alexkus

We had a host called 'elvis' for the very same Solaris ping response reason.

Viruses were a favourite for a while (Hanta, Ebola, ...)

We had a 'bad idea' theme once which included:-

    port23
    dotat

But my favourite for one of our build machines and appeared in -version output of our product was sigsegv.

I've settled on the elements with atomic number as last octet and the handy shorthands, but that's for home dev network.

For company stuff they get named by function/env/counter.

The Guardian[1] is notorious for typos and other little inaccuracies (mostly back from the non-digital printing days, but they proudly keep the tradition going even with modern presses.)

1. a.k.a. The Grauniad. www.grauniad.co.uk redirects to theguardian.com

And the dreadfully named Pen Island:-

http://www.penisland.net/

Cryptocat?

Yes, sorry, got the courses mixed up.

The sieving stage can be massively parallel and doesn't require large amounts of memory, with enough machines you could perform the sieve stage in under a day (and with more machines within an hour). A 100,000 node botnet could be very useful in this regard.

Knowing when you've got enough relations is an inexact science given there will be some duplicates amongst relations generated on separate machines, so it's not uncommon for a final bit of sieving to be required once msieve is pointed at the combined relations file (which is seen in the log).

It's the block Lanczos and matrix square root steps that cannot be parallelised efficiently[1].

Interest in the various Number Field Sieve algorithms (SNFS/GNFS) is one of the main reasons I started (and finished!) a part time degree in Mathematics to go along with my Comp Sci degree. Next on the list (after a break from 8 years of part time study) will be the M.Sc. courses[2].

1. It can be parallelised, but not efficiently, i.e. throwing 10 similar machines at the problem does not get the job done in a tenth of the time, only ~95% of the time. No efficient algorithm exists for doing this. Yet. If that does appear then RSA starts to look very very shaky.

2. The first of which (M820 The Calculus of Variations and Advanced Calculus) can be downloaded from here:

    http://chilli.open.ac.uk/dr9/

Yes, the entire course can be downloaded, (although it's more of a guided read of Apostol than a series of lectures.)

It all depends on whether you've got a compelling reason to or not.

For us it was a simple decision, we have a mature stable product[1] that's written in C. So the path of least resistance is to write out own web framework (from scratch to avoid IP infringement problems). Sure it took time, a lot more time than grabbing something written by someone else, but that's not how it works everywhere (especially in corporate environments). Now we've got this library it makes adding HTTP client/server stuff to any of our C binaries relatively easy.

Likewise string processing in C isn't a problem once you've got a suitable library built up; ADT libraries (no I don't need to implement my own buggy hashtable again and again), regexp wrapper libraries, etc. They also help maintain consistency across platforms (our product ships on 6 different platforms including Windows).

If you're looking for instant gratification then C isn't the right language for you but a huge amount of the Internet is built on the back of things written in C. Are webservers (Apache, nginx) written in C similarly crazy? No.

Of course, it needs someone to write a solid C HTTP framework and then open source it so that it can be maintained/improved, now that would be useful. Sadly our employer has no plans to release ours, which is a shame but I have no control over that.

1. Coming up 20 years old now and >$1.5bn in revenues over those years, not too shabby.

Funny means funny.

LOL is just unnecessary punctuation.

(UK)

Mortgage is 36% of our combined post-tax wages (there's no tax relief on mortgage interest in the UK). Childcare is another 21%.

(Mortgage and childcare combined would be 100% of my post-tax wage!)

Seems harsh now but it's worth it, and when the childcare costs drop (next September) there will be more money for holidays, more fun and also paying off the mortgage early.

Mortgage payments, for fixed rate mortgages anyway, aren't affected by inflation unlike rent payments. In 10 years time my mortgage payment should be smaller than it is now (as I hope to overpay) but my salary should rise; we have the bonus that we'd be happy to stay in this house for at least 20 years if need be (it was one of our criteria when looking for somewhere to buy).

The above may not seem sane, but the figures are quite normal for the UK tech sector.

Probably because it's linked to in the first line of the original article.

Given that:- sin(x) = cos( pi/2 - x ) cos(x) = sin( pi/2 - x ) you only need one of them.

It's good seeing the major roads so clearly defined outside cities.

There are a fair bunch of oddities going on in it though.

Ah, but with the --color=auto option on ls (which I have set in my aliases) there's a difference between "ls -1" and "ls | cat"

Indeed there's even a difference between "ls -1" and "ls -1 | cat" if "--color=auto" is specified.

It's not on my bookshelf but thanks for the recommendation.

> How did you find the OU degree?

It was good. I took it almost as slowly as you can (typically one module per year) so it was 8 years from start to finish. In that time I got married, moved house twice and became a father so I wanted to avoid it taking over my life. Tutorials were local to home or work (I was lucky in that respect) but they did seem infrequent.

Tricky to recommend now the fees have quadrupled though (I paid about £4k in total for my degree, it'd be closer to £15k now); unless it's your first degree and you're considering the OU over a traditional university; then £5k a year is quite cheap as you can be much more flexible with life and (part/full-time) work.

I was considering either continuing with the OU with Maths on some of the Master's courses (those fees aren't subsidised in the same way that UG courses are), or switching to languages (French, German, Spanish) but the prices put me off those. For now I'll have a year or two off as a break.

My favourite seemingly-useless-but-actually-not-useless use of cat:-

    ls | cat

> Quantitative trading seems interesting because I would hazard that you need strong math background along with solid hacking skills.

Strong maths knowledge can be good for general developer roles anyway. It's one (small) reason why I did a maths degree part time (Open University in the UK) to complement my existing Comp Sci degree.

I'm sure you could get a better bang per buck picking and choosing specific areas rather than an entire degree but that wasn't my motivation (I'm equally interested in both in general).

A good number theory course (even just plowing through Crandall and Pomerance, or Apostol) will definitely help with understanding/analysing asymmetric encryption.

> unless you use a tumbling service like bitcoinfog

Which could be run by the NSA...

It's turtles all of the way down.

How much you pay in London really depends on how/where you want to live. It's far cheaper if you're happy to spend an hour or more commuting each way.

I need to earn £50k to cover just childcare costs and the mortgage (looking forward to both of those going down soon). I could sell up and buy a similar property 5 miles away and those costs would both halve. I could sell up and buy a similar property 10 miles away and have no mortgage at all. Neither of those would make us happier as a family (no matter how much I'd love to have no mortgage); we want to live where we're living now, so I just get on with it.

Royston seems to take the worst of both places and the good bits of neither.

(I grew up just South of Cambridge and went to school not far from Royston; and I now live in London. For a while I commuted between the two by motorbike, passing Royston every day.)

It asks me to sign in when I click "Request Invite" in a browser that has never logged in to google. Also asks me to sign in if I've signed out of google.

No black snot for me (ever!) despite doing KX/Finsbury Park to Vauxhall (with a further train at each end) and back five days a week for many years.

My commute (when not cycling) is now just a single commute from Zone 2 to Zone 1. Never a seat on the way in but it's just 18 minutes.

> I've found the drivers in London to be better in general than the rest of the country. There are cyclists EVERYWHERE. No car is surprised to share the road with one and they all know what to expect from them.

I'd definitely agree with that (I commute 8 miles each way in London).

It was made very obvious to me when I had to go into the office one weekend. The standard of driving from the weekend drivers was dreadful as they seemed to spend most of their time looking at road signs and wondering if they're in the correct lane(s) rather than looking out for other road users.

There are various "walking tube maps" that show you where it's quicker to walk between two stations:-

http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/images/tube_walklines_fin...

libnetfilter_queue for rx, raw socket for tx.

That was going to be the basis for a project to handle large numbers of concurrent connections. Still on the drawing board though.

Given how mean my employer is I'd be in line for a substantial rebate!

Which comes and goes. I've got in several times in the last hour.

There are a few source files in one of our applications[1] that have last modified dates back in 1994.

1. Mostly C application that's had >$1bn in sales over the years, but it's been in active development/enhancement since 1992. My oldest contribution to it is probably 1997.

With BT-Fon the ADSL owner's traffic has priority over the BT-Fon traffic if push comes to shove.

So someone can use up to 512kbps of my ADSL connection, unless I need it, in which case they get throttled down to nothing.

(The traffic is also segregated in that BT-Fon stuff goes down the wire as a separate IP address from my own ADSL connection data. I'm not sure if multiple people on Fon on a single wireless router get unique IPs or not.)