Down Cycle
In the last 10 days, I have been on a down cycle. A down cycle is basically a point where the brain refuses to compute, the fingers refuse to type and all joy is slowly extinguished from using a computer. Down cycles are inevitable; they are a result of mental saturation and one can only ride them out by redirecting the mind to other tasks. Gardening is one such task, as is cooking and even cleaning the house! 
Software Freedom Day 2007 was held at KL Sentral this year. Khairil sponsored the booth space and various other folk chipped in with computers, speakers and other goodies. Aizat was there, as was Han and Kenmin. It was nice to meet the FOSS crowd again. And hey Kenmin, put up the pics already (but omit the “sensitive” pictures)!
I gave out Ubuntu Live CD’s to interested passer by’s, explaining to them what Linux was and explained the meaning of Software Freedom. Pretty much everybody was appreciative and some even wanted to donate money for the free CD’s (we were not accepting donations though). I left after lunchtime after handing out a number of CD’s, as I had other work to get to at home.
Had an interesting talk with Han and looked at Petri Nets a little deeper today. I am quite surprised I did not look at it in depth previously, it is indeed a rich modelling approach for concurrent processes.
Stuff I’ve been up to:
- Gave Yahoo! Pipes a go again, after the last time I’ve tried it. It seems to have improved. I wonder if the rich UI frontend is open sourced?
- Reading up on Map/Reduce.
- Downloaded Erlang, installed it and gave it a go. Nifty, tho took some mental gymnastics getting acquainted with its environment. There even seems to be a Planet Erlang.
- Read extensively on CouchDb.Very cool and it seems, Aizat and myself, may have found a possible legitimate use of it in the company. Great excuse to give it a shot.
- Wrote an XML-RPC load tester and promptly crashed the target machine. No time for tweaks yet. Bah!
- Re-wrote some parts of FortKnocker, and am contemplating another approach to secretly sharing keys between server and client. Pulled up Applied Cryptography and re-read Merkel’s puzzles. Possibly a new approach but I can imagine evil DDOS uses.
- Went to TechEd. Felt like poking my eyes out. Gave feedback to Microsoft guy, hopefully they can improve the quality of presentations next year.