Archive for May, 2007

Andrew Tridgell talks about network protocol analysis at the ANU

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Andrew Tridgell at the ANU. He talked about some of the techniques used to analyze undocumented network protocols.

It was a very interesting talk and talk was well presented. I first found it a bit odd that he would just show up at the ANU like that, but it seems that Andrew was at the ANU from 1989 to 1999 and remains a Visiting Fellow of the University.

My new cycling record

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

I did about 12.5 km today. I went to see an apartment and after that visited the Australian Taxation office which I found to be a pleasant experience. I am now back at collage and I am planning to take the bus home to Fenner Hall :( . Yes, I am that sore.

Introduction to Statistical Machine learning

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

A very good introduction by Samy Bengio. Access the videos here

Mahmoud porting Inferno to the cell processor

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

my friend, Mahmoud has applied to Google’s Summer of code and has been accepted :). He will be porting Inferno to the cell processor.
Now, is that not the coolest thing?

I gave my first tutorial today :)

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

I have been asked to fill in for one of the tutors for a computer networking course. It seems that he was not able to finish the semester (only half of the semester left now). I have two, 2 hour sessions on Wednesday and today was my first try. I had only about 10 students in the first lab and about 5 in the second and I think I did better in the 2nd session then the first.

To tell you the truth I am not sure that enough of the first session students even understood me. We had to go quite slowly as the students had a very bad understanding of the basic network functions. I had people fumbling with, socket() bind() and accept() I wouldn’t have minded if that was what we were supposed to cover, but it seems that they took this stuff about a month ago.

Also I had this bad feeling that 2 kids were laughing about me, but a just told myself that I was just been silly and even if they were it doesn’t matter :). I gradualy worked them towards select() which was the end goal (a multi-client echo server to be exact -they call it an IRC server- :) ).

I felt that I did better in the 2nd session because I was more focused and I got some feedback about the state of the students from my first session. I also attended Bobs (the senior tutor and a lecturer) 1st session today so that helped me a lot.

So even thought I was really scared that I would be exposed for the impostor I try and convince myself I am not, I was able to go through with not too many casualties.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out :)