More students choose Illinois, producing largest incoming class

With a dramatic jump over last year in the percentage of those accepting admission, the UI is expecting its largest incoming freshman class ever, according to Keith Marshall, the associate provost who oversees admissions.

Due respect to the good people at the New Bureau and the admissions office, but I think I’ve heard the term “largest incoming class ever” about 6 times since I’ve started paying attention to UofI. There’s always more people accepting than you think, even when you accept fewer people. There are always fewer dorm room spots available, and move-in always sucks — it doesn’t matter if you have 4000 or 7000 incoming students.

I’ll have to ask Professor Kamin about CS’s admissions this fall. I know we’ve been cutting back on students and adding faculty to try to get the ratio down. I wonder if we’ve lightened up the restrictions and let more students in. It would be great to see more women and minorities in Computer Science.

Computer giant Apple made ripples through the industry in the last few weeks with (NO WINDOWS I WILL REBOOT LATER) the announcement they’re going to move from their IBM PowerPC hardware platform to Intel based chips. Apple has always had good hardware, even though it was more expensive. Although recently, it’s their OS that has been more of a pull for consumers. I haven’t read all the industry fallout from the announcement, but I’m sure when that finally happens and we can run OSX on a PC, we’ll be seeing more competition for Windows, and choice almost always helps the consumer. I tried OSX and didn’t really care for it, but I encourage people to try new things and use what they like.

Also significant in Apple news is on the RC5 front. I participate in distributed.net’s project to crack encryption with my computer’s idle cycles. I’ve been doing this since my freshman year of college (when 220k keys/sec was GOOD. Right now my computer is doing about 9Mk/s.) What’s significant is they store which OS each keyblock returned was cracked on, and MacOS overtook Linux for second place for RC5-72. (Windows is still in a strong, strong lead.) That’s significant because the G5 processor that new Macs use has incredible RC5 capabilities. (My 2.2GHz AMD gets just under 9Mk/s. A 2GHz G5 gets about 15Mk/s – a 2.7 over 20Mk/s. Of course all of that will change when Apple is running on the same hardware as Linux and Windows – then I suppose it will be sheer numbers, but for now the smarter architecture took the second place prize. After the World Series and the Final Four, I pay attention to the teams that come in second.

Also significant with respect to RC5 and Apple is the Turing cluster at UIUC (I’ll put links in later, I’m lazy.) Turing has a 640 node cluster with dual 2GHz G5s. That’s 1280 CPUs at 15Mk/s. That’s about 19.2Bk/s, or roughly 11% of yesterday’s total RC5 cracking speed. Daaaamn. I wonder who I have to convince to run dnetc on the cluster? Putting it in a different perspective, the #1 individual on rc5-72 has 22M stat blocks (2^28 keys in a stat block.) Turing would pump out 71 stat blocks A SECOND, putting it in the number one stats spot in just four days of runtime. We’ve been working on rc5-72 for 928 days and they could be #1 in four. That’s some serious cracking.

If you’re interested in RC5 and want to join my old team, search in stats for 1367 – we’re the Cracking Illini. Join up; we could use the numbers. If I ever get around to updating the static side of my site, I’ll put in a page for distributed.net, and you can wow your friends with knowledge of golumb rulers. (Almost as interesting as the origin of “Live from new york it’s saturday night,” but if I give you all of my stories I won’t be any fun at cocktail parties.)

Ha, one blog post with a single thought! And you thought I couldn’t do it. Also, I’m older than PacMan. (See, I couldn’t do it.)

Did you know Dr. Seuss’s name was Theodor Seuss Geisel? I do, now, because I have Dr. Seuss stamps. And that makes me cooler than you. I can also tell you that 860-880 Lake Shore Drive is architecturally significant, according to the USPS.

This has been one of those weeks where every minute seemed long, and in hindsight was over in a blink. I’ll give you the highlight reel.

Summer band started — only a few familar faces in the group, and we’re all looking older. I’m still sitting first part (third seat, inbetween three students) and I’m still wondering why I’m third. Loyalty? Recognition? Clearly Pete hasn’t heard me play, but somehow otherwise appreciates me coming back year after year (p.s. this is summer number seven.) The music is almost becoming rote. My hand magically moves the slide to the right place in Armed Forces Medely, Stars and Stripes, and the Glen Miller piece. Our first concert is Wednesday, and because there’s no CU community band anymore, we’re doing a full set on three rehearsals. Oh, and Monday’s rehearsal doesn’t count because there was no A/C in the band room and damn it’s hard to practice when it’s 90. The next rehearsal it was 70 outside and like 60 in the band room. Anyway, this coming Wednesday, 7pm on the Quad.

I might have hinted about this before in the blog, but I submitted an application to Google’s Summer of Code contest. My project is documenting and packaging a distributed file system called MogileFS by the gang at LiveJournal. I worked on that most of Monday and Tuesday night. Chuck and Eric helped me proof it and trim it down. I’m one of 8000+ applicants vying for 400 paid slots (it was 200, but Google raised the numbers because of the publicity.) I’ll find out in two weeks if I was accepted, and if so, I have two months to complete my project and claim at $4500 bounty. Not bad for free software development. I’m excited to start working on it, and hope I get picked for the money.

As far as my other eternal struggle goes, I’ve watched two Netflix movies and finished season one of Dead Like Me in the last two days. Triplets of Belleville was nothing like I expected, and not in a good way. Cellular WAS like I expected but I was hoping for either all suspense or all hokey comedy – this one rode the line between them too close and cheated both sides. Next up is About Schmidt, which I would have started tonight but the Internet pulled me away. If I watch that one tomorrow, I’ll have seven’d out my run and need a new shooter to bring me three more goodies. Dead Like Me was good. Season two will be out soon, and I’m looking forward to it. The main character is a 19 year old crappily drifting through life when hers ends (by an incoming toilet seat from Mir) and she becomes a Grim Reaper. I think I’m getting older when I associate more with the adult figures in her life (her Post-It-Note giving boss, her real job boss, and her previous life’s mom) than her teenage angst.

Earlier tonight my computer rebooted on me. No notice or warning, just a warm boot. Then it wanted to install some updates, and now the dumb yellow shield in the system tray keeps popping up and reminding me to reboot. Yes, yes, yes. I’ll do that later. I also need to buy some DVD-Rs and backup my machine. One of my student’s campus house was broken into this week and they stole his laptop and Xbox. His main gripe about it, besides not having renters insurance and returning home just 20 minutes after the vandals left, is that three years of his life was documented on stuff in that laptop. Pictures, music, emails, IMs – gone so someone could have a crappy three year old laptop. I’m real good at backups at work; I need to do better at home. (But at least I’m insured. I’m also not worried. As cluttered as this office is, no one would be able to find the computer.)

Work is going well. It’s been quiet on the user front (I swear there’s fewer profs this summer than I have seen gone in a long time,) so we’re all working on our projects. CSIL’s moved to AD and the new SAN. I’ve got an SNMP and fping script (written by a student,) that can give me a snapshot of our network (several thousand ports and several thousand IPs) in less than a minute. My projects to redo our IP space and DNS/DHCP backend are moving along nicely. The switch and AP upgrades are sliding in, sometimes with nice benefits (like the APs finally being able to broadcast more than one SSID on a radio.) And, I got my annual (s/nu//g;) review on paper (the actual face-to-face is next week.) It read as a very nice resume of what I’ve accomplished this year (things I hadn’t even remembered,) and was good across the board.

Bored, I know, me too. When I was home last weekend (which I should blog about, because it was three packed full days of stuff,) I didn’t really read blogs or talk on IM that weekend, and I haven’t picked it up much since. I’m a few thousand news posts behind — it’s only a matter of time until I say “screw it,” and mark them all as read, which is what you should do to this posting, if I’ve even kept your attention this long. Part of the problem is I added a bunch of feeds to bloglines and I haven’t been able to keep up – even if it’s stuff I think I should be reading. I _should_ be reading _The World is Flat_ so I can give that back to mom to read, or the Harry Potter books to get read for next month.

Somehow, people get in these tightly connected networks with blogs and Flickr and people know when you post and post replies, and I just don’t know how they do it. I don’t know people make their stuff findable. I don’t think my content (pictures or this blog,) is bad. I’d just like to get it in front of some eyes. (NO WINDOWS I WILL REBOOT LATER QUIT BUGGING ME) What I am finding is there are lots of babblers like me on the Internet, some who even make advice like “how to blog so people read it,” and “how to live a more productive life,” but I don’t think they know much more than I do. Yet I found their junk and read it, so maybe they do know something I don’t.

Plan for the weekend? Be a homebody and take care of things around here. Lounge around, watch movies, work on MogileFS. Get caught up. You should too. Have a fudgecicle bar and enjoy yourself.