The Magic Word

Once in every three years or so, I fire up an editor that I can't exit. First it was vi, many many moons ago. Then came emacs.

Jun 2, 2006·2 min read

Way to blue

Been playing Nick Drake on endless repeat the past few weeks and it amazes me how it never gets old. I've been nursing a Drake obsession for more than three years now, but then I've been known to hook onto particular works for exceedingly long periods of time.

May 30, 2006·2 min read

FOSS-ed for Hackers, a footnote

FOSS-ed for Hackers ended last week, and the entire geek blogosphere has been brimming with posts on the subject so I won't delve much into it. Overall, it was a success.

May 4, 2006·1 min read

Chicken, meet egg. Egg, Chicken. Egg. Chicken.

Lately I've been stuck on z/OS, among other things, and managed to somehow fill up my allocated quota of disk space with considerable ease. But here's an interesting dilemma, clearing up some space isn't all that easy.

Apr 7, 2006·1 min read

In the days when Sussman was a novice…

Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe, Sussman replied.

Apr 6, 2006·2 min read

RMS @ MIT

It was a very eventful weekend. For one thing, the FSF associate member's meeting was being held at MIT on Saturday. I'm not a fan of social events, but as it turns out, geek hangouts are where I thrive.

Mar 20, 2006·3 min read

Virtual Private Networking

I'm sure most of you would have had to mess around with VPNs at some point of your lives. Sometimes, VPNs can turn nasty and bind you to an OS that hinders your free spirit.

Mar 18, 2006·1 min read

Hut 8, Bletchley Park

Came across the M4 project a couple of days ago while doing some much needed digging. Its simply a distributed effort to crack 3 enigma messages encoded in what is believed to be Shark, the formidable naval cipher which uses four rotors as opposed to Dolphin that uses just three.

Mar 14, 2006·2 min read

The Onion Router

I recently tried out TOR for the first time as this has been something in my TODO list for a while. It was just a matter of apt-get install tor privoxy.