Brent's Two Cents

Too Much To Know

With all the new technologies out there these days it's getting harder and harder for me to maintain my "Jack of All Trades" status. So, as a way of keeping myself up to date with Mac OS Technologies, I thought I'd start each day by reading through a different header file in the system, figuring that this would at least give me some brief exposure to the APIs and capabilities of the various frameworks. Well, today I made a list of all the header files under /System/Library/Frameworks. There are 1754 of them. That's 4.8 years worth of header file reading ahead. Whew! Better get started.

Keeping Secrets

I recently read the fantastic novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which I highly recommend for those of you who are fans of well-written tech fiction. The novel flips back and forth between the activities of some WW II English and American codebreakers and some of their present-day descendants and paints a very interesting picture of the world of cryptography, as well as being a great read. Stephenson's got a couple of other novels in the field, and I'm definitely going to track them down.

As a follow up, I am presently reading The Code Book by Simon Singh. This is a highly readable, fairly easy-to-grasp discussion of the history of cryptography from the Romans on through the middle ages and up through the various world wars to the present day. It contains all the details you'd want in an introductory book — just enough so that you can understand what's going on but not enough to be boring — and I was struck by just how much of the art/science of cryptography is really quite understandable. It isn't until some time in the 1970's that I start having difficulty with some of the concepts, and even then it's just because I'm lazy and haven't done any real math for about a decade or so.

I really had no idea at all about what a pivotal role codebreakers had played for the Allied forces during World War II. In fact, it's not at all a stretch to say that the main reason that the Allies won the war was because they were reading the Germans' mail and therefore knew what they were going to do and when. During the course of the war, cryptanalysts in England and elsewhere decoded millions of words of Axis messages, using an array of sophisticated mechanical devices and no small amount of sheer brainpower.

Cryptonomicon dwells on privacy, and The Code Book spends some time dicussing the issue as well. Did you know that it's pretty likely that every email you send is scanned automatically by the NSA for key words that might indicate that you're discussing something that might be interesting to them? It's been suggested that the ECHELON system — run by American and allied intelligence agencies — may intercept as many as 3 billion communications every day.

Now, I'm not the sort of person who gets very excited or upset about this sort of thing, but I admit to being a little bit annoyed by the fact that the government — any government — is reading my mail and listening to my phone calls.

One of the new features in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) is something called "FileVault", which will encrypt the contents of your home directory. It would be nice if Apple Mail offered the ability to encrypt your email, but for various reasons I doubt that will happen. However, if you'd like to make sure that nobody is reading your email, may I suggest taking a look at PGP, a program that will allow you to encrypt messages (or anthing else, I guess), and decrypt stuff that you get from others. PGP has just been released for OS X. It uses the amazing RSA public key encryption scheme which provides a way to encrypt messages in such a way that they can only be decrypted by the person they are intended for. PGP is free for noncommercial personal use, and there's also a payware version that is more convenient to use (integrated right into Mail) and has other features.

Anyway, I've generated a public key and posted it to the PGP key server. If you want to send me a private message, please feel free to look me up on the key server (Note: It's not the sympatico address) or use my public key:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGP 8.0.2 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com
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=/wKy
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Alaska Photos

Can be found here.

Alaska: Part I - Cruising

Well, we've been back from the cruise for quite some time now, and I've pretty much got my thoughts on the matter properly rehearsed and organized, so here's Part I of my summary of that experience.

We sailed on the Royal Caribbean Vision of the Seas, which is quite impressive. Twelve or so decks, two pools (one outdoor, one indoor/outdoor with a roof that opens), a gym, spa, various bars, lounges and discotheques, a small shopping mall, a casino, a thousand-or-so seat theater. And they had other shippy stuff, too, like lifeboats and gangways and anchors. Our stateroom was very small and on the inside, so we didn't get a porthole. What we did get was absolute darkness (which is quite pleasant, for sleeping) and the gentle vibration of the ship's engines. It would have been nice to be able to look outside, but I loved how easy it was to get to sleep in that environment.

I have to say that I really like travelling by ship. Since we live downtown, we had only a fifteen-minute drive to the boat and then Bang! -- we were there... on vacation. No endless waiting and lining up and dealing with the whole airline experience, just check in and start having fun... the whole hotel moves.

One of the interesting things about travelling by boat is the "muster drill" which is where they make sure you know how to get off the boat in case it sinks. It's pretty funny -- I wish I'd had my camera -- because every passenger on the whole ship has to put on their huge, orange, hilariously cumbersome lifevest and line up (men in the back, women and children up front) at their muster station under their designated lifeboat. Ours was number 13, which I'm sure made a few people a little uneasy.

I'm a pretty unstructured guy, so life aboard a ship is not really for me, because everything runs by the clock. Dinner at time X, show at time Y, activity W at time Z. You get the idea. For the most part this didn't bother me too much, but I did occasionally find it frustrating. Plus, I forgot my watch at home.

The thing everyone tells you before you go on a cruise is how good the food is, and how much of it there is. They're right. The food is generally quite good, and there is tons of it. Our waiter told me you could eat something like 17 separate meals a day, not counting room service. The plates at the breakfast buffet were big enough to hold two or three breakfasts. I know this because every morning I ate at least two breakfasts at once. (Mmmm. pancakes and scrambled eggs and assorted fruit and sausages (two kinds) and cereal and toast, etc.). I'd drop my practically overflowing platter of victuals onto the table, and Stella would just stare in disbelief. For my part, I'd stare at the two pieces of fruit or whatever she'd have on her plate and wonder aloud "is that all you're eating?" Of course, her breakfast only looked sparse in contrast to mine, which could have fed a small English village.

Dinner was another matter entirely. I like to think of it as a three-star gourmet cafeteria. There is assigned seating for dinner (we were at table 38) and with your table comes your very own waiter, head waiter and assistant waiter. These are three of the four members of your shipboard "personal team" (the fourth is the guy who tends to your stateroom while you're out eating). The menu changes every night, and the quality and presentation of the food is quite good, considering that they're feeding over 2000 people. Still, despite the fact that the food was good and the service excellent, I eventually just got tired of all that eating. I ended up with some kind of fancy-food overload and just wanted a pizza or hamburger or something.

During the trip to Alaska there are three "sea days", which are days where you don't stop at a port. That leaves you a lot of time to explore the ship and take part in the many costly activities, like gambling and bingo. All that exploring is good exercise, too. Since a large fraction of the passengers are elderly and/or moderately disabled, the elevators are overworked, and if you don't want to spend your days waiting for them, then you have to climb many, many stairs. The main passenger areas were from decks 4 through 12 and the decks are arranged so that no two things that you want to do in sequence are on the same deck. So you have lunch on deck 9, and then want to read by the pool deck 9, but first you have to go back to your cabin on deck 8 to get your book. Then there's a muster drill on deck 5. Then you could go to the library or card room on deck 7. Dinner is on deck 4, but you have to go back to deck 8 to change, after dinner there are bars are on decks 4, 6 and, 9, 10 and 12. After awhile you don't mind waiting for the elevators, except that they're always full of old people and there's no room, so you wind up taking the stairs anyway.

Deathday

You may think it morbid, but I have decided that June 14 is my "deathday". June 14, 2043, at 10:47 AM, in fact.

You see, it occurs to me that I'm going to die one of these days. As much as anything else, that's a fact of life. Dying doesn't really scare me too much, but it is pretty intangible and hard to think about, and as a result I think that I, like many people, tend to spend my time as if I was going to be here forever. This is plainly not the case. Acting like you're going to live forever can (and does, in my case), lead to wasting a lot of time. As I approach the age of forty, I find myself feeling a pinch of regret now and then about that amount of time I've spent — say — watching M*A*S*H. I'll use my deathday to reflect on such things and maybe it will help me to light a fire under my ass and actually do something, rather than sitting around in the livingroom waiting to die.

As well, there are certain things in your life that you really ought to consider now and then, like making sure you have an up-to-date will and planning for your retirement. Marking a death day on your calendar can provide you with an incentive to do these things, and others.

During a recent vacation I found myself thinking about this and decided that I'd determine my death date. For reasons of common sense, I didn't want my death date to be on my birthdate, so I decided I'd take my nominal conception date (birthdate plus 3 months) and call that my death day. To figure out the year I was going to die, I checked the latest Statistics Canada life expectancy data and found out that Canadian males born in 1966 have a life expectancy of 77.1 years. Rounded that off to 77, and voila: June 14, 2043. That means I've got about 40 years left. That's only 14,586 days.

Hmmm. Gotta go. The Simpsons is on....

Danish Esrom

One of the things I try and do these days is to buy different stuff when at the grocery store, to expand my horizons a little bit and get some experience with foods that I don't traditionally buy. That was the reason for my recent deli-experience with Head Cheese (summary: weird, not bad, interesting texture -- what is that... some kind of gelatin?)

This week's experiment was Danish Esrom, which was advertised as "pungent, soft, good for sandwiches". It's a sort of yellowy brown colour.

All I can say is "eeeew". It tastes something like an old shoe, or a sneeze or something. Definitely a "stinky" cheese. In a black forest chicken sandwich it's essentially awful nature is somewhat diminished, but still clearly present. I don't think I'll buy this cheese again.

Blog still working

I'm just testing to see that the blogging software is still working... Apparently it is, although I had reports that it was busted somehow. Perhaps it was just some kind of temporary glitch on the server.