Woohoo!! Just received acceptance notification from UPSEC 2008 for my workshop paper about phishing vulnerabilities on consumer electronic devices with significant concentration on the iPhone. Yay yay yay!
Professor Layton and the Curious Village is an AWESOME, AWESOME game full of puzzles and brain teasers. I can’t wait for the sequel!!! now that I’ve thoroughly beaten the game, I can only wait for the weekly puzzles. Penny Arcade did a great take on the game that I love in Professor Layton and the Perpetual Torment.
And whoever implemented Puzzle Quest’s path traversal either enjoys plotting convoluted paths, or judging by the inconsistencies in the path selections, really sucks at graph theory. Um, hello? There’s a subset of algorithms for the SHORTEST PATH problem for a REASON. It’s not like they’re finding the shortest path for randomly changing graph configurations. Every town/node is fixed. They could have hard coded it!!!
My summer internship’s all set. I’m going to Microsoft Research (which is pretty much my dream internship) from April until July. Woo!!! I was also interviewing with some other companies, but one of them wasn’t really a top choice so I dropped out of that process as soon as I got my MSR offer. I was waiting on another company, but their interview process was dragging on much too long and when they asked me to schedule in a third phone interview I decided to save myself the trouble and chose MSR for sure.
I’m so excited!! My housing situation looks awesome. I’ll have to commute ~15 miles or so from downtown Seattle to the Redmond campus, but I’m living smack dab in the middle of downtown Seattle. I’ll be so very close to that little crepe stand that I enjoyed during PAX and a few blocks away from the international district.
MSR!!! I can’t possibly describe how happy I am about this. For me, as a security student, to work with the groups that consistently publish in the top conferences is an unparalleled opportunity. I’d go to the middle of nowhere to work for them. Yay!!!
I’ve been reading The Queen’s Fool by Philippa Gregory and it makes me want more historical fiction!! Of course I’ll read her other books… This is my second Philippa Gregory; the first was The Other Boleyn Girl (which is also a movie I really want to see).
Any good recommendations for historical fiction, preferably set before the 20th century in Europe… with tons of court intrigue and maybe a little war? Judith Tarr had some nice, fun reads… but I think I exhausted her (non-fantasy) books. I want to read something comparable to I, Claudius and Claudius the God. The Romans knew how to do intrigue and conspiracy properly, and how to keep it going for generations. :)
Still on my reading list… the Baroque Cycle series by Neal Stephenson.