update
It's about time I updated this blog, so here goes. I'm interning at Google this summer, and will soon leave and enter the 5th year of my PhD. Google is nice, but the code I'm working on is frustrating and messy. And yes, the free food is great. I also like that it's (difficult) biking distance from my house, so when I'm not feeling lazy I can have a nice morning and evening bike ride.
It seems like everyone is getting married. My roommate Eric is engaged, and there are two other weddings coming up in September, including my grandfather! (Next on my to-do list: figure out travel plans for those weddings.) I guess it's just that time of life, though I feel a little sad to be left out of the party (and for a while, too, since I don't have a girlfriend right now). But good things come to those who wait...
My health hasn't been great this summer, but hopefully it's just a passing phase and I'll be all back to normal this fall.
A few months ago, Emily, Dan and I released version 0.8 of the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library, the smallest, cleanest, fastest, awesomest Javascript crypto library out there. On this weekend's to do list: finish importing Emily's elliptic curve crypto code. The trickiest thing about this, and one which I probably didn't get quite right, is defense against timing attacks. On the one hand, Javascript is a hard environment to defend against this attack on, and also an environment that you don't expect to fall under attack this way. But on the other hand, it seems silly not to offer any protection. So I've made some effort to protect SJCL, but I expect that it's not perfectly tight. I'm not sure this is the right trade-off: the code might be faster or simpler without these protections.
I've been playing Starcraft II since the mid beta. It's interesting to see how reviews tend to go wild in one direction or the other. To me, the game seems pretty good, not especially original but a worthy sequel of Starcraft I. The multiplayer is a lot of fun. The campaign is OK... not great but not terrible. I suppose it's annoying that the campaign is only Terran (with a little Protoss sprinkled in), but it does allow them to go into depth with Terran-specific campaign mechanics. Also, I'm sure that almost everyone who's considering buying the game knows about the campaign by now.
Similarly, I'm sure everyone knows that it's a trilogy, so that Blizzard is planning to sell you another game next year. This is interesting psychologically: would you be happier if the same game weren't part of a trilogy? (I'm sure there are legitimate reasons, such as the 3-part campaign or the fact that your friends will upgrade.)
The DRM has the usually annoyance/convenience tradeoff: you can just download and play on any machine, but you can't play offline multiplayer, and you can't create multiple instances of the campaign. What's more, you can't make a learning account. I'd kind of like to play Zerg in a low league and Terran or Protoss in a higher one, but as it is I've postponed learning Zerg, which is sad because this way I can't go random. Oh well.