It’s a Tuesday. Tickets on sale tomorrow (I think) At Foellinger, 6:30pm show. Anyone interested? I’ll try to find out if there’s some starcourse presale, but it looks like you can do it through Ben’s big site.

Edit: If you find this because you’re searching for UIUC and Ben Folds, you probably want to check out Star Course’s website.

Don’t give me that bullshit
you know who I am
I’m your nightmare little man
Vic you stole my lunch money.
made me cry.
Jane remember second grade
Said you couldn’t stand my face
Rather than kiss me you said
you’d rather die

They need to test their edge cases in the directory services project better. Today, ph has decided not to list me as a student anymore. If that’s true, they should strip out my home address like they do the rest of the fac/staff.

Also, the Union sucks today — between the construction, the Business Job Fair, and the shotty wireless, I would avoid it.

Edit: I decided to check Banner to make sure I was still a student, and I am. Apparently, until The End of Time.

Student Information effective from Spring 2006 - Urbana-Champaign to The End of Time
Registered for Term: Yes
First Term Attended: Fall 2005 - Urbana-Champaign
Last Term Attended: Fall 2007 - Urbana-Champaign
Status: Active
Residence: Resident, In State Tuition
Citizenship: Citizen
Student Type: Continuing
Class: Graduate
Primary Advisor: Caroline A. Haythornthwaite
Expected Graduation Date: Aug 09, 2010
Expected Graduation Term: Summer 2010 - Urbana-Champaign
Expected Graduation Year: 2009-2010

When putting events in your calendar to check up on weeks or months from now, please put more information in the event than “Check security of xyz.cs.uiuc.edu“

• Pioneers
  Open source Settlers of Catan clone
  (tags: games settlers)

Too bad I have class then.

Center for Global Studies: Prisms of Globalization Series
and
Engineering, Technology, & Culture Lecture Series
(Engineering and Technology Studies at Illinois)

TITLE: “Software as Governance”

SPEAKER: Jay P. Kesan
UI College of Law

DATE: Wednesday, January 30, 2008, 4:00-5:00 p.m.

LOCATION: 2405 Siebel Center

ABSTRACT:

Regulation through “code,” i.e., the hardware and software of
communication technologies, is growing in importance. Software
programmers and policymakers are addressing individual issues and
societal concerns, such as privacy, security, freedom of speech, and
intellectual property protection with code-based solutions. While
scholars have noted the role of code in regulating choices/preferences,
there is little analysis of the various features or characteristics of
code that have significance in regulating behavior. This talk examines
two or three universal governance characteristics that policymakers may
use to design code that comports with societal concerns. These
characteristics include defaults, standards, transparency, and the
like. For each characteristic, Kesan will discuss the salient
regulatory issues for manipulating code. He will also present proposals
for modifying some characteristics, such as how to set software
defaults. This analysis should aid policymakers seeking to manipulate
code to vindicate societal values and concerns.

BIO:

Jay P. Kesan is Professor of Law, Director of the Program in
Intellectual Property & Technology Law, and Mildred Van Voorhis Jones
Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois. His academic interests
are focused in the areas of intellectual property and law and
technology. He has written extensively in the areas of law and
regulation of cyberspace, intellectual property, and law and economics.
He received his J.D. summa cum laude from Georgetown University. Prior
to attending law school, Professor Kesan earned a Ph.D. in electrical
and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and he
worked as a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in
New York.

It’s ironic that the week I’m reading about 18th century postal system history and significance, I received my new Netflix discs the evening before the emails arrived telling me the ones I’d returned were received. Score one for the USPS!

I watched two movies over the 3-day weekend, and dropped them in the mail Tuesday morning. Normally, I would expect that sometime Wednesday I’d get an email Netflix had received them, and later on Wednesday, get the your-next-movies-are-on-their-way emails. Wednesday came and went with no notifications. When I checked my mailbox Thursday evening, I had two new discs. Later that night, closer to 9pm, I got the “For Thu:” emails. When I woke up Friday morning, I had three emails from Netflix (the two “We’ve received” messages and a “Has Weeds arrived?” survey.)

So the timing was off and the email was out of order. Weird, huh? I didn’t dig into the headers too much, but it looks like the delays were before the emails arrived at my provider (meaning it’s Netflix or the Internet’s fault.) If I had to pick between the disc delivery or email delivery being slow, I’m perfectly fine with the emails lagging. It’s just out of character for Netflix to be anything less than right on time.

Tags: Netflix

I don’t think I’d buy my genome mapping. I’m freaked out enough that Universal Studios has my fingerprint.

I don’t know, I don’t think society knows, the impact of an FCC auction for licenses of wireless spectrum that opened today. If anyone finds good summary articles of the auction, its players, its impacts, and more, please email or comment with them. Essentially, the switch-to-digital-OTA-TV next February is opening up a big chunk of high-quality bandwidth (the UHF 52-69 channel range.) This space, because of its penetrate through building capabilities, is huge for communication and data providers. And the intrigue abounds… The FCC is looking for billions of dollars from this auction, which will go until it finishes (the last one went over 100 rounds.) Google is in on it, although stuff I’ve read said they’re doing it to try and enforce openness in how people use the spectrum (ie: not locking it to just ProviderA’s devices, or allowing Google to be able to share it openly or via sub-license.) They also help the bigger players (ATT, Verizon, Ryan Harden,) meet the reserves (which are six digits or better.) Sorry, Ryan.

There’s also a 22MHz band up for auction that hopefully will have an impact on reducing the number of EMS channels, or make organizations use them smarter, in a bigger push to try to free up more spectrum space from government.

Even if you don’t understand it, and I certainly don’t, know that this is big news and the impacts of who wins this auction and how they implement it will have huge secondary effects on the future of telecommunication. (Both in the introduction of new services and the scrutiny of FCC licensure/distribution.)

Edit: Marc adds www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4246037.html

This post is for the Computer Scientist people out there. Those who don’t dig CS231 content should shift their attention pointers elsewheres …

Around the start of the semester, I subscribe to all the course newsgroups to make sure they’re being used, check for obvious threads about IT related issues, etc. It also means I get to lurk questions about the first homework assignments. Sometimes, those questions are “winners”. Like this gem, from the 231 class:

The director of the Binary Zoo has decided that he would like to give
each of the zebras in the main exhibit a new name consisting of a unique
pattern of 0’s and 1’s. There are currently 461 zebras - quite a herd.
How many bits will he need, in order to write out each name?

So I don’t get it. Once again. did I miss some lesson on Bits?

It seems like a straight-forward question, but then again I’m a more experienced Computer Scientist than the posting student. Maybe it would help if we told him the zebras are just a red herring. I dunno. Maybe the student did miss the lesson on bits. They should review that stuff — it’s only going to get harder.

• BlogScope: analyze blogosphere
  (tags: blog analysis)