Null Disquisition

Dis·qui·si·tion, n. – A formal discourse on a subject, often in writing.

Started seriously getting the ball rolling on my thesis this week, outlines and everything. I found a really great app for writing called Scrivener (non free, OS X only). Notice that I said writing, not publishing. For my purposes, it does rather poorly as a publishing platform, but I have that end of things worked out rather well ( represent!). 1000 words in the first day. Granted, they are the easy words (background and lit review), but hopefully I can keep up a moderate pace so I can defend this summer. Once I start finishing sections and moving my draft into LaTeX, I’ll start publishing them somewhere here. Probably not in this blog, but maybe a directory for a Latex2HTML dump.

In other news, we got a Nikon d80. All the recent pics in my Flickr stream are taken with it (minimal post-processing).

It’s nice to be writing again.

Busy times. Been busting ass to keep up with everything this semester – teaching assistantship, classes, thesis, not to mention my new(ish) job at Loud3r. Had a few interesting things happen latetly that I felt warranted an update. To enumerate: I hacked some kid’s Facebook account, wrote an HTML scraper to get the latest Naruto Shippüden episodes from Dattebayo, got my code working for my thesis, and did my final edits on my first real academic paper.

Facebook failure:

I was sitting in the class I TA for (along with my cohort Billzebub), I was sniffing the wifi traffic (like you do) and took a look at the pcap dump that was captured. Amongst the garbage was some request/response headers for Facebook. Being the curious little monkey I am, I fire up Firefox and copy/paste all the cookie information into my session (using Web Developer 2 extension). I head over to facebook.com and low and behold, I am Matt Whatshisname. Full access too, not just a temporary hiccup in the login system. After resisting messing with stuff and/or snooping, I clear my cookies and sit back in awe. Awe at how ridiculous it is that the Facebook login system is so exposed and broken.

I tried to replicate the cookie spoof for some pics for this post, but apperently one or more of the cookies are time-sensitive.

Edit: Hack successfully reproduced! Epic fail!!

http://skitch.com/mumrah/7gcg/his-name-is-robert-paulson

http://skitch.com/mumrah/7gcj/full-access

More Naruto Shenanigans:

No need to waste time about how I did it, here’s a link that pretty much explains it all. Naruto Shippüden XML feed.

Thesis:

After going back and forth with my professor for weeks not getting anywhere, I sit him down and start at the beginning and force him to work through all the details with me. 4 hours later we have some functioning code. Obligatory photos to follow. The above picture demonstrates the orthogonality and normalization of the eigenvectors (meaning we finally have the parition function correct as well as the normalization criterion). The following three pictures are just the first three eigenvectors.

Looking forward to the break.

-David

My prof is putting me down as primary author on a paper we’re working on. Or rather, I’m putting my professor down as a corresponding author on a paper I’m writing. heh. The topic is testing the efficieny/effectivness of Replica Exchange Molecular Dynamics to Multiensemeble methods (obligitory wiki links), and when it’s best to use each method. The funny thing about statistical mechanics (and a lot of science in general) is that the concepts are fundamentally simple, but the literature is so far obfuscated with jargon and assumptions that hardly anyone can understand them. I mean, shit, I hardly follow half of what I read – and now I’m supposed to be writing it.

My generation of grad student is coming from the first batch of kids who grew up with the internet, and really the first generation of Wikipedia. As such, I’m going to try a new type of research dogma that attempts to make my research available (and accessable) to anyone. This type of transparent research is become more common, and I hope to see more of it.

Here’s a quick run down of my goals for this experiment

• Provide all of my publications and projects freely (source too)
• Keep the language deflated, no jargon
• Document my methods, keep the research process transparent
• Contribute info (not necessarily new research) back into Wikipedia
• Not get caught by my committee for giving away research ^_^

Hopefully, by the time I finish my thesis I will have enough content here for anyone (idiots excluded) to somewhat understand what it’s all about. Hope you’re all ready – hope I’m ready.

Edit: Loving my macbook.

This semester is all about writing. My professor wants to get two papers out this fall. Luckily, however, these papers will be chapters 2 and 3 of my thesis. Huzzah.

I got a Macbook Pro last week (from an undisclosed source), so now I fit in with the other grad students. The adjustment to OS X has been relatively painless (coming from Ubuntu). My first inclination was to ditch OS X completely and load Linux, but I’ve been persuaded by the Apple Demons (evil and benine) to give Mac a chance. I’ve had to do a lot of customization to get the terminal anywhere near the functionality of gnome-terminal. In fact, I ditched the default terminal for a project call iTerm. Indeed, I will miss gnome-terminal.

The multi touch is incredible. The hardware is incredible.

I’ve quit my crappy job (see Access Nightmares), and taken an awesome job (see How Happy). This is going to be a busy few months. Here we go.

-David