Just Dance – Lada Gaga
In For The Kill – La Roux
Time To Pretend – MGMT
Where Is My Mind – Pixies
I Gotta Feeling – The Black Eyed Peas
Kids – MGMT
Shooting Stars – Bag Raiders
22 – Lily Allen
The Boy Does Nothing – Alesha Dixon
World, Hold On – Bob Sinclar / Steve Edwards
When Love Takes Over – David Guetta Feat. Kelly Rowland
Use Somebody – Kings of Leon
Knights of Cydonia – Muse
Break My Stride – Matthew Wilder
So this morning I logged into myUNSW only to find a new tab had been added that was labelled ‘Academic Admin’ (usually I see Home, Student Profile and Staff Profile). Naturally I was curious as to what this was, expecting some fancy new functionality that allows me to ‘administer’ my ‘academics’. I was quite surprised to find that instead it gave me access to every UNSW student’s enrollment and timetables. Whoops! myUNSW is now showing the ‘Temporary Outage’ page and claims ‘myUNSW is experiencing a temporary problem’… I wonder if this happened to everyone?
If this is some sort of database muckup, I hope they don’t revert it to yesterday or something, I just finished enrolling for 2010S1!
Thank you, Denton Gentry, for your Ode to Enum.
In particular I was looking for the gcc extension or flag to reduce the number of bytes used by an enum with only a small number of values __attribute__((packed)) did the trick!
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Internet, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military, is running a competition. On December 5th they will be placing moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The first person to submit the precise latitude and longitude of all 10 balloons wins $40000.
I have started a project, along with a few other computer science students here at UNSW, to use social networking and bayesian filtering techniques to try and win the competition, and donate the prize money to charity. We have a website, windarpa.com, where people will be able to submit the locations of balloons they find, along with a vote for which of our short-list of charities they would prefer to see the money go to. Check it out, and tell your friends!
Since there’s a Boost juice down the road from where I work, I now drink a lot of this overpriced mushed fruit and sugar. I was thinking the other day about their “buy 10 get 1 free”, and realised this just means I pay about $5.30 instead of $5.80 for each one, still not a very good deal… but somehow this attempt at wooing customers into coming back again and again just works. Then I found this in my inbox:
How can I not keep coming back for another year if it means in 365 days they’ll be giving me another one for free!
Yesterday Hung, Jayen & I started work on UNSW’s code base for the 2010 Robocup competition, and ended up with something quite neat that we didn’t have before. The Nao runs a piece of software from Aldebaran called ‘NaoQi’, which provides an abstraction layer over the Robot’s hardware, and also some sort of inter-process communication for each of the ‘brokers’ you are running. rUNSWift has previously had just one broker, which internally manages the communication between each of its modules. This has the benefit that it is very fast, when compared to using ALMemory, however it means that whenever we want to upload new code to the robot, we have to completely restart NaoQi to reload the librunswift.so shared-object library.
The new approach involves having two ‘brokers’: ‘loader’ and ’soccer’. The loader is loaded by the the NaoQi automatic loader on startup, using the same method that librunswift.so used to be loaded. The loader has methods called startSoccer() and stopSoccer(), which will load and unload libsoccer.so on demand. The loader can be communicated with over the network, and we hope to integrate this with our off-robot debugging utilities. With any luck this should greatly cut down on wait time between builds of the various rUNSWift modules.
We still have the performance advantage of having all the core components (vision, behaviour, localisation, locomotion, etc.) inside the ’soccer’ broker, avoiding ALMemory for everything except when we reload code through the loader.
C++ is cool, I didn’t know you could do this until yesterday. Unfortunately it’s a bit painful to bind anything other than the 1st or 2nd arguments (by painful I mean not-built-in).
#include <iostream>
#include <functional>
#include <vector>
using namespace std;
int main() {
vector<int> v;
vector<int>::iterator it;
v.push_back(3);
v.push_back(4);
for (it = v.begin(); it != v.end(); ++it) {
cout << *it << endl;
}
transform(v.begin(), v.end(), v.begin(), bind1st(plus<int>(), 3));
for (it = v.begin(); it != v.end(); ++it) {
cout << *it << endl;
}
return 0;
}
Also WordPress doesn’t like newlines or tabs in <code> </code> blocks? Lame!
Jayen and I put this article together this morning for ‘Beta’. CSESoc’s weekly student newsletter.
Jeff Arnold, creator of Ksplice, presented a talk this year at linux.conf.au, the annual Australasian Linux conference, about his product, the first practical technology for updating the Linux kernel without rebooting.
Jeff Arnold wrote most of Ksplice as part of his Master’s thesis, and upon its completion, started Ksplice, Inc. with a few classmates.
The Wikipedia article on uptime makes the statement about system administration: “Long uptime can indicate negligence, because critical updates can sometimes require reboots.” Ksplice endeavours to change this perception by making it possible for server administrators to apply important security patches immediately and without causing any downtime.
At the time of writing, we could not find a comparable technology. We found some references to Solaris having hotpatch support, and we assume IBM’s System z has this functionality due to the nature of their zero-downtime availability.
One can use Ksplice at any time, without interfering with any running services, connections, or applications. The catch is that Ksplice is really intended only for small security patches to the kernel, and not for even minor upgrades.
Ksplice applies patches to a running Kernel by loading new versions of entire functions into memory, and replacing the existing function code with a jump to the new one. This way, from a caller’s point of view, nothing has changed.
Most Linux Kernel security patches can be applied by Ksplice without doing any extra work. In the case where the semantics of a persistent data structure has changed, a programmer will need to write a few additional lines of code to tell Ksplice how the previous data structure can be transformed into the new one at runtime.
The performance impact of applying a Ksplice update is minimal. A small amount of memory will be expended to store the replacement code, and calls to the replaced functions will take a few cycles longer because of the inserted jump instructions.
Of course, with great power comes great responsibility. Ksplice makes it easier to change a running kernel, but that opens up all kinds of avenues to hackers, allowing them to easily mess with the core part of your system (only if they gain root access, of course).
Ksplice is currently available for download from their website, or as a package in debian, and Ksplice, Inc. sell support for business. There is currently work in progress for an up2date-type utility, which will make rebootless kernel updates as easy as distribution updates.
David Claridge & Jayen Ashar
After 3 months of not booting into OS X I decided to reclaim the 60GB of space it was hoarding, as I’d run out of room in /home. After hearing some horror stories about attempting to single-boot linux on a Macbook Pro I was prepared for the worst, but as it turned out, things worked without a hitch! I popped in a Fiesty Fawn CD, trashed all the partitions and did a clean install, it happily boots every time 
So it’s the last sleep before LCA, and there are now 7 of us UNSW CSE students coming along (that I know of). Boarding passes all printed and ready to go. It should be fun, watch this space for updates! See you in Hobart.
so true!
