post-season

Well, I made it through the Christmas season without hearing the damned hippopotamus song once. Christmas truly is the time of miracles. Visiting with extended family was nice except everyone wants to know what I'm going to be doing and I have no idea.

My big Christmas present was a GPS receiver, which is extremely cool and slightly devious. You see, if you just sit around being a bum all it will do is tell you where you are. However, if you get off your butt and leave the house it will tell you where you're going, track where you've been, and then there's the whole geocaching angle. Mine is even able to automatically generate routes on the fly and act like a satnav. Apparently some software will even let you look up ATMs, gas stations, hotels and restaurants.

They have quite a racket going with these GPS receivers though. The one I got isn't cheap, but you could easily spend twice as much for a unit with one or two more unnecessary bells and whistles. The preloaded maps only have main highways, so if you want to see every street you're going to have to drop $100 or so on software. If you want better reception from the satellites you can buy an external antenna. Then of course you're going to want a case to protect your investment.

The furthest I've been from the house since I got my GPS receiver is the mailbox, so I really haven't tested what it can do yet. I just figured out how to load geocache locations this afternoon (the receiver has a steep learning curve) but as soon as I did that it started getting dark out so I couldn't test it out. There is a geocache about a third of a mile from my house and I want to check it out.

primed, part II

In other news, I coded up an implementation of that Shanks factorization algorithm. So far it can do 19 digits, but I don't know how to get it to stop returning trivial solutions (e.g. factoring 51 as 1 * 51) so it only works most of the time. I was able to factor some phone numbers for people, so that was amusing. I tried to make a copy that used Java's arbitrary precision data types to work on RSA-100, but that wasn't going well. I'm also having problems with Java running out of memory.

beyond jet lag

It is just not my night to sleep. I've been trying to get over the jet lag from coming back to Michigan but tonight has been ridiculous. I went to bed around 11, got up again at 2, tried going back to bed at 3. Then I got fed up with my bed so I fixed it, and when I tried going back to sleep it was too stuffy in my room so I cracked the window open and now the fresh air is too invigorating to sleep. I can't win. So now I am writing some emails until I crash again.

primed

The code in question basically works out an integral by staggering the sum with parallel processing. I am going over it to see if it can be commandeered for other purposes. I was thinking about modular exponentiation but I already cracked that nut, so I'm thinking about factoring. I'm not going after RSA-2048 or anything, but it's an interesting problem.

I am looking up integer factoring algorithms on Wikipedia and I ran across one called "Shanks' Square Forms Factorization." I might have to take a look.

i'd rather be an exposed wire than be a cold machine

It's finals week in Corvallis. Normally I would be bouncing off the walls by now but I am still kind of doing productive work. Office hours were super slow today so I brought some parallel computing code to go over. The computational physics TA just happened to stop by and I talked with him for like an hour and a half about coding and calculating pi. The only final I have left is computational physics tomorrow morning and then I'm done with another term of classes.

I've been assigned to do two labs and a recitation next term, which is new. I'm wondering how many students there will be. When I proctored the final my room was supposed to have 119 students but I only counted 93. That's 26 drops since the beginning of the term in my room alone. And then I had a bunch of students tell me they were switching into 202 next term instead of taking 212. The joke is on them since I heard the non calc sequence is harder than the calc sequence.