thousands of ISPs in the United States. Under the new model, ISPs build and lease new last-mile connections, often bundling internet access with other services such as cable television. The barrier to entry is vastly higher, and as a result large ISPs have local monopolies in many places. (In most of the US,
broadband internet access is at most a duopoly, between the local DSL provider and the local cable internet provider.)

I think that this trend is disturbing. ISPs have already started traffic-shaping, generally without informing customers. In at least one case, Comcast silently inserted RST packets to sabotage BitTorrent connections--preventing their customers from seeding (sharing files) to non-Comcast subscribers. They denied doing this even after a customer discovered the problem and posted about it in online forums, until the EFF ran a series of experiments and published an expose. In this and other ways, the internet's status as an open, egalitarian space largely immune to corporate and political boundaries is being threatened.

I think the cleanest solution would be to establish "common carrier" status for ISPs. Common carrier is a legal doctrine that gives shared infrastructure companies certain protections and responsibilities. They have immunity from libel, slander, copyright, and other laws with regard to the content they carry on their network. (The end-users, of course, remain liable.) In return, the common carrier is prohibited from discriminating against one type of content over another.

Establishing ISPs as common carriers would bring back one important aspect of the status quo during the dialup years. Phone companies were the original "common carriers"--so common carrier law, combined with the large number of ISPs to chose from, ensured that essentially every packet on the internet was treated equally. This is no longer the case. Making ISPs themselves the "common carriers" would fix this. ISPs, I would argue, are currently having their cake and eating it, too. They are already given a variety of implicit and explicit protections against liability for the content they carry. However, they are not being made to treat content equally.

As one user put it in a discussion on BitTorrent throttling,
“P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches. Just because you pay $49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn’t mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP’s network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved.”

This attitude seems to be reflected in the ISPs' actions. I would hopefully be able to demonstrate to legislators that "internet access" has a clear meaning. ISPs do not sell "web service" or a "browsing experience". They sell internet access: the ability to send and receive IP packets. I would argue that customers are entitled to use whatever protocols they wish on top of IP, just as phone subscribers are entitled to speak in any language they wish with the person on the other end.

"Common carrier" has significant advantages over writing a new set of laws specifically for ISPs. It simplifies the legal situation and would make Net Neutrality much harder to impinge upon, once passed. It leaves less room for a compromised bill being passed under the guise of "net neutrality", without actually providing strong protection. Common carrier law has a large body of judicial precedent and therefore (hopefully) fewer loopholes.

Net neutrality can be divided into at least two separate goals: equality of content providers and equality of protocols. The first means that ISPs should not be allowed, for example, to make deals with individual companies to treat certain web services preferentially. The situation is complex, since companies like Netflix already rely on a limited form of preferential treatment called colocation--they pay companies like Comcast to set up servers in Comcast data centers all over America, instead of in a few centralized locations, so that the vast majority of their traffic never hits backbone links--it goes from a local "point of presence" directly to users' homes. Such practices are necessary and acceptable. However, restricting or artificially slowing access to individual websites should not be permitted.

Equality of protocols means that all protocols above Layer 2 (IP) shouldn't be controlled by ISPs. This does not strictly mean that traffic may not be prioritized. Latency sensitive apps such as Skype, for example, can use the Type of Service field in the IP header to request special treatment. The user's service contract will determine whether this field is honored. But using deep packet inspection to discriminate against types of traffic should not be allowed.

I'm optimistic that someday, the equality we enjoy on the internet today will mature. Instead of being a matter of convention and serendipity, freedom on the internet will be protected by law.

Software patents

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Mon, 02 May 2011 17:43:00 +0000

Just wrote this for an online forum in an interesting class I'm taking: CS181, Computers and Ethics in Society. Thought I'd post it here, too. I've written about software patents before. If I had carte blanche to change just one thing about our laws, this would be it.

I think that software should not be patentable for three reasons.

First, software algorithms are inherently abstract and mathematical. One of the core ideas in computer science is the Church-Turing conjecture--that every computable algorithm can be implented on a Turing machine, or, equivalently, written as an expression in the lambda calculus. In that concrete sense, there can be no meaningful distinction between an algorithm and a mathematical expression. Since patent law only deals with "physical inventions", it currently relies on the distinction that software is encoded in a physical medium--for example, as bits on a hard drive. I think that this distinction is silly, since the object being patented is clearly the bits, not the hard drive. Don Knuth himself expressed that sentiment in his letter to the patent office.

Second, the status quo in patent practice provides large software companies with an unfair advantage. In particular, it helps large vendors of closed-source software. Since the Patent Act of 1832, inventors have been required to submit sufficient explanation of their device that another engineer could reproduce it. In the case of mechanical inventions, for example, they must submit detailed blueprints with the application, which become a matter of public record. This gives companies a fundamental tradeoff. They can keep their invention to themselves--as trade secrets. This gives them sole benefit of their R&D, but no legal protection if another inventor independently discovers it. Alternatively, they can file a patent. This makes their invention public, but gives them legal rights. I think that this tradeoff is important to the patent system's goal of promoting innovation: it gives inventors means and incentive to make their discoveries public.

This tradeoff is missing in software. I think that the most natural way to generalize the Patent Act requirements to software would be to require applicants to submit their source code. Instead, large vendors currently have their cake and eat it, too. They build portfolios of patents, often on algorithms defined in surprisingly vague terms. They keep all the associated code--if it even exists--closed, hindering others who would like to create "new or useful improvements thereon".

Third, software should not be patentable because software innovators do not need patents. On the contrary, they are hindered by patents. Patent law was designed for physical devices, under very different economic realities. Its purpose was to foster innovation. Physical inventions, in general, have a vastly longer development cycle than software. They must progress from an idea, to a protoype (at which point they become patentable), to a production run. Scaling to production is often time-consuming and expensive. If a small company is brining the device to market, it may take many years to bootstrap, reinvesting revenue in production capacity, before it achieves mass-market success. Physical devices have significant costs and delays beyond the initial R&D; the primary purpose of patents, as I understand them, is to protect inventors during this period. Larger, better-funded competitors shouldn't be allowed to steal their designs and outcompete them on production.

Software is a different world. The unit costs of software are essentially zero. I believe that being first to market with an idea is more than enough competive advantage to encourage innovation.

Not only do software patents fail to encourage innovation, they actively hinder it. This is primarily because of the risk and costs of patent litigation. How much does a patent case typically cost? This page summarizes the result of several inquiries into this question. While there is no consensus, the lowest estimates are roughly $1million. In the world of mechanical devices, such costs may be incidental. A car company, for example, might spend many orders of magnitude more than $1million setting up a production line. In the world of software, such costs can be overwhelming. Many software companies begin with signicantly less than $1m in funding. Google, for example, famously started with a $100,000 in angel funding from Andy Bechtolsheim. A poorly-timed lawsuit could have probably have destroyed what has since become a beacon of American innovation, even if the plaintiff's case was weak.

I think that the fact that software patents have the same twenty-year protection period as other utility patents is an indication of how out-of-touch the system has become with the realities of the industry. Twenty years ago, in 1991, "minicomputers" were large towers with significantly less power than a modern cell phone. The internet was a research project run by the US government and a handful of universities. Students were typing essays on electronic typewriters or writing them out by hand.

Imagine, for a moment, that Id Software had filed a patent on the world's first first-person shooter, DOOM. "A novel method of electronic entertainment, simulating combat from an individual perspective in a three-dimensional environment." This was a truly novel innovation with a working implementation--and therefore far more patentable, in my opinion, than many software patents which have been granted. GoldenEye, Duke Nukem, Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto, Bioshock, Halo, Call of Duty, Portal and countless other titles would not exist. Eighteen years of fast-paced innovation and relentless competition could have been prevented by a software patent.We could look forward to the second company ever to release a first-person shooter to do so in 2013.

I'll conclude with a quote from Id's founder, John Carmack.

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.

I think that this summarizes my views nicely. Software innovation would be best served if software algorithms were explicitly excluded from the scope of utility patents, just as mathematical formulae already are.

Solidworks

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Sun, 01 May 2011 13:56:00 +0000

Solidworks is seriously cool stuff. It's a general-purpose CAD program--pretty much anything you can machine, you can design in Solidworks. We use it a lot the solar car team.

I'd been wanting to learn how it works for a while. So tonight, I finally decided to sit down and build something. I pulled out a pair of calipers and some longboard parts. Progress was pretty slow at first. With me, the ME force is not strong. Also, there are some random things in Solidworks where "Undo" doesn't work. Eventually, I got a wheel:

The carbon-fiber deck doesn't exist yet, so I had to improvise. I made a sketch with a bunch of lines and angles on it. It said "OVERCONSTRAINED" in big red letters. Our electrical ninja, Greg Hall, told me this was nothing to fear and showed me how to fix it by pretending that my carbon fiber was sheetmetal. Worked beautifully.

Two beers and five hours later, with a little more help from solar car teammates Forest and Greg, I had my assembly. Birds were now chirping outside, which usually means you have to stop OCDing and finish. Four wheels, two trucks, two rubber risers, and a deck.

Then I clicked "render". Solidworks' black magic voodoo code figured out how to set up the lightsources and everything else, did a little raytracing, and came up with this. Nice.

Stay tuned for the real thing, once I get around to building that!

Welcome back, ROTC

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:52:00 +0000

“The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools”

--Thucydides

Deutschland, in pictures

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:29:00 +0000

Just rediscovered the website of Friedrich Lohmüller, raytrace artist extraordinaire. He made a couple of the pictures on the excellent POV-RAY Hall of Fame. (Back in high school, by the way, that gallery inspired me to write a simple raytracer. It was pretty much my first real programming project.)

At first glance, his prints seem to have the simplified geometry, flat planes of color, and "plastic" look characteristic of low-budget CG.

For other artists, those qualities are usually tacky (eg most of the 3D stuff on DeviantArt). Even their "good" renderings often come across as a tech demo, not as art (eg the countless renderings of beams of light hitting a glass ball).

But Lohmüller's prints transcend the kitsch. He uses those same rendering limitations to great effect, conveying order and perfection--utopia, even.

I think he captures the German engineer ethos very nicely... or, at least, my interpretation of it. The detail in the machines, the geometry, the emphasis on solitude, the perfect infinite expanse, it's all there.

That one reminds me of a picture I took of the salt flats in Utah.

One of my favorites, apparently made a very long time ago:

It's a shame art like this isn't more widely known or respected.

Having linked to some of his pictures, I will also link to Mr. Lohmüller's gallery, where he sells a bunch of gorgeous poster prints.

EE108B in one (not-so-)short article

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:46:00 +0000

I took a pretty cool hardware class last quarter--EE108B. It's about processor design.

In any case, I just found a surprisingly comprehensive summary of the stuff we learned. A short, readable intro to pipelining, caches, instruction sets, gnarly design tradeoffs, and all that:

http://lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/

The Sincerest Form of Fail

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:05:00 +0000

I'm typing this from my dad's new Win7 phone. On the surface, the interface is what you'd expect: the closest thing to an iPhone you could build without getting sued, plus some Microsoft branding ("Windows 7", "Internet Explorer"; there's an app for mail and another for Hotmail).

The keyboard works similarly to an iPhone's, suggesting words and replacing obvious typos. The home view features a bunch of tiled app icons. The browser handles tabs in exactly the same way. There's even a button right below the screen that always takes you to the home view.

The similarities, sadly, don't include attention to detail. There are a number of usability bugs.

There's no cut and paste
There are two home screens. Both have buttons that launch apps. The second is a simple list; the first has a subset of the apps with larger icons. But both of them scroll, complete with a mini-scrollbar that fades in and out of view. Also, the first home screen's icons are inexplicably not the same size. Some are rectangles, some are squares. Some are two-tone, others are an... eclectic mix of colors.
Positioning the cursor in a textbox is difficult and imprecise. It doesn't work nearly as well as the iOS magnifying glass.
When you slide your thumb inside a multiline textbox, it doesn't scroll. Instead, it simply moves the cursor around. You have to hit the scrollbar on the side (which looks like it's straight out of Windows 95, square and gray with a 1px bevel). Then, when you pull the scrollbar down, the page scrolls up, as though you had grabbed part of the page and pulled it downward. This means that the scrollbar right under your thumb is also moving upward. Strikingly unintuitive.

...and those are just the ones that stood out to me. But the single most annoying issue, in my opinion, is the home button. Unlike the iPhone's slightly recessed physical button, the HTC HD7 simply has a printed Windows logo. The touch sensitivity apparently extends below the screen. This makes the button maddeningly easy to hit accidentally, while typing. It's right underneath the bottommost row of keys. In fact, I started typing this post on the HD7, ended up on the home screen at least five times despite being careful, gave up and am now finishing it on a laptop. This issue is especially bad since it can't be fixed with a software update. This is a hardware problem. A quick search on Google Images shows that many Win7 phones--not just the HD7--seem to have this problem.

Now, I wouldn't want you to leave this blog thinking you'd read yet another Apple fanboy rant regarding Microsoft interface design, or lack thereof. In fact, the reason Win7 Phone makes me sad is because I'm the opposite of a fanboy. I love the Nokia N900, with its large battery, gorgeous Carl Zeiss camera and full keyboard, running completely unencumbered Linux. The thought that most of Nokia's phones will soon be Windows 7 Phones means less competition for Apple, frankly, and that is always bad.

Joining Addepar

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 09:44:00 +0000

I'm very excited to join Addepar over the summer. Addepar is an early-stage startup. They're building software for fund managers--private equity types, family offices and perhaps even university or nonprofit endowments. They're solving a bunch of unmet needs for the kinds of customers most companies can only dream they had.

The coolest thing about Addepar, though, is the engineering culture. I've been hanging out with the engineers there and they're all extraordinarily legit. The founder and CEO, Joe Lonsdale, previously cofounded Palantir. So far, he's assembled a team of ~10 engineers and a graphic designer. More news soon.

Why startups are cooler

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 10:03:00 +0000

Many of my friends share my gut feeling about startups. That's where the fun is, where the upside is, where you can make the biggest impact. Michael Arrington captured the mentality really well in his article, Are You a Pirate?

Well, now there are some solid statistics to back up the intuition: when a company triples its headcount, on average, it halves employee productivity. This isn't obvious at first--if you graduate Stanford and work for Google instead of that startup you'll have a much smaller role in a much bigger enterprise. Well, multiply the two together and you get something less than one. At least in dollar terms--not my favorite way to measure impact, but certainly the most easily quantifiable--people at smaller companies make more of a difference. I think that this is a lot more pronounced in tech than in other places. Reminds me of "The Mythical Man-Month"--tech has this magic to it where the relationship between man-hours and the amount of win achieved is really weak. Microsoft can sink a billion dollars into Kin. One dude in a basement can make Minecraft.

As if I needed another reason! I've decided. I don't care if I have to live in shipping container like Hiro Progatonist from Snow Crash, with nothing but a box of ramen and fast internet. If I'm broke when I'm 30, it'll be because my startup failed in a suitably epic fashion. I'm definitely a pirate.

Solar Car Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 01:09:00 +0000

The Solar Car Project has been recruiting really successfully. We now have an absurd 10% of the new Class of 2014 on our mailing list, and more than a hundred people who have showed up at the shop for over the past week.

The strategy team has lots of cool projects Sam and I have been working on. Going from one- or two-person projects to full teams with a wide range of math and coding experience is going to be both difficult and awesome. The list will keep growing.

array power simulation

Onwards!

Another day, a new year

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:08:00 +0000

I just got back to Stanford. California is still glorious.

The summer was cool. I interned at a proprietary trading company that deals in equity options, in Chicago. Learned a ton. Didn't blog much because everything I worked on was, well, proprietary.

So today, I have two signs of the impending apocalypse.

#1. The flying robots from Half-Life have become reality

Yes, like this one

#2. The Solar Car Team's neighbors in VAIL are building a robotic rally car.

And when they say their fully autonomous car is going to climb Pike's Peak at "near race speed", it means quite a lot:

Cheers!

Round two, featuring Bruce Schneier

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:31:00 +0000

Bruce Schneier just wrote a post on all the suggestions to add authentication to the internet. The idea behind those is that if nobody on the internet was anonymous, legitimate users would be largely unaffected and the bad guys would be out of business. Schneier does a nice job refuting this. He says that the technological problem of attaching real names to everyone on the internet is "insoluble", and that trying to implement such a scheme will only hurt free speech, especially in countries that try to censor their citizens. As his first commenter summarizes, "if you outlaw anonymity on the internet, only outlaws will have anonymity on the internet."

Then, Schneier draws a parallel between universal authentication and copy protection:

The whole attribution problem is very similar to the copy-protection/digital-rights-management problem. Just as it's impossible to make specific bits not copyable, it's impossible to know where specific bits came from. [...]

Just as the music industry needs to learn that the world of bits requires a different business model, law enforcement and others need to understand that the old ideas of identification don't work on the Internet. For good or for bad, whether you like it or not, there's always going to be anonymity on the Internet.

Couldn't agree more.

The Elephant in the Room

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:41:00 +0000

I'm baffled: why is the debate about intellectual property and DRM so deep in denial? On one hand, I believe in property rights and the rule of law as much as anyone, and I recognize that as people take on increasingly abstract jobs--things like writing, making music, or programming computers--it's important that they be able to make a living doing those thing. At the same time, the business model for non-broadcast media designed for mass consumption--music, DVDs, and stuff like that--seems broken. And there's a huge disconnect between current copyright law and reality.

Blog posts ranting about how awful DRM is or complaining about the RIAA and the MPAA are a dime a dozen, so this one won't be another of those. I think there's a more fundamental problem, one that people don't seem to talk about as much:

You can't protect a sequence of bits while also distributing it for consumption.

Sure, I can protect a sequence of bits I send to one or a small handful or receivers. You and I can get PGP--a freely available military-grade encryption protocol--and I can send you a message that nobody else will ever be able to read, even if they can see all the communication between us. But if I make a song and "sell" it to a million people to listen to, then the idea that I can still protect its distribution at that point is ridiculous. It's like walking into a crowded room, shouting something private as loud as you can, and then getting upset when it comes back to you a week later from someone else. Paper money can be kept in safes. Cars can be locked. Information just doesn't work that way.

The practical manifestation of this is that DRM is famously ineffective. For example, the DVD and HD-DVD formats were both designed, at great expense, to contain strong encryption, with the key only available to licensed DVD player manufacturers and a few other corporations. Both were cracked relatively quickly. There are plenty of cracks in Blu-ray's armor, too. Encrypting something well--keeping it secret--and making it available to millions of people to view are incompatible goals. On a similar note, I once checked out an "e-book" version of a book I owned from a local library, just because I was curious what it would be. It could only be opened in a program called Adobe Digital Editions, with particularly intense DRM--it needed an internet connection to run, so that Digital Editions could connect to an Adobe server, exchange cryptographic keys, and make sure that the book was still "on loan" to you. But, like all DRM schemes, it had a relatively obvious weakness--I could view the pages. It was writing out all the carefully protected content, in pristine unencrypted form, to my computer's framebuffer. So I hit Print Screen, fired up Paint, and pasted in the title page. I wrote a quick macro using the excellent AutoHotkey that did some additional voodoo, let it run overnight, and 1300 automatic Print Screens later I had a folder full of neatly cropped JPGs. I clicked "view as slideshow" and my book was mine again.

You can't share a secret with a million people and expect them to keep it.

There's one more elephant in the room that I think deserves some attention. Two elephants, actually: Apple and Google. Despite its fundamental technical weakness, DRM used to have a bit of efficacy in preventing the average Joe from copying and sharing media designed for mass consumption. This is simply because it makes the fundamentally possible sufficiently inconvenient. The average Joe isn't going to write many AutoHotkey scripts. He's not going to write an audio driver that reencodes all that DRM'd music in his ITunes library as MP3s instead of sending it to his sound card. But nowadays, the average Joe somehow has access to all this stuff. He listens to tons of music. Most of my college friends, regardless of whether they're technically inclined or not, have many gigabytes of music. If they were actually paying $0.99 a song, many of them would have a Bugatti's worth. Clearly, what they're doing is not paying, and it's not rocket science either. And Apple and Google are the big enablers.

Yes, this album art is the intellectual property of System of a Down. I'm sure they don't mind. If they ever send me a takedown notice, this post will implode in a puff of irony.

I remember when I got my first IPod in 2004. I bought it used from a friend, and it still had 3GB of his music on it. A few weeks later, I was listening to a different friend's IPod on a bus trip when mine ran out of batteries. I noticed that it had a lot of the same albums, and that the occasional artist name was misspelled in the same way. So I asked around and found out what all the cool kids were doing: swapping IPods. You have a 3GB music library, and I have a 3GB library. I take your IPod home for a weekend, use a little utility off of the internet to circumvent its laughable DRM, and merge all the tracks with my library. Then I put that library back onto your IPod, and now we each have 5GB of music instead of three. (The missing 1GB, in this example, is overlap between our original libraries.) Part of the reason that Apple makes billions from the IPod is because IPod was the new Napster. Copying songs from IPod to IPod is way faster than downloading them from virus-ridden P2P networks and is even less traceable, since there's no internet connection involved. I'm sure that part of the reason the Zune never took off is because Microsoft put a lot of thought into making a really strong DRM scheme, and opening up the kinds of possibilities an IPod offers was apparently more work than people were willing to do.

Google opens up an additional Pandora's box of information freedom so easy anyone can open it. Type in something like "family guy s02e01" and you'll get tons of sites where you can simply download that episode, a number of torrents and a few sites where you can actually stream it without leaving your browser. I know a number of people who get their textbooks by typing in the name plus "filetype:pdf". What really hit me, though, was when I opened Youtube earlier today and typed in "system of a down". On the first page, there was a playlist--a relatively new Youtube feature--containing a wide variety of songs by the band. The videos were just still pictures of each album cover, but they were HD, so the sound quality was pristine. One click later they were all on autoplay. Napster had nothing on this.

As a result, I'm surprised that Apple and Google aren't taking more heat from the likes of the RIAA. If the trade associations want to keep up the Quixotic fight for DRM, Apple and Google seem like the logical targets--not single moms whose kids once used KaZaA. Yet both they and the legal community seem stuck in denial. I know a number of people whose music libraries currently exceed 30GB; assuming 3MB per song, that's about 10,000 songs. According to the Copyright Act, each one of those if punishable by a fine between $750 and $150,000--for a total of, you know, somewhere in the $7.5m to $1.5b range. Between that and the DMCA, most of my friends, your friends, and millions of other people are criminals, and we each owe a corporate association or two astronomical sums of money. Yet those laws have resulted in only a handful of lawsuits, most of which have settled out of court. How can we take this legislation seriously?

What I would really like to see is not the RIAA and MPAA shifting their focus to Apple and Google, though either of those would be lots more palatable than their current victims. Instead, I wish they and all the other parties who care about copyright would be willing to take a levelheaded look at the way media is being consumed. I wish they'd step back and be realistic about the options content creators have. DRM is not really one of them. You can't share your bits and control them, too. There are other, more sustainable ways of making a living. Artists can go on concert tours. They can do private shows for hire. Film producers can show their work movie theaters and get paid at the box office. If you look at it that way, sharing becomes the good thing your preschool teacher always said it would be. The more people see your work, the more will care about you, and the bigger your audience becomes to which you can sell your services. A song or movie you get from a friend comes implicitly vouched for, and you're more likely to pay attention to its creators. As Richard Stallman famously said, information wants to be free. I think its time we stopped fighting that and started embracing it.

Computer Science Bonanza

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:58:00 +0000

It's been an adventure. After

the race
the vast expanse of nothingness that is Australia
the carnivore's utopia of New Zealand
the adventures of Thailand
joining my dad's project, and
chilling at home in Utah

...after all that, I'm back at Stanford now, five minutes out from my first lecture in six months. CS110: "Principles of Computer Systems." Based on MIT's 6.033, I hear. I'm also taking CS108, where I'll write an ungodly amount of Java, and CS109, stats for programmers, taught by the always-awesome Mehran.

The solar car team is meeting tonight for the first time since the race. A few fixes and, if all goes according to plan, we'll be rolling around campus on battery power, recruiting freshmen. Sometime between now and this summer, we'll have to build a new top shell and get ready for the North American Solar Challenge.

This will be an interesting quarter. More news as it comes in. Peace.

Two Decades, Two Birthdays

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:30:00 +0000

I'm twenty now. This will take some getting used to.

It happened en route from Bangkok, on my way home to Utah, somewhere on the flight from Kuala Lumpur and Sydney. I took in the biggest skyline Down Under for the third time in three months, chilled for a few hours, then got on a plane to San Fransisco. The sunset from the window seat six miles up was gorgeous. It also happened in 2x fast-forward, since the plane was going east almost as fast as the earth's rotation at that tropical latitude. Just three hours later instead of the usual six, it was midnight, December 13. Then we crossed the international date line, and it became my birthday again.

(True-color Earth, courtesy of NASA.)

If I could somehow go back to that other hemisphere exactly a year from now, I'd troll the stewardesses with a ridiculous legal edge case: I'd try buying a beer four times on the plane. It wouldn't work the first time, because I'd still be twenty. Then, after midnight, I could celebrate being twenty-one. Crossing the date line the other way, the date would jump back, to Dec. 11, and I'd be underage again. Finally, by the time we landed in Sydney, my legal age would change a third time.

Not that it would matter, since the drinking age Australia is 18. Cheers!

Heading South

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:50:00 +0000

...we've just come full circle a second time. We started our Thailand trip in Bangkok, and after all our adventures in Chiang Mai, we passed through Bangkok again a week ago. Here we are now in Bangkok a third time, looking out across the Chao Prahya river, which is buzzing quietly with millions of mosquitoes and loudly with a handful of overpowered ferries.

We just finished an awesome trip. A side-trip, but still--we spent the week in southern Thailand, on hills, on a beach, and in no less than four caves.

The first two of these were in Petchaburi, our first stop. A place so far off the tourist trail that it was hard to find any signs in letters I could recognize, and where getting food was an exercise in sign language. The town's one attraction was that pair of caves, which had been converted into religious spaces--one was a wat, or temple, while the other was just filled with Buddha images. Both had an interesting, unexpectedly postapocalyptic feel to them, empty and surrounded with stray dogs. Hundreds of monkeys sat in the side streets as much as in the trees, scratching themselves and squawking at us. They seemed to be waiting for throngs of snack-laden tourists that didn't exist. Inside the "cave of a thousand buddhas" were two women in white robes, meditating in silence. The darker corners of the cave were filled with the guano and high-pitched chirps of lots of bats.

...the Buddhas

..and us, waiting patiently for the shutter timer.

The real Terminator vibe, however, came from the wat cave. Its entrance was halfway up a hill that rose out of the otherwise flat outskirts of Petchaburi. As we approached the hill, locals were burning trash and leaves in ditches by the side of the road. The smoke wafted up to large, but decaying facilities--a half-finished parking structure, some food stalls, and a long line of bathrooms. These buildings, like the monkeys that surrounded them, seemed to be waiting for visitors that never came. We were the exception.

Only one other person entered the cave with us--a lady, like those in the by the "thousand buddhas", dressed in white. Three dogs followed her in; they looked as though they had definitely seen better days. We followed the dogs.

Inside, the wat was lit with bare flourescent tubes. The Buddhas were beautiful, but the smell was consitent with the handful of stray animals that seemed to call the place home. Nathan and I found a side cave that was accessible only by crawling through a tunnel a few yards long. It was just big enough to stand in, and black except for the dim glow of Nathan's iPhone. It also contained two floorboards, a broom, and a piece of cloth--we're guessing that a monk spent some quality time alone there.

...then we set the iPhone flashlight to red and Ben took a really long exposure shot.

We kept walking. One of the coolest statues in the cave was a very large reclining Buddha. So Matt whipped out his headlamp and Ben did another 15-second exposure:

...every year during New Student Orientation, there's a slideshow of the wildest pictures people have taken with the word "Stanford." With a little luck, this might qualify. (Also, the way the word overlaps the Buddha a bit was unintentional.)

We walked deeper into the cave, and into the most surreal experience I've had on this trip so far. We heard someone's voice echoing from the walls, piling syllables on top of each other in a fast staccato rhythm. It was the lady who had walked into the cave in front of us, and it was clear that she wasn't saying anything in any language. She was exerting herself visibly, though, taking short sharp breaths between long stretches of sound. This was glossolalia--"speaking in tongues." I had only known it from the book Snow Crash (which, by the way, is awesome.) In real life, however, there was something seriously disconcerting about it. I watched open-mouthed for about a minute. The three unkempt dogs stared back, presumably hoping for food, but the lady was facing one of the Buddha images and never acknowledged our presence.

We left the cave and climbed to the top of the hill, which is capped with an enormous (20-ish yard tall) sitting Buddha.

...and some extreme scaffolding

The statue was under renovation, surrounded by an abandoned-looking construction site. The hilltop also had some excellent views of Petchaburi and the countryside.

...like this one

The next day, we took the slow train to Hua Hin, through some scenic farmland. Hua Hin is only about 100 km south of Petchaburi, but in many ways the cities seem to be opposites. Hua Hin, it turned out, is a sunny beachside resort town. Once an annual destination for the Thai royal family, it is now full of Hiltons, Courtside Marriotts, and middle-aged vactioners in beach chairs. Nathan found some really good seafood.

Our last stop was lots more memorable. It was Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park, and it was almost as devoid of tourists as Petchaburi. Steep, dramatic, jungle-covered limestone peaks rose up next to a white-sand beach. We had a bunglow surrounded by palm trees.

...yes, it was this good.

That night, I walked over a short, steep path to a nearby fishing village. The boats were all ridiculously colorful. No English was spoken or written anywhere, so I just walked up to some dude who was loading fishes into a giant cooler and asked "khao lai"--"how much?", one of the five or so phrases of Thai I know. (I have the same understanding of Thai that a parrot might have if it was still in training. It worked, though, and with a bit more gesticulation and waving of Baht bills, I got some fish.) I got a few other things from two little shops. (This town was so small, it didn't even have a 7-Eleven. Those are totally ubiquitous in Thailand, kind of like McDonalds in America, and like McDonalds, you know you're really off the map when you find a place that doesn't have one.) In any case, I carried the fish back and Nathan showed me how to cook them Japanese style, encrusted in salt. We made a bonfire out of coconut shells and palm fronds.

...the fish was ridiculously delicious.

We got up the next morning to go caving again. These were a different kind of cave altogether, though--no black chambers or hair-raising utterances here. Instead, these caves were gigantic, and most of their roofs had caved in, creating two gaping sinkholes. Lots of sunlight filtered in through really tall trees reaching toward the surface. We shared the space with a couple of butterflies and a group of elementary-school kids.

We rolled back to Bankok again by the scenic route--chugging along in a German-built diesel contraption from a couple of decades ago.

...yours truly and friends

Until next time... peace!

Welcome to the Jungle

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:04:00 +0000

We're in Chiang Mai now, the center of northern Thailand and gateway to the madness that is the Golden Triangle jungle. We trundled in a few hours ago on a sleeper train. It smelled strongly of grease and chunked its way relatively slowly over a rough track. Nevertheless, I slept well after walking around Bangkok all of yesterday.

Tomorrow morning, we're going on a three-day jungle trek. Of all the places we've been on this trip, this is the least beaten path. According to those storytelling history bubbles in Lonely Planet, Northern Thailand only became reasonably stable in the 1980s. Before that, it was torn between Burmese, Chinese, and, during the Vietnam War, even CIA influence. It was home to a vicious drug trade, a lot of the world's opium production, and to some colorful personalities like this guy.

then...

That's Khun Sa, the Burmese warlord who got his start with the Kuomintang, amassed a personal army big enough to have territorial feuds with the governments of Thailand and Burma, and trafficked more than 1000 tons of heroin to America. The party, it seems, has since moved to Afghanistan, and the indigenous people now cultivate rice paddies where the poppy fields used to be.

...and now

The plan is to ride some elephants, go bamboo rafting, and hang out with some hill tribes. I'll have some pictures and updates when I come back.

Thailand Ahoy

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:26:00 +0000

...it's been a pretty intense month. We drove across the outback twice, racking up 8000km of desert. We broke and then (mostly) fixed the array on our solar car, then raced it across Australia--we managed to go coast to coast on just sunshine. Great success! That weather script I posted about a few weeks ago worked great, but was totally unneccesary since the entire race was cloudless and not particularly windy.

Then we went to New Zealand, a land of hippies, awesome hikes, good surf, and more than a hundred million sheep. A land with so much grass and so many timid meaty animals that steak burgers cost less than veggie burgers. It was like Sunday-school picture-book Heaven, with sunshine and rolling green hills and fluffy white lambs.

Now were going the last leg of our trip: Thailand. Here's what I just posted on our travel blog:

...so we spent two relaxing days in the lovely town of Wellington, and are now sitting in the international terminal of its airport. On Saturday night, the All Whites beat Bahrain at "football" and the city filled with load people in white jumpsuits and live music and generally turned into a giant seaside party. The atmosphere of revelry continued well into Sunday, which saw some major streets cordoned off and lined with flag-waving kids for the Santa Day Parade. I said goodbye to Wellington's palatial Burger King, complete with an extravagant neo-Baroque ceiling and an espresso machine, by getting a giant pancake breakfast. Yes, even the fast food here is pretty extreme.

...almost like this

In a few hours, we'll be Down Under again. Next stop: Thailand. I spent this morning reading a bit about that country's history--an elaborate fugue of warlords, farmers, clashing ethnic groups and abortive attempts at democracy. The country has 17 different constitutions since they first tried that sort of thing in 1932. Their most recent PM was kicked out after the Royal Thai Army walked into Bangkok with lots of guns and accused him of having a "conflict of interest" because he was also a host on a TV cooking show. Apparently this sort of thing happens every few years. Thailand is a very peaceful country in spite of everything--it's mostly Buddhist and hasn't had a real war or particularly violent coup since WWII.

Political ridiculosity aside, Thailand sounds like a promised land of teak temples and spicy street food, where a dollar will get you 33 Baht and a couple Baht will get you really good tea. Updates forthcoming!

Solar Car Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:47:00 +0000

One of my jobs over the past couple of days has been to program a weather data feed for the solar car. (The race is in twelve days! More on that soon.) After a lot of looking, we settled on NOAA's Global Forecast System as our source.

the world, simulated. thanks NOAA!

(That, by the way, is a really cool system. It gives you everything that's going on at any point on the globe, in three hour increments, from right now to more than a week in advance. By "everything", I mean everything from the chance of rain to "soil porosity" and "total cloud water (atmospheric column)." They run the simulation four times a day. That means that the NOAA guys crank out gigabytes of data every six hours, and anyone can just go there and download it.)

For the World Solar Challenge, we're interested in two things: the amount of power we're going to get (or as NOAA likes to call it, "downward shortwave radiation flux") and the amount of headwind or tailwind.

solar power, in W/m^2

The only problem is that the race is one one of the most remote highways in the world. We're bringing extra fuel canisters so that our vans make it from one outpost to the next. Those gigabytes of real-time data aren't going to get there. Instead, we're bringing a satellite phone, which gets us a couple kilobits per second--1991 style--and at exorbitant cost. Sasha calculated that loading Gmail would take more than an hour and cost $400.

To get around this, I wrote a script that runs at regular intervals on my server back in California. Each time, it downloads the latest weather data and parses out only the variables we care about, does a little bit of voodoo, and samples them roughly every kilometer along the race route.

Plan A was to compress the output into a hackish text file. I'd output one line for each waypoint along the route, and each line would have one character per forecast: the first character would be the amount of sun we're getting now, the second would be the amount of sun we expect in three hours, and so on for the entire six-day race.

~3000 waypoints * 60 forecast times * 1 character per value = 180000 bytes. 180 kB. Doable over a satellite phone! Still, I forgot the obvious part: the weather at one point in the middle of nowhere in the desert is very similar to the weather a kilometer away, or a kilometer after that... as a result, many of the lines in the script output were very similar to each other. Not optimal. So I tried something else...

scriptin'

Plan B was to round each value to the nearest integer, then write them as a regular text file. Number, comma, number, comma, on every line, one per waypoint.

Then I zipped the file and made it available for download. Much easier, and fewer moving parts since we can just open the zip file with software we already have. As Donald Knuth once famously said,

premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Simplicity rules.

Tomorrow at the crack of dawn (according to Sasha), we are leaving for Adelaide, then for Darwin. I'll post when I can, but internet will be spotty. In fact, internet access sucks in Australia, in general. More on that later. Peace!

I'm in Sydney

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:08:00 +0000

...on my way to Melbourne. Jesus, Australia is awesome. I think even the bag claim conveyor belts go counterclockwise here.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be putting as many miles onto the solar car as we possibly can, and then we're racing. It's the World Solar Challenge--from Darwin to Adelaide, across the outback, sun power only.

(The car, just before shipping, with about half the solar panels on. Taken a few weeks ago by Nathan.)

I'll be blogging from the road, of course, and on the trips to New Zealand and Thailand some friends of mine and I are doing afterward. Nathan has some great pictures of the solar car on his blog (which he started writing just for this trip, and which I'm sure will be excellent). If we have time, we'll throw some content on the Stanford Solar Car team blog, too. And Wired.com's Autopia did a post about us a few weeks ago.

Peace!

Drive-By Journalism

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:43:00 +0000

So I was cruising down the boulevard in the Stanford Solar Car last Thursday. I was the middle car in a three-car convoy. Cars would slow down as they passed by to do a double take on our carbon fiber contraption.

One guy pulled up next to me and started taking pictures. The "experimental prototype" he snarks about is the car we're taking to Australia, and "Solstice" is the old model, this one's Apogee. Cool pictures, nonetheless. And mad props to Mr. Zbrozek for digging this up.

And if you want more production value and more ridiculous commentary, Wired.com did a post about us, too.

More pictures forthcoming!

Finding the Next Dot-Com

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:35:00 +0000

Its seems like everyone and their mom has a domain name nowadays, and domain squatters have the rest.

The land grab is speeding up. VeriSign says that more than 2.4m new .coms are registered every month. Virtual real estate is just a name, but domain auctions sometimes make actual real estate look cheap--and even if you aren't paying $7.4m for "business.com", a lot of domain names are expensive. If it's pronounceable, paying a few thousand bucks is apparently normal.

All this squatting and grabbing makes life harder for people who actually want to build a web presence. Just look at the names of some of the newer companies around here: Ooyala, anyone? DealKat? SaaSure? That first one reads like a misspelling of a French exclamation. The second is a misspelling. The third is a pun on SaaS, which is usually pronounced "sass", so it sounds like a lisp ("sass-sure"?).

These guys seem to have gotten what lots of people want: an unregistered domain name. Those sell for about $10, renewed yearly; the details depend on the specific TLD you want. In any case, they're vastly cheaper than domains that are already registered, whether by previous legitimate users or by squatters.

After spending half an hour recently typing stuff into whois, looking for the coveted "not found" that would tell me a name was unregistered, I found nothing. I thought: there's got to be a better way...

So I wrote a few quick-and-dirty programs that generate domain names, then used a shell script to test them automatically and pick out the unregistered ones. I wanted domains that were reasonably short and looked and sounded like English words. Since all the tricks I tried to that end rely on a large English word list, and since I didn't feel like waiting very much, I wrote these mini-programs in C++.

Attempt #1 goes through a list of English words and builds a map of all each 'syllable' along with how often that syllable occurs. For syllables, I just used all the substrings in each word of 2-5 letters that had at least one vowel. The most common were es, in, er, ed, ing...

Then, I combined two syllables at a time, starting with the the most common and the second most common: esin.com, ines.com, eser.com, eres.com...

The names got a bit more complicated after that, but they weren't very wordlike. Worse, the first 1000 were all four or five letters long, so despite sounding like gibberish, almost all of them were taken.

Attempt #1 results
500 domains
53 of which happen to be in the original wordlist. None of those was available.
Of the remaining 447, 2 were available: 0.4%

I needed something better...

Attempt #2 is a Markov model of the words in the dictionary. After a bit of experimenting, I decided to use a Markov model. For every three-char sequence in the input word list, I kept track of all the characters that come next. I included the null character at the end of each word, to model the length of English words as well as the characters they're made of.

To generate names, I sampled the most common three-character sequences at the beginning of dictionary words. For each sequence, I randomly picked from the characters that could come next, and repeated that until I got to a null character.

This one worked a lot better:

dislew.com
comm.com
trati.com
fore.com
staying.com
impo.com
recre.com
stri.com
gravel.com
miss.com
...

I especially like comm.com. Maybe a communications or PR agency? It's a sweet domain.

These names were generally a bit longer, but pronounceable. A lot more of them were available--it seems like raw length is what the squatters really care about.

Attempt #2 results:
500 domains
122 of which happen to be in the original wordlist. None of those were available.
Of the remaining 378, 61 were available: 16.4%

Possibilities abound. I could..

Artificially crank up the probability of the null character for every seed in the Markov model, to make it produce shorter domain names while still trying to keep them wordlike.
Exclude long words from the wordlist and then build the Markov model, also in an effort to produce shorter domain names.
Use the Markov model to generate two words at a time, and simply concatenate them, also to get more compound-word domain names.
Repeat the experiment for languages other than English.
Run a bunch of popular domains and less popular ones through the Markov model to see how they score. Are domains that look like words more popular than those that don't?
Compare some sites with a lot of direct traffic (people typing the domain into their URL bars, instead of going through a link or a search engine) and see if those tend to be more wordlike than their less typeable counterparts.

I might try some of this stuff. If I do, I'll keep you posted. Peace...

Reblog

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:02:00 +0000

...the 140-character crowd gets retweets, so why not a reblog?

This is an awesome one I found yesterday: Overcoming Bias

It's by an economist and in the style of Freakonomics, but with fewer inhibitions. In particular, Robin Hanson has no qualms applying the rational, disinterested analysis of incentives, biases, and markets to issues of gender and race. I especially like this post, which is a bit outside his usual vein. It's not your average relationship advice...

In other news, Max now has a column on The DC Writeup. He's one post in so far--and that post is coincidentally also about overcoming bias. It's an exposition of academic groupthink in climate research. (Disregard the article title; he didn't pick it, and the real one seems to be in the URL.)

Finally, there's Rick Rusczyk, of Art of Problem Solving fame, who seems to share Max's mix of topics: his writing generally falls in the triangle whose corners are math and politics and economics. He has the inside scoop on an interesting niche culture--that of high-school contest math, and the kids who participate in it. His tagline is "the Search for Intelligence Continues."

I think that search is what the blogosphere is about, too. People like these are making it easy.

Yet Another Round of SunSpider Benchmarks

noreply@blogger.com (dc) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:32:00 +0000

... I ran some today because I've been getting mixed signals reading other people's results. I only tested the latest versions of the four most popular browsers. The executive summary:

Chrome 2.0	776.2ms
Safari 4.0	957.0ms
Firefox 3.5	1648.8ms
IE 8	6045.4ms

Each measurement is a mean of five tests, and the 95% confidence intervals for each one were all close to ±3%. Full breakdowns of all the tests behind the links...

Machine: Toshiba Satellite L305-S5939, Core 2 Duo T6400, 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Lots of people have been writing about just how quickly Javascript is becoming quicker, so I didn't test for that--instead, I just wanted to see for myself how the race was going. Chrome still owns.

Chrome runs V8, built by a crack team of Danish coders. Among other things, it's great at handling tail recursion. Chrome does monomorphic inline caching to migitate the performance hit from dynamic typing, plus a lot of aggressive bytecode optimization.

Safari has it's own lightweight JIT compiler and some other optimizations (amusingly, they call their engine "SquirrelFish Extreme"). They use polymorphic inline caching to optimize object member lookups. As far as I can tell, that means a smaller potential speedup than that of V8's monomorphic caching, but one that applies in more situations.

Firefox runs TraceMonkey, using a really cool hack, trace trees (PDF). In my tests, it took a bit more than twice as long as Chrome 2.0, but by all indications is lots faster than the original Chrome. It's like adding another Moore's law on top of Moore's law! At least for now, the speed of Javascript software seems to be doubling every 18 months or so.

Even IE 8, which took twice as long as Firefox, is a huge improvement over IE 7. John Resig, the Javascript guru who wrote jQuery and now works for Mozilla, gave it no faint praise. In his words, "our day has finally come." He goes on to talk about "some big improvements in improving garbage collection issues, memory management, and performance - all of which will be greatly appreciated in everyday applications."

I think the coolest thing about these speedups is that the different teams all got there by different routes. Maybe there will be convergence resulting in even better numbers? Javascript on Chrome 2.0 and Safari is already comparable to optimized native code, and the two most popular browsers aren't far behind.

I bet the day will come when programming languages will be performance equivalent--when working at a higher level of abstraction won't carry the serious performance hit that it usually does today. Javascript is a very dynamic, functional language--so if it can be optimized this well, why shouldn't other languages get the same boost?

In other news, I've resurrected my blog, Lazarus style. It's a zombie now, back from the dead. My last few months have been busy. More coming soon!