Posted by avsm
Sat, 30 Nov 2002 23:55:00 GMT
Went to an interesting lecture called "Face to Face with Political Islam", given at King's College by Dr. Francois Burgat. He was basically plugging his new book, but the questions afterwards led to spirited discussion about the lack of leading, moderate Islamic parties in the West, and why this was (the strong Christian/Jewish control of Western media, voter apathy, etc). Also some contrasts to the growth of similar trends in Hinduism, but why that hasn't had as much impact on world politics as Islam.
I think I'll sign up for more of these kinds of talks in the future ... I missed the series of lectures that Edward Said gave here in Cambridge, which sounded fantastic.
Posted in politics, cambridge | no comments
Posted by avsm
Fri, 29 Nov 2002 15:08:00 GMT
My new PC is finally rock solid, after installing ten fans in the case! The noise output is pretty quiet as well, thanks to the wicked noise-reduction case from QuietPC.
With that finally done, I managed to get OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows XP and Linux booting on it, and setup a nice VMWare environment to do PhD work under. Now the boring bit is done, the work has to start :-)
Fun time in college - played and won the latest badminton league match, which should cement our place in the current division, giving us good ground to work up to winning a promotion next term when we seriously start training!
Posted in computers | no comments
Posted by avsm
Mon, 25 Nov 2002 15:20:00 GMT
Yawn; just hacking NetBSD into booting under the XenoServer. The XenoServer reserves the top 512M of memory for its own nefarious purposes, so it requires setting the appropriate segment registers and tweaking a few defines.
If I can get away from here in time, I'll go visit Claire in hospital with Jon and David with a bunch of flowers or chocolates; sounds like she needs cheering up!
And someone convince David that benchpressing at 11pm is a bad idea please... possibly the worst bench session ever (except possibly that time I dropped it when Salman was 'spotting' me).
Posted in hacking, cambridge | no comments
Posted by avsm
Sun, 24 Nov 2002 01:47:00 GMT
Just back from YACB (Yet Another Cambridge Bop); this one was the 'handover bop' and I got voted in as the Social Secretary for the Robinson Grads. First port of call is to organise a ski trip for after christmas, and figure out how to fool the treasurer Dave into allowing me to commit massive fraud (cough).
Posted in cambridge | no comments
Posted by avsm
Thu, 21 Nov 2002 18:29:00 GMT
So my Athlon MP processors got delivered today. Well, err ... 5 of them to be exact. After waiting two weeks for two suppliers, dabs decided not to send me any at all, and simply sent me five, in addition to the one I already had. Time to do some returns, aaargh!
The computer itself seems to work pretty well, except the idle temperature of the processors is 65 degrees celsius. Gulp? Doesn't appear to have any harmful side-effects ... yet.
Posted in computers | no comments
Posted by avsm
Mon, 18 Nov 2002 11:51:00 GMT
A fun weekend, completely vegetating with Seb, Tino and Nick playing computer games. Seb's getting married in March, so we won't get to do this much after that :)
Interesting paper on enforceable security policies from Dave can be found here. I reckon the plan for my PhD is slowly forming now ...
Posted in research, london | no comments
Posted by avsm
Fri, 15 Nov 2002 15:49:00 GMT
Off to London for the weekend to hang with Seb, Tino and Nick, and perhaps play a spot of Warcraft. My back feels a hell of a lot better today, and the injury has got a good side - my posture has improved dramatically since it hurts to slump!
Rich, Dave and I have a cunning plan for writing a paper to publish at HotOS. More details as we figure it out...
Posted in london, gym | no comments
Posted by avsm
Thu, 14 Nov 2002 23:40:00 GMT
Went to the gym with Dave, Rich and Sal, and ended up straining my lower back doing a dodgy deadlift. After a brisk cycle ride to the local hospital (punctuated with gasps of pain), it turns out not to be that serious, just pretty damn painful for the next few days.
I'll be back! (ha ha)
Posted in gym, cambridge | no comments
| 