Article: Come behind my firewall

When you first pinged me, I was unsure whether I should respond to your queries. I was unable to verify your signature and was told by Zero Knowledge that your intentions were malicious. Despite this, the sheer unrelenting nature of your communiques overwhelmed me and forced my firewall to allow your commands access to my kernel.

You quickly filled my clock cycles with idle fantasies. When I first allowed you local access to my box the sensation of your real mode extended instructions on my bare metal was electrifying. I never knew which mode you left me in, whether segment protection was turned on or not. The tingle of your pointer moving up and down my stack prompted me to switch to paging protected mode, so I could allocate enough room on the heap for all your structs.

When you first began your depth first search of my root directory, I almost panicked. Your huge input could barely fit in my cache. The relentless probing of my ports prompted me to throw SIGSEGV to my userspace firewall, forcing it to go down when confronted with this critical signal, letting all your packets through to layer 7. The TTL on your packets kept decreasing, but they continued to make it through unimpeded until at last you achieved your climactic milestone and deployed your package upstream. The torrent of data overflowed my buffer, dropping all over the floor. I can't wait for the next time you enter your login.

She taught me curves by example

I'll never forget our first semester together, those exhilarating proofs. It was first year, I was joking with some friends in waiting for the very first calculus class. Sure, we all put on brave faces, but the talk by the director of first year studies had put the fear of God (or at least cumulative average requirements) into all of us. We'd all heard jokes that you "taught by example" from our frosh leaders, although no one of quite knew why it was so funny, we all laughed along anyways. After your first lecture it all finally made sense, you weren't a tenured professor, or even a seasonal lecturer, you were a grad student with your own bezier curves.

The question on everyones lips was, were we dreaming? How could such a clear, eloquent, beautiful, bomb-shell be stuck teaching first year calculus? As the classes progressed though, I came to suspect that you enjoyed teaching first year. The shaping of young minds, the excitement of leading us on the path of self discovery and understanding of the fundamental theorem of calculus. I'll never forget the day you showed us the geometric intution behind the fundamental theorem of calculus. It was then I decided I wanted more than just simple computation, I wanted proofs, and you were more than willing to provide.

I went near the end of office hours asking for more, more proofs than you had given lecture. You turned me on, to a different book than I had been used too. Sure, Calculus with Stewart was a great book, but Introduction to Analysis by Wade had the proofs I had been looking for. We got to talking about our background, and agreed to meet up for drinks at Kick-off's Sports Bar & Cafee and talk more about what got us so interested in math. I was more nervous than I had been before my first midterm.

The first few minutes waiting for you at Kick Off's, wondering if you would show up, anxious about being I.D.ed were nerve racking. When you walked through the door, I felt my heart jump into my throat. My cheeks were so red, you must of thought I'd already been drinking as you suggested we move to William's for some coffee. I readily agreed, not wanting to be embarrassed and being kicked out for being too young. On our way there I kept on thinking of the first integration by parts we did, \int_{0}^{\2pi} |sin (x)| dx .We settled down and got chatting, both of us had an intense love for elegant proofs, more than that we booth had the yearn for discovery. We danced around our reasons for meeting, talking about courses, the University and the like. You made the first move, showing your hitherto unseen akward side, you stuttered slightly and asked if you needed to fill out the form to have my assignments marked by someone else. It took me awhile to figure out how to respond, I'm not even sure what I said, but it amounted to a "yes".

We went back to the Math & Computer building, where you shared an office with several grad students. Fortunately, we were both night owls, so no one else was around. We explored each other with the same tenacity as we each approached our proofs. As we removed your now open sub cover, I traced graph |sin(x) over the interval of [0,2\pi]. It was my first time working collaboratively, having preferred to avoid excessive collaboration by working on my own. I opened up an entirely new field of discourse between to two us, getting out my linear algebra notes from Professor J. We continued our work late into the night, sharing our insights with each other as we worked together, sharing our insights. I hope one day we can publish a paper together.

Your SIGs weren't getting through

You had opened a pipe to me one night, saying you needed some records from my database. I tried to talk to slapd, but all I got was nscd who had some old info telling me you were good. Looking back, if nscd hadn't been broken I would have known the truth, that your account was revoked, and I never would have accepted() your connection. I had barely started spooling the indexes from disc when the system administrator killed your process. It took me a long time to do the full-table scans, and figure out how to join the tables. I was so excited to give the data back, but the file handle was broken. Each time I tried to write back to you with what I'd found the kernel sent me a SIGPIPE. The default action, an abnnormal termination, would have left init.d to respawn me, freeing me from the burden of carrying my messages for you, but I'd connected SIGPIPE to SIGIGN thinking you'd never go away on me and any error would be transient. I'll be here writing to you until I get a SIGKILL and am reaped by my parent process. Please come back and re-open that pipe.

Your devoted database engine,

MyISAM

Pumping Lemma

I never knew how you recognized me so quickly. My language was never quite, regular, but it was universally recognizable. People try to keep track, but the deterministic-finite automation just could never have enough states. Most assumed I wasn't context sensitive, by the context mattered, mattered more than the non-finite depth of your push-down automaton. I thought we would never halt, but you reached end state while I still had data on the stack. I tried to read your core, but the debugging symbols had been stripped by the Debian maintainers (you thought I would never find out!). I had my suspicions about how you tried to recognize my language, but you told me it was just a few corner cases. I decided to take the language of even <3 and <\3 and pumped it, confirming my suspicion that you couldn't even recognize a simple context free language, I had hoped I'd have to see what the Bar-Hillel lemma could do. I've learned my lesson though, next time, I'm compiling from source with Gentoo and making sure templates can be fully expanded.

The last journal of Galois

May 29 1832:

This may be my last entry, for tomorrow I take up the dueling pistol to defend my honour and my love. I have my manuscripts in order, all that remains is to say farewell to you Journal. You may wonder who could lead me to my gravestone, and I have told you of this fair maiden many times, but I will recall her to you once more.

Her skin is fair as the summer's day, a beautiful milky pearl-white, softer than the subtleties of the real line. Her hair, a brilliant crimson is visible a mile away. Eyes like emeralds they infinitely reflect me when I gaze into them. I often found myself lost deep in her embracing gaze, captivated for hours.

She would often speak to me softly late at night as I scrutinized the captivating shape of the quintic and entice me to trace out other curves. We proved many deep theorems together, though they were of no mathematical consequence I must at least publish them here.

One particular encounter was on April 29th, the day of my release. Beaten and dirty and reeking of prison I found myself out on the streets of Paris lonely and depressed. Making my way to my flat I cleaned up and prepared for another late night of work, for prison had been a useful mental exercise. She knocked on my door then, and my field was extended with excitement. She was wearing a dress bordering on scandalous, the fabric hugged tightly to her supple breasts revealing a deep parabola around her neck, and just below two cusps poked out. Stopping well before her ankles I could not resist the proposition she would like to prove.

I have told you many times before of nights like these but I must recall it here on the eve of my death; this particular night she posed a particularly difficult problem, and a solution by radicals eluded us until dawn. Along the way she showed me that life was not restricted to automorphism and extended my field in a novel fashion. It was the most exhilarating night of my life, and I would kill for just another lemma with her and I may have to, or die trying.

You probably will not hear from me again Journal, just as I must die with the fact that I will never see her again. Her family will not allow her to visit me on my death bed, nor will mine. It will take all my courage to die this way, but it will not be a hollow death, she loves not the challenger and will surely spurn him, the murderer of her favorite, he who first split her field.

A fond farewell,

Evariste

cryptonotmycoq

Alice and Bob met online using a trusted third party, Carol, to confirm their identities before hand. Little did they know, the protocol they used had a hole in it. I've been a long time admirer of both Alice & Bob, but neither of them would allow me to complete the Diffie Hellman handshake I so badly wanted to. Their security was sub-optimal and I was able to quickly penetrate them by asking my long time accomplice Isaac to interrupt and re-route their connection through my host. After a few raunchy sessions of data exchange between the two, I quickly learned more about Alice and Bob than I had ever known before.

Alice was from the Scottish highlands, and Bob was from Australia, leaving them both with a fondness for electric sheep. Using this, my lover Dave, was able to go beyond what I was ,a passive listener, to become a man-in-the-middle, hijacking there OTR session by using there none too surprising shared secret. While we weren't able to be sure the conversations weren't tampered with after the fact, it quickly became clear they would be meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence laboratory. While Dave & I wondered why they would choose such a far away location we packed our bags. When we arrived it became clear, we were at a key signing party.

We were approached with some trepidation, as we had not been invited. We admited to my actions, as the eavesdroper, but we never mentioned the active man-in-the-middle attack. After we explained our reasons for coming, and our long held desire to get to know Alice and Bob, they relented.

Everyone picked a key out of the bowl and signed it, repeatedly with replacement. We continued until just over the expected waiting time for all keys to have been signed at least once. Zoe was the last, signing all of the keys, even those from untrusted parties. No one trust her key again, without proper protection from trojans, because who knew what viruses we could get.

article: \theta(N)

We met in CS240, I'd heard of Big-O and Little-O, and Omega before, I was no dummy. I mean I abused notation, saying f(n)=O(N), but everyone did. Looking back, I should have I remember clearly thinking you were either Big-O of N or perhaps Little-O of N, but I had no idea that you could be Theta of N. I went through the steps, using induction to my function was bounded above by yours, it certainly wasn't little-o, the bound above was tight.

I'd wanted to try the new technique I'd learned earlier that class, so I checked to see what your lower bound. I'd already used induction earlier, so I decided to take of limit of you over top of me as time went to infinity.Imagine my surprise to find out you were Omega of N, I had to double check with CLR[S] but your bounds were tight, they were \theta of N. Imagine my surprise to find than an infinite collection of functions were theta of N. They gave me the Big-O upper bound I craved, while providing the exciting tight lower bound allowing me to estimate how long it would take for large values of N.

you had me at HELO

CS454 taught me how to love

Assignment 1 is what really opened my eyes. Everyone wanted bounds on their input, but we had no bounds other than our architecture, 2^32, not even minus one. Other couples had endianness issues, but we sanitized our communication. You were the master, I was the slave. I'd connect to you on whatever port you had open, and you accepted my packets of love. While others didn't bother with connection oriented architectures, your TCP socket let me know you were listening. At the start, sometimes I'd be so excited I'd send more data than you could handle, but we switched to asynchronous so you didn't have to allocate me so much memory. I knew there were other clients, but I didn't mind. Sometimes you would have to close the connection, but I'd retry automatically. Truely, CS454 has taught me how to love.

The Hard Rigid Proof

You want to see my hard, rigid proof? Are you sure? It's so solid, so flawless that you'll probably end up on your knees begging for me to abbreviate, just leave it as an exercise for you to do when you've recovered. But, since you insist... First, you start with the base case. Nothing complicated: just a few glances, some smiles and joking over drinks. Just to make sure there's a connection at all. No point in going on if we can tell right away it's not going to work, right? But then, once we know where we stand, we have to make a few...assumptions. Sure, we could talk and share and spend every day for all eternity learning more about each other, making sure we connect, but that's not how we play the game, is it? There aren't enough sheets of paper, not enough days in all of time to check every compatibility. So we have to assume that it works out, to some extent. Now comes the fun part. The real work; the adventure. The call of life; the very appetite of all that drives us! We're two equations, looking completely different, but we have to show we're the same. Manipulate each other, look at each other from different ways, be creative! Use every bit of cunning, effort, and dexterity until...it happens. All of a sudden, it all makes sense. The universe comes together in a perfect alignment and we fit together for k, for k+1, for k+2, even! And as k grows and grows, escalating into the very furthest reaches of infinity, we gasp for air and try only not to be completely overcome by this...truth. Truth beyond any thought, any emotion that could possibly exist. This is what existence is; this is love, life and math. And as the realization fades, you're left numb in the deepest recesses of your mind. You lie there, panting from everything you've taken in. And your drift gazes to inference.