Parisa's Blog

Whoops, I mean...

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or the secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

Someone I know used to do a linkage dump every now and again of interesting articles or sites he came across in surfing. I'm not sure what his motivations were, but I just want to keep the links I come across some place other than my browser bookmarks (which undoubtedly get deleted come bookmark house cleaning time).

Open source hardware... Two thumbs up to Sun for plans to release design specs (plus a verification suite, simulation models, ISA, etc.) for their UltraSPARC processor. Hopefully a mutual benefit between the development community and Sun will result and motivate other companies to follow suit in releasing design docs and APIs.

Take down wikipedia... A class action lawsuit against wikipedia because it's not the entirely legitimate information source it has always claimed to be. Wait, who said anything about the Internet being reliable? Goodness people, it's a wiki. The lawsuit is claiming to have expected damages in the tens of millions of dollars, so make sure to sign up and join their cause! Ugh, this is just disappointing.

Don't forget to write down your memories... A short article inspired by Tsar Ivan really not being so Terrible (or at least our lack of basis in that opinion) that brings up a really important point about history preservation and our age of information. With so many people documenting their own lives and experiences on the web, we are creating this huge basin of information that can be used in retelling tomorrow's history. Similar to a major theme from The Transparent Society, it will be a lot harder to lie if there are hundreds of eyes telling the story.

SIGMil dominates U.S. competition... Two weeks ago SIGMil participated in the UCSB International Capture the Flag competition (iCTF), which pits teams of student hackers from around the world against each other for 6 hours of an offensive and defensive battle in computer security. Our team placed fourth overall and first in the United States. So ya know, that's pretty 1337.

The next thing to hit photo sharing... Slide is the new startup by Paypal co-founder and former CTO (and UIUC alum) Max Levchin. I have a friend that's dropping out of school to go work for them, but I have my doubts on how successful (re: profitable) this is going to be. I mean, it's photo-sharing. What's the big deal?

In celebration of the end of a busy semester and the beginning of winter break, I went out for some crazy, mad partying!! Wait, no I didn't. I went to traffic school to erase the ticket I got for totalling my car a month ago. At one point I felt like I was in some addiction help group. We got into small groups, introduced ourselves, and told "our story". "Hi, my name is Parisa... and I got into a fender bender because... because... I'm a tailgater. Oh, the weight has been lifted!" Anyways, all things considered, it was a painless experience. Our instrutor was very kind, and made what would otherwise be four hours of total boredom pretty enjoyable.

The class included three short videos featuring a bunch of careless drivers (examples of what we should strive to NOT be) with such choice quotes as, "Yeah, I know it's [drunk driving] bad so I don't do it. Especially after hard alcohol. I mean, I'm fine after beer, but I know better than to drive after the hard stuff," and "Dawg, it don't make sense. Why would they make a car that can go 120 mph if we are only supposed to be going 55 mph. They're out to trick us."

When we were going over the topic of driving conditions and sleep deprivation, Todd, the semi truck driver, offered the energy-boosting suggestion of, "Whenever I get tired after a few hours on the road, I pull out some Colgate and start brushing my teeth. It keeps me up for at least another two hours and keeps my breath fresh too." My instructor reminded us that it's never a good idea to "drink, drive, and be nude," as evidenced by two recent incidents of people getting into head-on collisions while in the middle of sexual acts. And then, someone commented that on p. 15 of our Defensive Driving Coursebook ("Drugs and Their Effects on Driving", a chart describing main drug types and their effects on driving behavior), the authors left out some "really cool drugs" in their analysis. Hopefully some of these additions will make their way into the new version of the safety book for 2006. Until then, you'll just have to remember to bring toothpaste while driving on your own.