Personal | Wonderings of a SAT geek

# Some food for thought: great content on the Internet

December 19, 2024 Personal msoos

The Internet is a pretty vast place. So I decided to curate a few links for you all for this special end-of-year period:

- https://vimeo.com/41786246 A film about… a couch. That balances on a single leg. And sometimes falls, and falls apart, but with some care, and compassion, can be pieced back together.
- https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/02/15/rhythmical-lines/ An article on unbroken lines, drawn by Wacław Szpakowski, who did it as a form of doodling.
- http://astronaut.io/ This website is an art piece about the world, I think, made of small, randomly selected videos.
- https://interfacecritique.net/book/olia-lialina-from-my-to-me/ An article about the old internet, and why we should have and cultivate our own space on the interwebs. By one of my favourite aritsts, Olia Lialina
- https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/07/28/working-on-my-novel/ About a book that is made of a set of tweets that contains the phrase “working on my novel.” A surreal experience.
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/brecht/works/1935/questions.htm A short poem by Bertold Brecht about who did what, questioning why we only remember those in power.
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/michael-heizers-city About a land art piece by Michael Heizer, who is both a genius and is also rather crazy. His other work, Double Negative is truly beautiful (it’s literally a hole in the desert, but a beautiful hole, the best hole, and I mean it)
- https://publicdelivery.org/agnes-denes-wheatfield/ About a large wheat field, in the middle of Manhattan, that Ágnes Dénes sowed and then harvested, right in the view of the World Trade Center.
- https://www.africavernaculararchitecture.com/ A classic 90s website about vernacular architecture in Africa. Some amazingly beautiful houses, built for the people, by the people, to live in. Click on a country and enjoy.
- https://vimeo.com/58444378 A mockumentary about a guy making music, caring for his father, trying to enjoy life, and remembering the things that didn’t work out, which he likens to Mount Everest, his Whateverest.
- https://www.vincentmoon.com/map/ The map of places where Vincent Moon recorded traditional music preformed by locals. Here is one for a taster. If you listen patiently, with intent, you might find that there’s a lot of beautiful music out there.
- https://www.ryojiikeda.com/project/testpattern/ A set of test patterns, projected over a large space, that allows people to lay down, walk around, and explore. To be coupled with his strange but fascinating noise music. I went to his concert, it’s exactly as weird as you’d imagine. He never said hello, goodbye, or left any space to clap.
- https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ What it means to be poor by Scalzi. Watch out for the comment by her own sister. Back in the days of the interwebs when comments added value.
- The Marion Stokes Project, with its transcript in a more accessible form.
- https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-10-summer-2007/excremental-value An article about my favourite artwork, Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista. In 1961 he put his own excrement into 90 small cans and sold them at the price of gold ($37/ounce). Over the years, it has outperformed gold by a factor of 70x. The guy with the banana stuck to the wall is a mere imitator by comparison (and 60 years late)

Ágnes Dénes – Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982, Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, photo: John McGrall

# Texas Executed Offenders’ Last Words

July 17, 2016 Personal art msoos

An artist friend of mine gave me this idea, so here is the list of the most used words of those executed in Texas, from their last statement:

    word       frequency
    -----------------------
         you   4.670330
         and   3.945360
         the   3.670635
         for   2.701465
        love   2.419109 **
        that   2.190171
         all   2.113858
        have   1.663614
        this   1.297314
       thank   1.030220 **
        know   1.014957
      family   0.969170 **
        your   0.908120
         not   0.839438
        will   0.808913
         god   0.801282 **
        want   0.801282
       would   0.778388
        with   0.755495
         i'm   0.755495
       sorry   0.747863 **
        like   0.740232
         say   0.679182
         but   0.641026
        life   0.595238 **
        what   0.579976
       there   0.549451
       ya'll   0.534188
        hope   0.488400 **
        them   0.488400

# On Testing and Security Engineering

November 12, 2015 Personal Security, testing msoos

I have been working in a large organization for quite a while now where I have seen a lot of testing going on. As an information security engineer, I naturally aligned more with testing and indeed, information security assurance does align well with testing: It’s done on a continuous basis, its results usually mean work for developers, operations people, system architects, etc. and not caring about it is equivalent to accepting unknown risks. Since I have been working in an environment where testing was paramount, I have been digging more and more into the testing literature.

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# CryptoMiniSat: 8000 commits later

October 18, 2015 Personal, SAT free software, Parallel SAT Solving, programming, research msoos

The GitHub repository for CryptoMiniSat just hit 8000 commits. To celebrate this rather weird and crazy fact, let me put together a bit of a history.

## The Beginnings

CryptoMiniSat began as a way of trying to prove that a probabilistic cryptographic scheme was not possible to break using SAT solvers. This was the year 2009, and I was working in Grenoble at INRIA. It was a fun time and I was working really hard to prove what I wanted to prove, to the point that I created a probabilistic SAT solver where one could add probability weights to clauses. The propagations and conflict engine would only work if the conflict or propagation was supported by multiple clauses. Thus began a long range of my unpublished work in SAT. This SAT solver, curiously, still works and solves problems quite well. It’s a lot of fun, actually — just add some random clause into the database that bans the only correct solution and the solver will find the correct solution. A bit of a hackery, but hey, it works. Also, it’s so much faster than doing that solving with the “right” systems, it’s not even worth comparing.
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# My Dell Vostro 3560 review

August 26, 2012 Personal, Uncategorized review msoos

In this post I would like to share with you a personal review of my new business line laptop from Dell, the Vostro 3560. It’s a 15.6″ laptop that has Full HD screen using TN display technology, a 750GB HDD spinning at 7500rpm, 6GB of DDR3 RAM clocked at 1600MHz, with the highest possible Core i7 processor available for this machine, the i7-3612QM, that goes to 3.1GHz with all cores still active.

Overview of the laptop

## The good

First, let me talk about what I found to be great about this laptop. The display is great: it’s sharp, the colors are good and it’s bright enough even in strong sunlight — though admittedly here in Berlin there is not much of that.

The keyboard is also magnificent. It’s one of the best keyboards I have ever used, even though I am very particular about my peripherals, especially keyboards and mice. I used to own business Thinkpads and this is the first keyboard that I have found to be as good as or maybe even better than a Thinkpad keyboard.

The system is built sturdily, and the materials used don’t feel cheap in your hands. Though the system isn’t light, it feels easy to hold due to its rigidity and smooth (but not slippery) surfaces.

Finally, the system contains extras that are only mentioned in the service manual. For example, there is an mSATA socket inside the laptop, meaning you can plug a 256GB mSATA SSD into the system in a couple of minutes for a reasonable price (around 200EUR), significantly speeding things up.

## The mediocre

The CPU is a trade-off. It’s not the i7-3610QM which would go up to 3.3GHz with all cores still active. The reason for this is interestingly not price: the two CPUs cost the same from intel — the reason is heat removal. The CPU installed only generates 35W of heat while the other generates 45W. Essentially, Dell didn’t work hard enough on the cooling system and the result is that a better CPU cannot be installed. Unfortunately, Dell is not the only one that couldn’t install the 3610QM, other manufacturers such as Sony with the Vaio S series had the same issue. Naturally, Apple with the new MacBook Pro lineup didn’t mess this up.

The included charger is rather bulky. Interestingly, there is a slimmer charger available, for a mere 114 EUR — the one included costs 50EUR on the same Dell webpage. I find this to be rather disappointing.

Bulky charger included

Slim charger, available at 114EUR

The wireless card inside the system doesn’t support 5GHz WiFi. This sounds minor, until you go to a conference or a public place with a WiFi where everyone seems to be able to connect, except you. 2.4GHz WiFi uses a band that is substantially more noisy and since routers on that band cover more area, if many people are in the same place, connection can be very spotty. In comparison, my IBM X61t, released in 2007 (!) had 5GHz WiFi, so it’s hardly new technology. In fact, for about 30EUR you can change your WiFi card inside the case for one that supports Bluetooth+802.11abgn, i.e. all that is inside plus 5GHz WiFi. I still cannot understand why a computer that costs 900+ EUR would cheap out on such a component — especially since Dell can get bulk discount, so the upgrade for them would be around 10 EUR at most.

The system comes with a DVD writer included, but I don’t have any use for that. Who uses DVDs nowadays? If I want to watch a movie, I use Blu-Ray — after all, the display is Full HD! Having a Blu-Ray option would have been easy for the manufacturer, as the DVD player included is a standard one, so it can be easily swapped to an internal notebook Blu-Ray reader. Such readers cost around 60EUR at any online retailer. In fact, a Blu-Ray internal writer would cost no more than 80EUR. Dell missed out on this completely, for no good reason. Yes, it’s for business, but even business people need to back up their HDD and a DVD writer with a capacity of 4GB won’t be of any help.

## The bad

Build quality is terrible. This is very surprising at this price range and in this category (i.e. business). First off, the screen’s backplate fits so badly to the front that there are holes larger than 2mm on the right side, and almost none on the left:

Left side of panel

Right side of panel

The same, though less accentuated, is true for the palmrest. You can clearly see that the plastic fits differently on the two sides, and in fact fits unevenly on both:

Left side of front

Right side of bottom

Similarly, the bottom sticker of the laptop with the most important piece of information, the Service Tag, is of such a low quality that after only 2 months of use the numbers got completely erased, and only the barcode (blacked out for privacy) remains readable:

My Service Tag — other than the barcode (blacked out) it’s unreadable

Finally, Linux support is terrible. I wanted to get reimbursed for the Windows 7 licence, but they refused it, which I think is clearly illegal, but of course I don’t have months to waste and money to burn to get some 50-100 EUR back. In the same spirit, there is no proper support for controlling the fan under Linux, as the highest level of the fan cannot be attained with the linux driver, and there is no proper palm detection support for the touchpad. The AMD Linux driver available at the time of purchase crashed X11 at startup, but the new one (fglrx 8.980) is flawless, and I have to commend AMD the on that.

## Conclusions

The Vostro 3560 is a nice piece of machine but it’s not quite business quality and its makers prefer not to hear the word Linux uttered. However, if you are ready to shell out some money on a Blu-Ray drive, don’t intend to use Linux and are content with mediocre build quality with holes between elements the size an edge of a penny, the Vostro 3560 is a good choice. Otherwise, maybe hold out for a better offer.

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