Obsession with twngan

Let me celebrate the imminent new year by a triple post. To me, this is something quite complicated. I've got an email from an old friend X from high school whom I have not got in touch with for 4 years. He told me he got married with Y 6 months ago in US. X and Y have not been in the same elementary or high school. When X was preparing invitations for a wedding banquet in Hong Kong, he came across a name Z of a high school classmate that Y recognizes as an elementary school classmate. X also remembers vaguely that I am from the same elementary school with Z, so he emailed me and asked. It turns out I still remember all of them, and it is actually two people I know got married...

I don't know about you but I find this kind of relationship very interesting.

One interesting thing I have been doing in the last few days is playing again a very old game from Sierra: Quest for Glory (also known as Hero's Quest). This is my favorite game from Sierra and also one of my all-time favorite. I need to use DOSBox to make it run on my XP box, although it keeps crashing every so often. Apparently people are still selling this game in good money in eBay and half.com.

It came to my attention that my boss has googled my name with his Mac at his home... Wondering why this would happen...

I would have talked about the crazy things I have done over Christmas, but I guess it is not the time now, given what is happening in South Asia and East Africa. Please consider contributions if you could, and one simple way to do that if you're a customer of Amazon is to donate to American Red Cross Disaster Relief through the Amazon Honor System.

Here it comes, my first photoblog entry. I got up this morning just to take some pictures of a rare snow-covered, white Christmas Houston.

Maybe because of the excitment from the snow, I also went to campus and practiced tennis serving. The only thing I found out, I suck after not playing for years...

Been in Houston for more than 3 years, today finally it happens. Apparently this is the first time in Hosuton since 1996. It doesn't stick to the ground, but still. Seeing it snows is one thing I've experienced before, but seeing it happening on the place you live is definitely a different experience. I like snowing so much, I just can't see why I'm not moving to a colder place after graduation.

I've decided to pick up tennis again, and got myself some rackets. The bad part about shopping around today in Christmas Eve, though, is that there is this annoying thing around everywhere. What's this called, again? Um... Oh, right, people! Always distasteful.

A Festivus for the rest of us!!! But no, I'm not celebrating it... Learn more (NYT, must be serious) about Festivus.

First of all, don't ask me why this title seems so similar to one of my Masters theses.

I doubted the effectiveness of the ad. It has been one week since the ad, and I think it is fair to evaluate it now. In the first five weeks before the ad, there were 11 million downloads. In the week after the ad, it is around another 1 million downloads. And no, numbers don't lie.

Most probably due to the Slashdot article, I have many visitors coming to my homepage in the last two days, nearly 10 times the usual. That completely changed the statistics I have been tracking on visitors. And 90% of them come from this page. Probably most of them would be rather disappointed, since they won't be able to see any similar, "exciting" security research work there. Always preferring to stay on a low-profile, I have yet to decide whether this is a good thing or not.

I suppose my boss would want as much publicity as possible, so I'm obligated to put a link here. In his security class two of the students did a project on finding security flaws in Google Desktop, and they found one where an attacker could potentially perform searches on one's computer and have a peek at the results (NYT).

And to avoid flash crowd problems we have had in our departmental server after being slashdotted, my boss has finally created a homepage for our Computer Security Lab.

Still undecided on what I should do for my dissertation and still on chapter one of the economics book I've been reading, I have agreed to work with Atul on his Eclipse attacks (and may revive the thing we stopped working on a while ago if time permits). The only problem with that is, I am spending my time on someone else's dissertation...

I'm supposed to finish reading his draft today, but I'm not sure if this is going to happen, due to holiday mood and the fact that I'm a bit exhausted after driving around the whole day yesterday to help someone to find a new place to live.

Thunderbird has reached one million downloads. And Mozilla outfoxes M$.

I'm happy with both 1.0's of Firefox and Thunderbird. I say happy, instead of joyous or delighted, because Firefox still constantly crashes for me. It is the worst when I have already written half a page of my blog entry. Apparently this only happens to some people, and may have to do with the extensions installed. Some blame a particular one, Tabbrowser Preferences. Even if this is true, this extension has made Firefox so convenience for me that I am not going to give it up unless there is another comparable option...

I have been refraining from giving comments, since what people do with their lives are none of my business. But sometimes, some news make me really sick.

I have finally got this book that I have wanted to read for a long time: Turing, by Christos Papadimitriou. A novel that is by a theoretical computer scientist, is funny, contains "Turing" in the title, has something to do with Hong Kong, is recommended by Knuth, describes the halting problem and how RSA works, and contains proofs on, among others, real numbers are not countable. I mean, What else can you ask for in a love novel?

But sadly, before I can read it, I should probably first finish cover to cover another book Economics and the Theory of Games, by Fernando Vega-Redondo, as it seems to be the most relevant book in the library for my research. After all, I still have the intention to decide a direction and finish my dissertation.

And oh, by the way, it seems that both books are prepared in L^AT_EX.

Labels: hk

After a really long delay, the two-page advertisement for Firefox in New York Times is finally up. There are already more than 11 million downloads before the ad, and it would be really interesting to see whether the ad can further boost the download, although I'm seriously doubt the effectiveness of a newspaper ad for a web browser...

While I have submitted a thesis title, I still have no idea on what exactly I would be doing. Not even the big direction. The only certain thing is that it would be related to p2p systems and incentives. The way I see it, there are four different possible directions:

1. Pure economic, game-theoretic type of analysis. Pro: Would look nice as "serious" work. Con: Probably I won't be able to get the happy bit from the economist to graduate in 1.5 years.
   
2. Use economic analysis as foundations and prove properties similar to competitive analysis in theoretical computer science. An example here (pdf). Pro: Just need basic economics knowledge and I'm more familiar with these proofs. Con: My boss might not like this type of work.
   
3. Modifying existing p2p applications to provide incentives. Pro: That's what I've been doing. Con: Seems not as stringent and convincing, particularly when my future job is counting on it.
   
4. Design and implement a new p2p application with nice incentives properties. Pro: Could potentially look like a cool, new system, and my boss always wants me to do more implementations. Con: I don't feel like to...
   

So you see, this is a really tough decision for me. Drop me a line and give me some comments, if you will.

I went to UHCL's commencement ceremony today. This is interesting, since I didn't even go to my two very own Masters ceremonies. But I got to see the Minute Maid Park, the home court of the Astros. Although I really hate baseball as a sport, I have to admit that it is a very nice ballpark.

First one from slashdot, on how playing GTA can save you from burglary. Looks like a PS2 can now be considered as security investment.

Second one is very long and can take you an hour, on how to screw up your bank by depositing a fake check in junk mail. Too bad I don't get these junk mails... I could use 10 grands.

Gmail is no doubt the greatest thing happened for emails, and I converted the first day using it. But it has this annoying "feature" which matches mails sending to nonexisting accounts to the account with the closest name. This feature could potentially be useful, along the line of correcting people's spelling errors in search engines. Yet this is a very dumb idea for emails, since there are so many spammers simply spamming generated addresses, and Gmail would try to make sure that all those spams would get to some people's inbox. I've been receiving much more spams lately just because of that...

I was invited to fly to Seattle for the next interview, but it turns out that there was a mix up and they thought I was looking for a full time position. Anyway, I am still going to have my another interview–just a phone interview–next week. I guess it is time for me to start looking at research labs.

No, I didn't, but that's what my bank told me. My credit card has been charged for $130 for some jeweler I didn't buy. This is mysterious, since I have not used that credit card for almost half a year (it doesn't offer enough incentive). Luckily, at least the bank is smart enough to figure out that this transaction is suspicious. (Wait a second, is it really that hard for even the bank to believe that I might have a girlfriend?) Now I should be careful about identity theft. Too bad we in Texas won't be getting the free annual credit report until June...

OSDI started yesterday. So many people around here have gone that even the janitor asked if I'm going. Well, my boss has this policy that he pays only if we have papers in or if the conference is called USENIX Security, and his financial situation isn't helping either. And quite frankly, SF is really not the place I'm most excited to go to...

Same deal, grab it while it is still hot!

It's almost two weeks since I passed my C-Exam, but I'm still decompressing and without much done in the weekend. The only thing that is worth mentioning here probably is that I've updated my Firefox extension to 0.0.2 and added an interesting example in its homepage. I guess I have been not working for long enough and perhaps should restart working tomorrow (there will be another research group meeting on Tuesday...).

Submitted the form today. Now I have five people, instead of the minimal three, in my thesis committee, after my boss' insistance. My boss thinks it's good to have people read and approved my thesis before my defense to minimize surprises during the defense, but the way I see it, it just increased the number of happy bits I need to get from 3 to 5. Anyway, graduation is not even remote, so being in the field of computer science, where everyone works and worries about things only in the last minute, I'll probably just forget about this and enjoy a non-working December...

I've received my digital camera HP R607 (for around $200), with spec 4.1MP and 21x zoom (3x optical). More than enough for a little toy. So if you go anywhere close to my office and do something stupid, be aware :) Why? Because, according to our department chair, "The faculties in your [the systems] group are never here. But you're [me] always here!"

I have invited a famous Economist to my thesis committee, as suggested by my boss. Crap, I've been bs'ing on the economics stuff for the last few years, but I guess every happy story has to come to a sad ending. Now I suppose I'll need to learn something before I can graduate. Anyone has pointers to Econ 101?