Blog Archives: December, 2003
Touring Oxford
I had the pleasure of playing tour guide for visiting Heather and Chris, who are here in England for Christmas. They flew in to London Heathrow yesterday morning, after flying from Toronto to New York and transferring airports in New York in just 2 hours. They were, as you can expect, tired.
Oxford’s a hard city to visit. There aren’t a lot of things you can do as a tourist in a day’s time, rather you appreciate Oxford the more you’re here. Luckily, we had wonderful weather (it was actually sunny!) and Heather and Chris are outdoors people. We wandered through a few colleges, had lunch in a pub, visited my favourite library, saw a few Harry Potter sets, and visited a bike store. And then Heather and Chris collapsed and fell asleep for a few hours before their journey to Colchester. A laid back, but enjoyable, I hope, visit.
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A weekend in Portugal
Praia da Rocha I just got back from my weekend trip to Portugal. (“A weekend trip to Portugal”, how cool is it to be able to say those words?) I visited friends of my family staying at the Jardim do Vau in the Algarve, the southern-most province in Portugal. This time of year, it was very quiet, and each time we were on Praia da Rocha, our beach, there were less than 25 people around.
Sagres Fort, the Algarve The highlight of the visit was to the western-most region in the country, and indeed the western-most point in continental Europe, Capo de São Vincente, the last point the European explorers would have seen before setting off to their doom, or possible America. There’s a magnificent lighthouse facility and an old fort which used to house the school of Henry the Navigator, a prince of Portugal.
Cemetary, Almancil An interesting stop along the way was a cemetary in the small town of Almancil. In the picture at left, there’s a shed- or garage-sized structure with a door on it; it’s a mosileum, I think, in which there’s room for a casket and artifacts. Based on the fresh flowers inside and throughout the cemetary, I’d guess that the Portuguese visit the graves of their ancestors regularly, which was an interesting thing to learn.
Fishing boats, Alvor On my last night in Portugal, we dined in the fishing town of Alvor. The boats in this picture are just a few of the many colourful boats dotting the town’s harbour. I expect the shrimp kebab I ate that came fresh from their boats just a few hours before. One of the simple, peaceful joys of southern Portugal.
The rest of the pictures from my trip to Portugal are in my photo gallery.
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Note from Portugal
Just a quick note to say hi from Portugal. I’ve been to the western most point in Europe, spent some time on a deserted beach today (maybe I’ll have a tan when I get back to snowy North America). Cheers!
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Feels-like-home TV
Today wasn’t nearly as productive as it should have been, but I did get some good TV watching in. This afternoon my housemate Emily and I watched a very old episode of Murder, She Wrote (so old that it still has Amos as the sheriff in Cabot Cove), and tonight over dinner I watched the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Warm, fuzzy, comfortable, lying-in-bed-listening-to-the-rain and playing-in-the-autumn-leaves TV. And now it’s time for some soft and soothing Surfacing-era Sarah McLachlan. What a nice day…
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ECDH in SSH Draft
This won’t mean much to non-technical readers out there, but I’d still like to report on it.
Near the end of my internship at Sun this past summer, I worked on a technical standard for adding and algorithm called Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman key agreement to the protocol called SSH, which is widely used for secure remote access. I was finally able to post the draft, and it’s now available online. Hopefully in the near future it will be implemented.
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MIT Technology Review
There’s a short article in a recent issue of the MIT Technology Review about the work my group at Sun Labs is doing in hardware support for elliptic curve cryptography, and specifically the hardware accelerator described in this paper. Some quotes from the article:
Cryptographic Accelerator “Sun Microsystems senior staff engineer Hans Eberle and his staff at Sun Labs are addressing that problem by creating a microprocessor that can be plugged into network computers to quickly authenticate messages from a range of wireless gadgets.”
“Eberle’s chips can establish secure connections at the rate of 7,000 per second — the “fastest reported,” he says. Sun’s product groups are evaluating the microprocessors for inclusion in the firm’s server computers.”
The picture shows the network card, with the black box at the bottom being the elliptic curve cryptography accelerator.
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D&A at the V&A
Yesterday I made a short jaunt down to London to visit my friend from Windsor, Allison. We paid a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum, a spectacular two-hundred year-old museum of design and art. It mostly features artifacts, of which I’m generally not too fond (preferring paintings and statues), but this was a refreshing and enjoyable visit.
David covered with a fig leaf, Victoria and Albert museum We went on a brief guided tour, taking in a few disparate portions of the museum. In a large room housing a collection of plaster casts of famous statues from around the work (some of the few statues the British and French didn’t steal for their museums), there’s a copy of Michelangelo’s David.
When it was first installed in the museum, Queen Victoria was shocked by the nudity of the statue and, as a result of her Victorian sensibilities, a proportionally accurate fig leaf was commissioned and strategically hung on the figure during her visits. The last member of the royal family for whom the fig leaf was used was Queen Mary, the grandmother of the current Queen, who lived until the 1950s.
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No more school, no more books
Well, not exactly. I still have more school (3.75 more years, at least), and I still have books to read. But I’m done classes for the term. (Technically, I have one class today, but only about 20 minutes of it will be actual content, and I’ve decided to skive off those 20 minutes.) (To skive means to skip class.)
All that remains to be done (Elementary Number Theory and Applied Probability) are two projects, due Dec. 22, projects on which progress has already been made. And perhaps a weekend trip to Portugal. Oh, and visits from friends, a trip to Windsor Castle, a few formal dinners. I’m working hard here. Really I am.
