The project I've spent nearly all of the past two months working on has been released. We made a nice web page to tell the world about it: http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/

I think my one-sentence summary is something like "We broke your disk encryption system under the security model it was designed to be used in, and it was easy."

It's been a fascinating process all the way through.

The web site went up around 9 am. It was posted on Slashdot and BoingBoing within a couple of hours, then C|Net and Wired, and now the NY Times. To illustrate how much traffic that is, our site has been mirrored to deal with the load (and was still up and down in the afternoon), but the web site for the Center for IT Policy has been overloaded just by the fraction of visitors clicking through from the project page.

The universal experience of being slashdotted includes the inevitable frustration at reading dozens (hundreds) of comments that were quickly dashed off by people who didn't bother to read any further than a one-paragraph summary, although I'm encouraged that a good fraction of them are followed by rebuttals from people who did read further and think our results are interesting. The thing that really bewilders me, having not really looked much at slashdot since I was in high school, is the apparent disappearance of that strange underworld of trolling and "first post" that used to be visible when you chose a moderation threshold of -1. Where did they all go? YouTube? (Although currently even the YouTube comments on our video are generally on-topic.)

Posted by nadia at 01:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (431)

That's my bike in the foreground.

A drunk driver sped through a stop sign and slammed into the wall outside of the Equad at about 1 am. I somehow managed not to hear anything, until half an hour later Alex comes into the office and says "Hey, did you see the accident? Isn't that where you park your bike?"

The driver had already been taken away to the hospital and they were towing the car away. I filed a report with the policemen who were standing around and they told me to try calling in a week.

I'm glad that it was only my bike and not me.

Update: In the daylight I can see spatters of blood on the sidewalk. Eesh.

Posted by nadia at 03:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)

A clear winter's night, the air sharp against my skin and fresh in my lungs, the frost on the ground crunching beneath my feet. It is not quiet, as there are faraway cars, and it is not truly dark, as half the sky is lit by light pollution.

The barren branches of the trees are dark against the illuminated sky, and the stars hang from the trees like jewels. I imagine the predecessors of Christmas lights in a pagan world.

Like jewels! One of those emphatic pronouncements best practiced for one's grandchildren.

Posted by nadia at 02:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)

So I tried writing and posting the past few entries using TextMate's blogging bundle. It's cool. You can write and post directly to your compatible blog from within TextMate. Dragging and dropping an image into the file you're editing will automatically upload it to the server and insert the correct markup into your post.

However, under Movable Type images are automatically uploaded into the "site root" directory specified under "Settings", and I wasn't so into the idea of having zillions of images dumped into one folder and mixed with all the index files.

So I modified the blogging bundle so that it will upload into a dynamic directory based on the date. There may be an easier solution that I didn't find.

Find the blogging bundle at TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Blogging.tmbundle. Open it in TextMate and look for Blogging.tmbundle->Support->lib->blogging.rb. In the function upload_name_for_path, change the line:

prefix = mode == 'wp' ? '' : Time.now.strftime('%F_')

to

prefix = mode == 'wp' ? '' : 'photos/'+Time.now.strftime('%Y/%m/%d/')

(or whatever you prefer).

Instead of files appearing at http://www.site.com/blog/2007-08-04_name.jpg, they will appear in http://www.site.com/blog/photos/2007/08/04/name.jpg.

(Now, of course, I just have to figure out how to auto-rotate the images based on the exif data. The utility jhead should do this, but I haven't worked out how to pass everything through Automator.)

Posted by nadia at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

blogging

Imagine, if you will, an ancient house, in the center of a tiny village of haphazard roofs, perched above a river flowing through a valley, carpeted with lush green terraced pastures that become, as the viewer's gaze rises upwards, the imposing rocky cliffs and spiky peaks of the Alps.

In order to get there, you board a plane in whatever horrid uncivilized country you were coming from (really, every country is uncivilized in comparison to Switzerland) and disembark in Geneva's charmingly retro airport, where you proceed to walk right through the terminal to the train station that is conveniently right where you need it, and board a swift, silent, and shiny train into the countryside. Somewhere you change trains to a smaller one covered with pictures of cuddly St. Bernards, and ride that one into the mountains to the end of the line at Le Chable. At this point, you could walk right out of the train station and into the telepherique that would take you right up to a glacier at 3000 meters of elevation, but instead you want to board the postcar bus, which is just barely narrow enough to fit between the stone and darkened wood walls of the villages that it winds through on your way up the valley. (Unless, of course, someone's father has decided to drive his shiny right-hand-drive Jaguar into town just in time to meet your train, and then you'd take a slightly different road.

The house has a new number attached to it, but old letters in the basement are addressed to "la maison en face du four".

The milk is fresh every day from the laiterie in the next village over, collected that morning from the cows on the high pastures for the summer. We asked how they got it down: they used to have pipes, but now they just use milk trucks. Each village has its own distinctive cheese--all somewhere in the spectrum of Gruyere to Raclette--and the artisanal butter comes imprinted with a flower. Water is fresh and cold from the fountain running across the street. Many houses in the village have impeccable vegetable gardens laid out in front of them.

The house comes equipped with a lovely Swiss mother who cooks simple yet fabulous meals for lunch and dinner for you every day from scratch, raclette and fondue and fried potato patties and lentil salad with local farmer cheese and salad from an enormous head of lettuce from a neighbor's garden that she dropped by to deliver just because. While walking through the village, an old friend of the mother's wordlessly gives you a handful of the raspberries she has been snacking on while walking.

We hike up a nearby trail. The scenery passes from grassy meadow to pine forest to wide expanses of many-colored wildflowers to a sort of short-grassed rocky wilderness by the time we're finally in view of the cloud-shrouded white peaks and glaciers.

At 2000m we find a herd of cows grazing above a lodge overlooking a perilous drop to the valley far, far below. The lodge won't let us sit on their benches to eat our lunch, so we walk further up and eat our lunch underneath an enormous wooden cross where the view of the glacier and the valley is even better, and listen to the many-toned cow-bells clinking.

Another day we take the cable cars up to the top of Mont Fort, over a herd of grazing goats with musical bells, over the barren wasteland of short grass and piles of dirt that is the ski resort in the summer, a change of cars as the attendant tells us they're still having electrical problems as the cable cars were hit by lightning the day before and out for the entire morning, and finally to the very spiky pile of rocks and snow that is the peak. It's a long, rocky, snowy fall in any direction. Only one other couple is at the top, and they leave before us. It's desolate and deserted, and there are huge billboards on the wall of the cable car lodge for watches.

The next day we go on a long drive to the German part of the country to spend a day at some famous baths, which are more of a water fun park than a therapeutic bath. The most fun is the current pool, which at full speed is honestly dangerous, but we had a blast being pulled around the rapids. I was a bit surprised the first time a teenage boy rudely threw me off of an overhanging rock I was hanging on, and it quickly turned into an afternoon-long battle for king of the hill, with dozens of strangers jumping up to attack the current rock occupants as they were pushed by by the water.

The last day spent in Geneva, I decided to recreate my first Geneva experience and buy chocolate from as many chocolatiers as I could find walking around in an afternoon. This time I ended up with 19 truffles from six different stores for about 25 Swiss francs, of which 15 are currently still waiting for the taste test I promised myself.

Posted by nadia at 05:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (143)

Travel Pretty

I threw a mediterranean dinner party before I lost my appetite for the summer: homemade pitas, hummus, baba ghanoush, white bean puree, feta, roasted bell peppers, tabbouleh. People came and ate and gathered around the picnic table outdoors, all candlelight and fireflies and clinking glass and voices rising through the darkness about such erudite topics as... facebook.

I've heard more since about the homemade pitas than any other food I've ever made, no matter how difficult or tasty.

The Wild Oats on the corner of campus closed, victim to Whole Foods's purchase of the Wild Oats chain, because, as rumor has it, the location was competing with the Whole Foods on Route 1. Nevermind that any store gracing this location was by default the grocery store of choice for the entire population of carless Princetonians. I've ridden my bike the five miles to the Route 1 shopping centers once, and while it was fine, I don't really enjoy being the only bicycle in a SUV-filled parking lot the size of a town.

Anyways, Wild Oats closed and reopened as Olive May. The reopening was awaited with much trepidation by the entire aforementioned population of carless grad students, and so it was a bit trippy to walk the aisles and see: the same products, purged of the Wild Oats brand, in the exact same arrangement, the same cashiers, the same 10% student discount. There are emerging signs of real funkiness, though. The manager can be seen daily wearing enormous MC Hammer pants with a fish pattern, and the music now tends more to the apparent "employee CD collection" (with daily selections such as Elvis) than internationally standardized store muzak, and they now stock Soyrizo, and the fancy chocolate rack (a staple of my diet) is hidden in a new location every day. The produce still sucks.

Thunderstorms. There was one that everyone referred to for the next week or two as "that thunderstorm where the world was ending", because of the way the lightning flickered every second for hours. I watched it from the hammock in my glass-roofed porch. When the lightning stopped, we sat in the hot tub and ate ice cream and watched the fireflies glittering among the high trees.

There was the gay pride parade, but I was too sick to enjoy it.

I spent the fourth of July in the hot tub, an unexpectedly decadent evening that resulted in a six-person massage ring in the hot tub (carefully alternating boys and girls) in the torrential rain, until we decided that perhaps the hot tub was not the safest place to be in a thunderstorm.

Summertime means outdoor dancing in New York: Saturday afternoon tangoing in Central Park, where disconcertingly the large crowd of spectators claps after every song, Sunday evening tango at the South Street Seaport, which is all fresh breeze and romantically lit tall ships.

Shortly after the iPhone came out, I spent an afternoon in the 5th Avenue Apple store playing with one. The iPod software crashed every few minutes. I feel justified in my decision not to buy one.

The garden, unmaintained, has exploded, providing me green beans every time I think to go out and snack on one. The tomato hedges are now weighed down with swelling green globules, and the whole area smells intensely of tomato. The pepper plants produced one single pepper before being consumed by a bunny. My row of beautiful red lettuce was consumed by a bunny before I could do much more than snack on it, but the bunny seems to have rejected the romaine, which is largely growing up instead of out. The yellow squash and zucchini plants are inexplicably enormous, and have produced several surprise squashes. The watermelon that we planted before Clay decided to plant his zucchini over it has also produced vines which are racing to find sun before being blocked out by the zucchini. Watermelon planted elsewhere in the plot appears to have been a mixed bag: some of the vines are oddly shriveled, some seem to be just taking their time to come along. My experimental cucumber plants have produced one cucumber. The pumpkins dumped in the horrid front yard plots are incredibly happy, and have started to take over the wide asphalt expanse of the front driveway. I wish them luck.

I got a second hand ice cream machine off of Tigertrade, Princeton's private craigslist replacement, and have been turning out batches of chocolate sorbet. Recipe:

Chocolate Sorbet

Mix 1.5 cups cocoa powder with 1.5 cups sugar and 2 cups hot water. Dilute with 2 cups cold water, chill until nearly frozen, then run ice cream machine.

It's fabulously good.

I tried making traditional vanilla ice cream, with egg yolks and cream and all, but I got a migraine shortly after and have been loath to try that again.

Posted by nadia at 04:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

new jersey

Very Californian, the wide roads and suburban sprawl, the scrubby little bushes and rabbit hutch apartment complexes, the brilliant shining sun over the gleaming outdoor malls, people everywhere saying "please" and "thank you" and "have a nice day" like they really mean it.

I stayed at Jack's place in an enormous shiny luxury apartment complex. With Alexf there too, it was an odd throwback to five years ago.

I took to calling the FCRC the Voltron conference, despite never having seen Voltron as a kid. Imagine, if you will, sixteen co-located conferences across wildly divergent areas of computer science, resulting in thousands of computer scientists converging on one hotel for a good week and a half.

Of course, everyone goes a little crazy after a couple of days of talks. Near the end of the week as the computer science conferences began to end, the hotel scheduled some unintentionally hilarious events alongside the computer science, including a high school sports awards ceremony and a conference on "Vital Aging".

I went to lots of talks (even some outside of theory, which made me glad to be a theorist) and met lots people and gave the same 30-second summary of my research to all of them and even learned some things that ultimately ended up being useful for my research this summer.

The first day I wore my hair down, causing many people to confuse me with my doppelganger.

I went to the beach to go surfing with some theorists, but instead of surfing I walked all the way down the end of the beach, or at least the part where the sand gave way to piles of large smoothed rocks and chunks of broken concrete, which some guys hanging out and drinking in a makeshift lounge area in the cliff told me were from WWII bunkers.

Had a fancy dinner at a restaurant of Haakon's choosing, which resulted in the consumption of some $60 bottles of wine. My wine palate is binary, so I couldn't appreciate the difference, but I guess it was an experience worth having.

California really knows how to build a beautiful highway. I love the plant cover draped over the sound walls, the dramatic ride under bridges and over ridges, the glimpses of ocean.

Drove out to the beach late at night on a semi-whim with non-Californians who wanted to experience the Pacific. The clouds were lit up dramatically with light pollution, and when a car pulled into the beach parking spots off the highway their headlights lit up the waves. When we arrived, the beach was crowded with Asian families wandering around with buckets. We asked one family what they were there for, and after some translational difficulties, we learned they were there to look for "silver fish". We saw no fish, and the families left soon after.

Posted by nadia at 04:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (25)