Friday, September 09, 2011

memory

So, my office moved to the other side of the building a month or two ago. My lab is still over there near my old office, and that's also where the copier room is, and the kitchen where I get hot water to drink. So, I do still go over there frequently.

One thing I don't do over there so frequently is use the bathroom - there are two restrooms near the new office, so now I usually go there. These two restrooms are both unisex, and are next door to eachother, and are basically mirror images in layout. The old restroom is laid out differently.

So, just a few minutes ago, I go to the kitchen to get some water, set my mug on the coffee maker to wait for me, and go into the old restroom. This whole time, I'm thinking about the talk that Shrinivas gave a little while before. I do my quick business in the restroom, turn around to leave - and realize that something is wrong. I don't recognize my surroundings. I don't know where I am.

At first, it was kind of terrifying - I thought that I didn't know where I was at all, but quickly realized that, really, I just didn't know which bathroom I was in. The lighting, i.e. the color temperature, was unfamiliar. The layout seemed wrong. "Which one am I in?" I thought. "The left one or the right one?"

I stood there for a few seconds, and thought hard about what was wrong, then finally figured it out. I remembered the water, and that I must be in the old restroom.

That makes two times now that I was in that restroom and thought I was having a stroke. First time was the first time I had experienced a visual migraine aura, which was much more awesome than this.

Thursday, September 01, 2011

1k/mo

Got over 1000 page views for the month of august, basically because last week was HUGE for my classic comedic dialogues and self-indulgent essays. No no no, really, it was MS-WBT server. Observe:
Yeah, I don't know what's going on. Whatever it is that causes people to google "MS-WBT server", and wind up here for a few seconds, got a little worse last week - visits increased by something like 30%. Google is weird, the internet is weird, MS-WBT server is weird.

Going to Nashville tonight!

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

self

I have been thinking frequently about who I am, and about whether who I am has changed over the years, and if so, how.

One thing I keep returning to is this feeling that I am losing myself, or that my self is somehow diminishing over time. What I mean is, I feel more and more that I am what I do, and what I see and feel, and the people I interact with - mainly Jingping (not that I think I am Jingping, no) - and the random thoughts that run through my mind when I'm away from things to do or people to interact with.

This isn't necessarily a problem. I don't mind being my thoughts, or being an interaction with my wife, or being the work that I do, or the procrastination that I put between myself and my work. These things, or parallel things, are what I think we all are. But parceling your self into these discrete components makes them identifiable, and subject to direct analysis, which can reveal things in stark detail that you realize you just don't like. There are some specific features that bother me.

When I was younger, I spent a large portion of my free time writing. I wrote stories, essays on my thinking, letters, etc. I did this because I wanted to. Now, I write because I have to - I do research, and I have to write about it to sustain my personal profession. There is always work to do, and when I feel willing to write, I feel I have to apply this will to work, not fun. So, I almost never write for fun anymore. Even worse, I realize that I distract myself from this sort of unease by reading what others have written. It's as though I'm replacing parts of myself with parts of other people.

Also, over the years, I more and more began to think of my self expression as excessive, or pretentious, or useless, and so I suppressed it. I think that my entire character is suppressed. This has not had the result of simply bottling up my character, but instead I think that in some ways I am withering away - I feel that even if I tried to go back to my old ways, of writing out my thoughts regularly, there would be less to write. This is why I am writing this entry, which even as I write it feels excessive, pretentious, and useless. I feel like I have to get a ball rolling, though.

Another thing that bothers me is what I think about. We all have recurring thoughts that irritate us, things that we don't want to think about but that we do anyways. Some of these things are fine at a high level, because they are features of our lives. But other things - news, politics, etc., I find myself repeatedly going through these internal monologues, not daily but frequently, on topics like the American military, US history, religion, politics. Why? I tell myself that I don't care about these things, or I try not to care - I have no effect on them, and they seem to have no effect on me. I feel infected. I want to think about my life, my wife, my work, about things I enjoy. I'm not a politician or a columnist - why do I obsess over these sorts of things? I have not figured this out. I do get a strong feeling that these sorts of thoughts erode my self - they are not me, they are other people, other places. They make me forget who I am.

I am not bothered by thinking about sex or violence, or obsessing about the aesthetics of the Green Line tunnels, or wanting to see if someone sent me an email or a Facebook message, or my shabby piano playing. These are aspects of my life, they are fine in themselves - some of these things may specifically implicate odd aspects of my personality, but so what?

Conclusions: I still exist, but I have doubts about the vitality of my existence. I have suppressed myself too much, and the empty spaces in my mind are more and more taken up with irrelevant puzzles. I'm thinking that a solution may be to do something like this regularly, do more writing for fun, try to be more expressive with other people, stop always trying to hide myself from the outside.

Friday, August 26, 2011

hypothetical question

Okay, so let's say you run the following experiment:

You want to compare different states of adaptation. The yardstick you're going to use to compare them is is a matching function. You have two stimuli, x and y, and you're going to assume that the associated matching function - your matching function model - is simple, like y = mx + b. You want to know how those function parameters, m and b, vary when the adaptation state changes.

To do the experiment, you keep one adaptation state constant in all conditions. You can do this because you have two stimuli, and you can adapt them separately. So, you have two adaptors, X and Y. You keep adaptor X the same in all conditions, but you vary adaptor Y. Since X doesn't change, you can then compare the effects of Y across conditions. Adaptor X is your baseline.

Within a subject, this design is fine. You can take your xy data from different X conditions and plot them on the same axes. You look at how the data for X1 differs from X2, for example. You fit your model to the X1 and X2 data, and find that mX1 is higher than mX2. You repeat the experiment with another subject and find the same pattern - the m values are different across subjects, but you see the same relative difference between mX1 and mX2 for every subject you test. You average the results together to show that mX1 is higher than mX2. This constitutes a result of your study.

But then...

You start to look at the individual data, at how the m values vary so much across individual subjects, but that within-subject difference is always there. You think, something is covarying between these two things, what could it be? Why is it that whatever value mX2 takes for a particular subject, mX1 is always higher?

Then you realize: Y. mX1 and mX2 might not vary at all, at least not to the extent that they appear to. Maybe its mY that's varying.

Look at that model from the point of view of Y. Then you have x = (mY)y + (bY). Turn it around, and you get y = (1/(mY))x + (bY)/(mY). This means that mX is inversely proportional to mY, so that measured values of mX1 and mX2 will be similarly affected by differences, across individual subjects, in the value of mY.

Well, this led somewhere, anyways.

Saturday, August 06, 2011

zipper trucks

Yesterday I learned about the existence of zipper machines. We were driving back from Foxboro and there were all these little movable barriers on the interstate; I might have said something about them, and Matt explained that they were moved every day by big, slow-moving machines. I couldn't believe it, but you could see that the barriers were all linked together with springed, metal joints. I came home and looked it up, and found that link, and some youtube videos. I have to see one of these things in action...

Also, my poem output was way up over the last few weeks (like, above zero per week). They're all in drains like google or weekly report or facebook, so for posterity let's put them here. For my birthday, I made a haiku:
thirty-two years down
won't pick up another bit
for as many more

I thought that was clever.

Then, Murf decided to institute a Thursday google+ rhyme circle. Murf started with:
"i'm a serial gangsta, so don't you be hatin';
these rhymes are coming at you - 9600 baud ratin'.
i'm a cereal gangsta, pouring as smooth as silk
all o'er these fruity pebbles some quality soy milk."

I responded with:
"
why's your baud so slow, must be messin' with your flow
don't hate, i got infinite bit rate,
symbols at the speed of light
like nuclear fission, constant information transmission,
a meltdown, crossin' synapses,
no lapses, my latency's good, it's understood 'cause i drink real milk
fortified, omega-3,
carbon chain, developin' my brain, got to sustain that spike train"

I was proud of that. Then one night this week I generated this for facebook:
"
no frogs,
no crickets,
 
no bugs at all. 
just air conditioners, 
and echoes of air conditioners. 
no, wait, 
i hear something- 
i hear a bug. 
what is it? 
what is it?"

That was kind of lame, but it was accurate. Then yesterday the Thursday rhyme circle was late. Murf began:
"
Subjective speckle, what do you say?
650nm class IIIA
Black spots moving as I'm delighted;
Not in my same direction means I'm near-sighted."

And I responded with this:
"
myopia, that's some shit
some negative lenses would fix it
stimulatin' those long wavelength cones
seein' red, thinkin' about homophones
"

I am such a genius.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

binary gregorian chronometry


11111.1111111110100110001110011

this is my age. my chronometer is about to roll over. about to get my sixth bit!

i've been posting these numbers on facebook for more than a week, and nobody has figured out yet what i'm doing.

i posted it once to google+, and murf got it right away.

so, win for murf!

this reminds me of my old toyota. we met when it was at 86,000 miles, and i was a spry 10010. we were together when it rolled over 100,000; when it crossed 111,111 and 123,456; when it crossed 186,000, and when it rolled over 200,000. we even made it to 222,222 miles together. then i had a crisis of faith when it was time to drive from louisville to boston, and we parted forever. i'll never see that odometer roll over to 238,000 miles, or to 300,000, or 333,333... we could have been together when my binary gregorian chronometer rolls over - it won't happen again for 32 more years.

but we won't be together tonight. the camry is gone. i miss you, 1991 blue toyota camry LE. we were friends. i'm sorry i left you behind.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

lorica-in

Here's a mystery which I don't have time now to investigate, but I want to remember it for later.

Matlab has a constant open connection with.. itself.. through ports 4079 and 4080. All I can find is that 4080 is associated with something called "lorica", and 4079 with "SANtools". SANtools is a some sort of general utility for disc access, network storage.. I don't know what. It's familiar, I've encountered SANtools somewhere before, but can't remember. I have no idea what "lorica" could be.

Later.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

tubely

I got an interesting email this morning - actually two of them. They were spam on my gmail account, which is interesting because I almost never get spam on that account. They were sent from the account of someone I know incidentally - actually by way of two incidents. That's a funny story, I'll tell it now, in parentheses:

(I go to a Taekwondo club, and most of the other people who go there are like me, normal slobs, not genuine atheletes or fighters, though there are many of those. Anyways, one of the people I had conversed with a few times was the mother of a child student, who would come to classes when her son was there. So, okay, we "knew" one another, saw eachother maybe once every week or two. So then, last summer, I'm shopping for a piano, looking at Craigslist ads. I see a total of 4 pianos. The second one (I bought the 3rd), I show up at the person's house to check it out - and it's the lady from Taekwondo. Very weird, in a city of a million people, that 1/4 piano ads answered contain a person you know. Oh well, that's the story.)

So, I'm apparently on this lady's email contacts list because of the piano interaction. She must have fallen for this Tubely thing - I'm still not sure exactly what Tubely is - and it dumped "invites" to everyone on her contacts list. It sounds like this is the typical Tubely MO.

The interesting thing about the emails (I got two simultaneous copies of the invite) is that they contained the sender's IP address. I have no idea why. I knew it was the lady's work address because 1) I know that she works at another Harvard-affiliated research institute, and 2) the address resolved to another computer on the Harvard network.

The emails were sent around 7:40am today, so she gets to her office at least by 7:40am. It's creepy that spam can reveal that sort of detail about you. Embarrassing and creepy.

And, it seems pretty weird, that spam would want to be giving out your exact location on the internet, through a Webmail service. Maybe it's an effort to *not* look like spam, by showing that you originate from the actual sender, as if IP addresses are obviously familiar or not. Oh well, who knows.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

TeliaSonera

For the first time in a while, saw an outgoing packet that I didn't recognize.

It was a TCP packet sent to 213.155.157.32. This seems to be part of the telia.net domain, though this address doesn't actually have a domain name. Telia is a Swedish IP that extends throughout Europe. Hostsearch says the address is maintained by Akamai, which is based here in Cambridge MA, but that it's located in London - so this is an Akamai International host, accessed through the Telia network. The packet was sent by one of those generic svchost.exe processes, and I didn't notice it in time to see if netstat could have told me anything else.

The host has open http ports - my packet was sent to port 80, so maybe it was an attempt at opening an http session. Maybe some Microsoft component was checking for an update - I've noticed before that Microsoft updates are often hosted on Akamai servers - but it's weird that it tried with a single packet and gave up. Other option (more likely maybe) is that it was a long delayed "close connection" packet, from a website I had opened much earlier - the web browser had been closed for a while, though I don't remember how long it had been.

The packet was sent from port 22095. This doesn't appear to be associated with anything interesting...

Oh well, this was pretty boring.

Friday, March 25, 2011

How To Escape the Web

I have finally found a browser configuration that can reliably keep me from screwing around on the internet.

For a while I've had the Leechblock add-on for Firefox, which lets me dynamically (i.e. on-the-spot) add a site to a list, and then keep me from seeing it for some period of time. But I figured out early on that I could remove sites from the list with just a little work. Apparently, I just didn't know how to use Leechblock to the fullest of its abilities, because it's also possible to set it so that no changes at all to its configuration - except for adding addresses - are possible outside certain circumstances, which can be made very restrictive.

So, with Firefox, I am now prohibited from visiting my favorite places to read, visiting my favorite forums, and periodically checking Facebook to make sure that, still, no one has left me any messages.

But that leaves IE, which I quickly discovered is basically un-uninstallable. You can roll back to earlier versions, but you cannot, without more expertise than I have, remove it from XP. So I persisted this way for a while, with an old version of IE that at least made me nervous to go wandering around the web, for fear of Java trojans. I could sneak over to stupid IE to check for Facebook messages, or to see what the others were talking about on the forums, or to see what country was on fire today. I was basically controlling myself relatively well, but still not satisfied.

Solution: rather than try and figure out whether there's some Leechblock equivalent for IE, I rolled IE back up to the current version, went into the "content advisor" settings, and told it not to let me visit any websites that I haven't already rated as okay. I'm not even sure what a content advisor rating is - I was just testing to see what the setting did. It prevented me from looking at basically any website at all, making IE useless. But the key is that the content advisor has a password option, so that without the password you can't change the settings.

I set the password to something I made up on the spot, and I have no idea now what it was. It was actually a word, something like arduvon or.. I remembered it for a few minutes afterwards, and worried that I had memorized it, but it's gone!

I'm not completely protected, however. I could always download Chrome or something else, or roll IE back again. The first option can be prevented by just adding the Chrome site to the Leechblock list.

Anyways, I'm pretty satisfied with this.

Friday, January 21, 2011

yandex.ru

Another boring Sitemeter post. I'm so sorry.

Several interesting visitors recently, though I haven't kept notes and have forgotten the names of several. Someone in France came here and spent something like an hour viewing several dozen pages, I don't know why - they came in through the MS-WBT server page, though.

Someone came here through my link in Facebook, which never happens, and he looked at a few pages. I know who it was, but I won't embarrass him.

Anyway, page views are up for some reason - every day or two, someone flips through several pages, I don't know why that's happening now but not before - the MS-WBT page isn't changed, nothing is. Random winter boredom maybe?

Today there was a visitor about whom Sitemeter seemed to know nothing at all. I was curious, so tracerouted the entire IP block, and it led back to a cluster of sites named yandex.ru. This, apparently, is the Russian Google, a search engine suite. I don't know what hit the site, exactly, but maybe it was a yandexbot - the Googlebot comes every few days or weeks, maybe the yandexbot will start dropping by.

Anyways, that's pretty boring. Sorry.

Friday, December 31, 2010

WebSense

This is kind of interesting.

Being on the private network and all, I can't see the main stream of internet traffic - or, I don't know how to watch it from an external host, same thing. Anyways, I am reduced to watching Sitemeter to see if anything interesting pops up there. So we get the Italia thing from last time.

Sitemeter tells me the referring URL for most visitors to this site. 98% of them are referred from Google, because they've searched for MS-WBT-SERVER and that April page is the top return for that search. The ones that aren't from there are the interesting ones. Today I get the following referral:

http://10.237.125.90:15871/cgi-bin/blockOptions.cgi?ws-session=1817507749

An IP address starting with 10.* is a private network address - so at first I thought this was a referral from some site on my own network, which doesn't make any sense at all. Then, slightly more sensibly, I thought it must be a reference from within the Blogspot network. Then I gave up guessing, and Googled it.

A number of forum questions suggest that someone on a private network tried to see this site, but it (i.e. blogger.com) was blocked by WebSense software. So WebSense poked the site, found it was on its block list, and probably gave that person a notification that it was blocked - 15871 is the port used by the WebSense monitor or something, so this actually reveals (I think) the user's own IP address. The request came from an address in Tamil Nadu, India.

So, strangely enough, this is a way of getting information about a user from within a private network - get your site blocked by them, then you can see their external, public address when they attempt to connect, and their private address when WebSense bounces them off. Neat!

***

The public address sitemeter gave me was 203.99.193.* - this is registered to Cognizant Technology Solutions - long story short, Cognizant is (among other things) an outsourcing company. No way of knowing exactly what they're doing there, some sort of white collar stuff, call centers, that sort of thing.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Italia

Oh, also I am always watching Sitemeter, keeping track of how many people are coming to check out my invaluable MS WBT tips. Somebody on an Italian network actually seems to have searched this site out by name, strangely enough: they Googled the terms "internet what i am going to learn today", which is pretty weird. May have just been a coincidence, but I think they were looking for me.

Sitemeter doesn't give the whole IP address of the visitor, just the prefixes, and in this case it couldn't be certain where the visitor was coming from. I tracerouted the whole block, though, and they all belong to the Telecom Italia backbone, called "Seabone".

So today I learned that Telecom Italia's international backbone is called Seabone.

Publication Report 2010

My internet research has dwindled to nothing!

Meanwhile, this year's publication history:

Published manuscripts: 2
Submitted manuscripts: 0
In-preparation manuscripts: 1
Abstracts submitted: 2
Conference papers written: 2
Conference presentations: 1
Invited lectures: 1

SUBMITTED MANUSCRIPTS = 0.0, this isn't so good. I have a waiting list of whatever comes right before "in-preparation", though.

Okay, what did I learn today:
Well, I built a model of adapted image quality (blur/normal/sharp) matching yesterday, and fixed it up today. It does just what it should: it "normalizes" when adapted to one or another type of input, though for now its starting point is "blank adapted" which isn't quite right. It also displays the loss of blur/sharp gain that I found in the matching experiment (which accounts for 4 of the above objects: paper in preparation, abstract accepted, presentation and lecture given).

The model is your basic contrast transducer array, a set of Foley functions (Stromeyer-Foley, Naka-Rushton, etc.) with thresholds set by a standard function. I've built it several times before, but this is the first time I came up with a good way of implementing the adaptation part. This is the transducer function, with w in the denominator standing in for some added (only added, yes) gain control function:

The idea is that the system wants R to be kept relatively constant, at a particular level above threshold but not terribly near saturation - but C keeps changing, so how to keep R in that ideal range? Yes, we adapt, and here adaptation basically means setting the value of w. That's easy to do, just solve for w. This introduces probably the most important free parameter in the model, R, because I don't know what it should be, though I have a good idea of the range, and luckily the thing only really behaves if I put it in that range. So okay, it works!

So what I learned is that the third time you build something, it might actually work. From now on I need to make sure to build everything at least three times.

Monday, November 15, 2010

MS WBT SERVER 2

This site has been getting more than 20 hits/day because of this post from back in April. Basically, all it does is describe some packets that were sent to a port used by the service MS WBT SERVER. It supplies a critical piece of information for those wishing to find out what, exactly, MS WBT SERVER is: "this is the port used by the 'Remote Desktop' utility in windows". There, I've done it again! Now I should start getting twice as many hits.

Sitemeter says that something like 98% of those hits leave the site immediately without looking at anything, probably because people immediately recognize that there's nothing useful here at all. But they keep coming, more every week, more every month! Every once in a while someone goes and looks at one of the indices on the right side of the page, maybe thinking, "ah, there's where something useful might be hidden!" Usually they leave right after that, but it's interesting anyways. I haven't gotten any comments on any of my old comedic dialogues unfortunately.



Virtually every one of these visits was referred from google.com, from a search for MS WBT SERVER.

For comparison, here's an old record from a couple of years ago.

Monday, October 18, 2010

ARP

One small thing, which I don't have on hand - the other night, I switched on the network monitor and saw an exchange I'd never seen before: ARKIV (my computer) sent an ARP packet to Jingping's computer, which is on the same local network - immediately, her computer responded with two UDP skype packets. ARKIV's skype was turned off. Is skype constantly checking incoming messages to see if they come from an address in its routing tables - in that case why was Jingping the only computer that got an ARP packet? Was the ARP packet sent by some active skype process? Mysteries, mysteries...

(These conversations suggest that skype knows enough to adjust its routing for LANs - so instead of IP addresses it needs to be routing to MAC addresses, or something.)

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Audio

Ok, here's something slightly interesting. It has to do with Skype - the only traffic I can see here that isn't building business, or something I'm doing (webpages, ftp, updates, etc.) is Skype, so I guess that's what I live with until I go figure out something new.

Anyways, I've mentioned before about how my Skype account seems to use port 34268 to advertise its existence - UDP packets go in and out through that port, and sometimes a link gets established with one of the associated addresses, and a conversation starts - i.e. my computer gets used as a relay in the Skype network. Sometimes I see the UDP packets go out, looking for another node, and nothing comes back - they go out a few more times, and give up.

So, what I noticed is that tonight, my computer is sending RTP packets, which I haven't seen before, rather than UDP packets. RTP is apparently used for transferring video and audio, especially with VOIP applications. So, Skype is looking for someone accepting video/audio streams, trying to establish an RTP network? I have no idea.

Each of those RTP messages was reciprocated with a UDP response, by the way. Nothing else followed, however - there's a single conversation going on through Skype, leisurely exchanging TCP packets every few dozen seconds, so I would assume this is a text conversation - but it's a one-sided conversation, since my computer is communicating only with one other address! If I were relaying a conversation, I should see connections with two other hosts, not one. Maybe some sort of routing table content is being transferred, updated, etc., very slowly?

That's all I've got.

Sunday, October 03, 2010

Private networks are boring

Just as the title says. Since moving into this new apartment, I've been viewing the internet only from within private networks, at home or in the lab. It's very boring. Here, as there, I see absolutely nothing but the browsing traffic and attendance updates between the hosts and the server. Nothing from outside, ever.

I haven't done anything, learned anything internet-wise, since moving here. This is the reason.

Before, when I had that public Comcast address, it was like living on the street, and all the random scans and searches that passed by every other minute were like other street people, bumping around and looking for somebody to take advantage of, or just exploring as I was doing, scanning this or that node, looking for something interesting.

The private network is like living in... an apartment building, or a suburban neighborhood, where all you ever see are your neighbors, and all they're ever doing is routine, everyday, necessary things, which aren't interesting at all except in that they're being done and that they're done every day, routinely - routine has a quality all its own, but it's not much fun to watch.

I need to figure out how to watch traffic from other hosts. It's time to expand my abilities.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

back

okay, june was a busy month, and it had absolutely nothing to do with me learning anything at all about the internet. and, lately, i have lost interest in the topic. but i'm sure it will come back! i'll be moving to a new apartment by and by, where the internet is apparently distributed by a local network run by the building manager - i.e. i'll be plugging into a LAN to get outside. so, first, i'll have to find out what i can and can't do from there, but it will also be interesting to try and figure out how the building's network is put together. i'm guessing, however, that i won't have my own IP address any longer, which will be a plus and a negative when it comes to exploration.