roguelazer's website

I'm about to finish my second-to-last semester of college. That in and of itself is perhaps a somewhat stunning thing to think about. Equally important, of course, is the question of what I'll do once I leave. I've been interviewing with a half-dozen companies, and just got back the other day from a trip up to the Bay Area to do in-person interviews with Yelp and NVIDIA. I'd forgotten how nice the Bay Area was. I stayed in downtown San Francisco, at The Mosser Hotel, and it was, well, really nice. Caltrain is also an awesome commuter rail system.

The interviews were the usual, intimidating technical interviews. Six hours with a series of engineers and managers. Programming problems on the board (none of them terribly difficult, but all of them rather harder to solve when you're under a time constraint and being watched). I think I did okay, though. Hopefully they liked me. crosses fingers

I should start hearing back from them (and hopefully the other companies I've been talking to) in the next week or two, which is very exciting. I'll be sure to post and update when I have some idea what I'm going to be doing in the real world. Until then, ciao.

I picked up a new "computer" last week. A virtual one, that is. I ran into this site called prgmr which offers very low-cost, bare virtual private servers. So far, so good. Got Debian set up all the way I like it. Now just to find something fun to do with it. :-)

Okay, so this is maybe a little unusual, but today's "*nix Tip of the Day" isn't about Unix/Linux/etc. at all. Instead, it is about their antiquated archenemy: VMS. First, a little bit of history:

History

Way back in 1970, the PDP-11 was hot stuff. Ken Thompson, Dennis Richie, Brian Kernighan, and others at Bell Labs were writing what would become Unix for the PDP-11 (well, for the PDP-7 at first, but nobody talks about that). Unix was a huge improvement over what DEC shipped with the PDP-11, DOS-11 and RT-11. This couldn't stand, so Dave Cutler at DEC designed VMS. It was a new operating system, with lots of fancy features, like networking and, uh, lots of upper-case letters.

VMS and Unix sort of battled on. Or so some people would have you think. Really, Unix won early on and VMS stumbled along with corporate financing and an obnoxiously difficult-to-use interface. It passed from DEC to Compaq to HP, from the PDP-11 to the Alpha to the Itanium. And it still lives on, churning away in scary back-rooms here and there.

Current Events

So, why do I bring this up? Well, as some of you may know, Harvey Mudd College has a few VMS machines around. The most well-known of these (to students) is thuban, which is a 667MHz DEC Alpha running OpenVMS 7.3-2. Today, I had the, uh, interesting experience of using it, and thought I'd share my impressions with my readers. You can see the proof of my VMS skills at my VMS homepage. That's right, I'm on the Internet. And on DECnet.

Hello gentle readers... You may be surprised to notice that this website has had a redesign. I was on earlier and noticed that Srini's Fluid-Blue WordPress theme had been updated to F2, which is newer and shinier. So, of course, I had to install the new one and redo my customizations of colors and such. And once I'd done that, it was really worth my time to do some additional customization, like adding a Google Custom Search box. Ayuh.

You also might have noticed the new logo. Yes, I know, it's not very good. Oh well. If you didn't notice it, it looks like the following (click for a nice SVG version that I wanted to put on the site proper, but didn't out of sympathy for old browser users):

It's just the letters "RL" (for RogueLazer, not for any silly clothing manufacturer) in GTS. I don't really play Vendetta Online much any more, but I do appreciate that it's an awesome game and I support the devs. Plus, I was on the team of players that deciphered GTS back in, um, 2003? So I feel that it is useful for a logo.

Anyhow, feel free to let me know what you think. Or not, if you prefer. The redesign was definitely a better way to spend an afternoon than doing homework, no matter whether it's any good or not...

There's currently something going on in Washington that Twitter has called "912dc" (New York Times story); it's a protest against not any particular act by government, but against government itself. More Jeffersonian than anarchistic, though.

This protest bothers me a lot, and I thought that maybe if I wrote down my ideas as to why, it'd bother me less. There are a few reasons why people protest what they call "big government":

1. They feel that they don't need the services provided. — This covers a lot of the rich-white-libertarian group and doesn't get a response
2. They feel that private industry can provide the services better than public government.
3. They actually only disagree with some action of the government, but are protesting the whole thing anyway. — The foreign-born-Obama and 912dc intersection falls here
4. (most rarely) They actually think the government is too big.

I'm sure that there are people at this rally for all of those reasons (and probably a few that I haven't considered), but there's really one that bothers me, and it's one that I hear espoused a lot.

I spent Saturday at the 50th Newport Folk Festival, and it was excellent. Some of the highlights? Well, let's see... I saw Iron & Wine, The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes... the list goes on. Aside from a little bit of sunburn and a lighter wallet thanks to having my chair set up perilously close to the Del's stand, it was awesome.

The festival was held at Fort Adams State Park in Newport, RI, and started at 11:30 in the morning. We even managed to get there for about 11:30, after waiting only about half an hour for a parking spot. Right off the bat, the festival opened with a legendary name in folk: Ramblin' Jack Elliott. He was fun to listen to (lots of stories, obviously), although not quite as dynamic a musician as some of the others. Other early acts that I took in part of were Tift Meritt and Ben Kweller. Merritt didn't make much of an impression on me, but I rather liked Kweller.

Around lunchtime, I watched Billy Bragg, about whom I have somewhat mixed feelings. He was very... politicized. On the one hand, I agree with him and his songs about why socialized medicine is good and deregulated banking is bad. On the other hand, even a rather staunch social liberal such as myself might want to listen to some music without the prosthelytizing that seems to be part of his music. I also saw a little bit of Tom Morello, who I won't even give a link to. He did not appeal to me.

Here's a fun thing that I've just discovered:

1. Purchase an Amazon Kindle 2 (this trick may work on other versions)
2. Download the MobiPocket version of The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce
3. Copy the .mobi file into your Kindle documents folder
4. Open the copy of the book that appears on your device
5. Enjoy the frequent crashes and random "java.lang.integer" exception errors that pop up (even when you do not have the book open!)
6. Fight with the Kindle for a while until you realize that it's this book, remove it from your device, and reboot the device (yes, this step is required)

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the Center for Not Being Annoyed at Your E-Book Reader.

As an aside, I absolutely adore my Kindle. I use it on my train ride and at lunch pretty much every day. I thought that I might regret not having the Kindle DX with it's bigger screen but the Kindle 2 is the perfect size. And Whispernet+real books from Amazon is a killer feature. Being able to actually get books, unsurprisingly, makes me read more. I'd just like it more if, you know, it never crashed.

Just in case anybody cares, I've upgraded the site to the latest and greatest (WordPress version 2.8.1). No user action is required at this time.

Also, the code behind the blog is now valid HTML5, and there's a Google Friend Connect widget so you can participate in discussions without creating yet another account (woo!).

The underlying principal of free-market economics is that individual actors will, in the aggregate, make optimal choices. Why should we believe this to be true?

Well, I'm done with another semester. That finishes off my third year here in Claremont. One to go. Woo.