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Hello?

This is a test of posting from email, via a script I wrote in Python in a couple of hours. Yay Python. Sorry for the "weird' formatting, I just want to make sure it's doing what it should be.

Look for posts from the arctic in the coming weeks...

I'm headed out to California tomorrow morning for a conference - looking forward to seeing Dan, QA, and Popo. Ann Marie and Mark Chang will be there as well - we'll be presenting the work we did as part of our SCOPE project. Let me know if you're out there too and you want to meet up!

Since most of my posts seem to invariantly end up with some political subtext attached, I would point out that if you haven't watched any of the AG Gonzales senate hearing, you really should. Between Leahy (woo! Go Vermont!) and Specter, Gonzales takes quite the beating. My favorite part is the exchange about 1.5m into Specter's questioning about whether or not Gonzales is 'prepared'.

Also, in this photo the white is trash. Wow. The Phillippines.

Your photo selection so entertains me.

An interesting article here: Why can't programmers program?, and it links to several other interesting ones. Basically, it turns out that a lot of self-proclaimed "programmers"... really aren't. Read it for more details. Potentially even more entertaining is that of those programmers who can program, many can't read! Yes, of those who completed the task, many completed the wrong task.

As for solutions... I of course had to try it. Here's my answer:

print  ", ".join([str((i, "Fizz", "Buzz", "FizzBuzz")[int((i % 3)==0) + int(2*((i % 5)==0))]) for i in xrange(1,101)])

If you can follow that, you're definitely a programmer. If you can follow that and are still talking to me, then clearly you're a forgiving person ;-) (It's Python, for those who don't recognize it)

To any readers of PlanetOlin, sorry for stomping on it lately. In the process of moving things around on my website, PlanetOlin got confused and decided all my old blog posts were NEW NEW NEW!!! and decided to show them all at once. sigh. On the plus side, I now have the beginnings of a spiffier / slightly more polished website up, and the torrent of posts should end soon.

So, it's official - I finally decided yesterday that I'm doing the MIT / WHOI Joint Program for graduate school. My advisor called in the morning, and I pretty much knew what the right answer was.

MIT didn't put on nearly as good a show as Carnegie Mellon - CMU actually made me feel like they wanted me there. MIT mainly left me feeling confused and frustrated. Nevertheless, I've wanted to be at WHOI since I was really young, and that hasn't changed - I don't think I could give up that opportunity. WHOI has a great community to balance MIT's insanity, and I'm hopeful that the MIT craziness is all transient. At steady state maybe I'll meet up with the many good people who I know are there. In June I'll be going on an orientation cruise on the Corwith Cramer, so I'm looking forward to that.

My political post of the day is about torture in the US; an interesting read. Also, if you haven't checked out the trailer for An Inconvenient Truth, you should.

There's an interesting article at Wired explaining how Homeland Security computer systems failed due to poor security practices; namely deliberately avoiding patch installs. What gets me is not the security issue though; I can understand that to some degree, though it was definitely a bad call by their IT people.

On page one, the articles says that "The system has processed more than 52 million visitors, and allowed border officials to intercept more than 1,000 wanted criminals and immigration violators".

That means that for every criminal or 'immigration violator' (how many of those were students overstaying a student visa, or something equally HORRIBLE OMG) there are 52,000 innocent people who are being stored in a database, and having all their personal information recorded. The US-VISIT system is invasive. It requires fingerprints, digital photos, and a bunch of additional information to all be stored in a US Government controlled computer system. And it's all to catch 0.002% (literally) of the people that cross the border.

Isn't there another way? I would not be excited if (e.g.) I had to get fingerprinted just to visit Paris.

The most depressing movie I've ever seen, yet still one of my favorites, is Requiem for a Dream. There's a mashup over at alienpanic which is great - definitely worth the watch, especially if you've seen Requiem. I have Requiem for the borrowing if anybody's interested, but you should watch it with a friend when you're not depressed. ;-)