FOB

The attached paper describes optimal play for the Netrunner card Social Engineering. Netrunner is a Collectible Card Game that has been out of print for around 10 years. Remarkably, there is still an active community of people playing the game and creating new cards.

This analysis has been sitting on my hard drive since my grad student days in 1997. This weekend I finally wrote some code to solve two-player hidden information games, and used it to check my work from back then. I was surprised to find that I had gotten everything substantially right, as near as I can tell. (Corrections welcome.)

The paper is in PDF format produced from LaTeX: it's a pain to do math in HTML.

One of the great joys of my life was playing Netrunner with my brother. I showed him this back when I wrote it, but I wish he could have seen the final version. I hope someone will find it amusing, instructive, or even useful.

I'm sick of trying to debug ssh connection issues; they're often hard, and I work on them just infrequently enough to forget everything I knew. This blog post is a note to myself about what kinds of problem to look for and where to look when ssh has gone south…

I needed to run debsums on everything on one of my boxes today. A hack from the net helped me get it going…

  cd /var/cache/apt/archives
  apt-get --download-only \
    --reinstall install `debsums -l`
  debsums --generate=keep,nocheck *.deb

Since I had a full local Debian mirror and my apt was set up to use it, I had to temporarily change /etc/apt/sources.list to get apt-get to do what was wanted. Then it worked like a charm, and I was able to finish with debsums -c and find out that everything was fine except what wasn't.

Thanks Arthur de Jong from 2005!

This is a very short HOWTO that answers something that's been bugging me for months. Network Manager was finally working fine with my Debian laptop's wireless, but would not (as advertised) manage its wired connection. The solution was found in an obscure email list conversation. Go to /etc/network/interfaces and comment out the lines related to eth0. Then restart Network Manager or just reboot.

I have no idea how you're supposed to know this.

A while back, I wrote a little HOWTO on putting the cryptoloop module back in Debian. Yesterday, Josh Triplett pointed out to me that current dm-crypt can actually be used instead of the cryptoloop module to compatibly work with cryptoloop-formatted volumes. Huh.

It turns out to be as simple as

$ apt-get install cryptsetup
$ cryptsetup create -c mycipher -s mykeysize volume-label /dev/sdx7
$ mount /dev/mapper/volume-label /mount-point

Obviously you'll need to make some substitutions in the above. Use

$ umount /mount-point
$ cryptsetup remove volume-label

to clean up afterwards. Enjoy.

There are a few good tutorials on the web about how to get a (mediocre) halftone screen in Inkscape (1, 2). (The GIMP, by contrast, has a special halftoning plugin that does a nice job. I wish that Inkscape had one of those.)

One thing that none of these tutorials tell you is how to rotate the halftone screen. This turns out to be important, since unrotated screens of different colors do not overlay well.

In this tutorial, I summarize the basic technique for halftoning in Inkscape, and suggest a way to do rotation…

Update 2010-11-20: It has been pointed out to me that dm-crypt can handle cryptoloop volumes. Thus, you may choose to ignore this HOWTO in favor of one on how to do that.

For reasons detailed in Debian Bug #559961 the cryptoloop module has been dropped from the Debian kernel as of the 2.6.32-trunk binary packages. I've filed a complaint at that bug. I know what I'm doing, and am unhappy that the Debian kernel maintainers have taken it upon themselves to gratuitously delete functionality from the Linux kernel image…

With emacs 22, apparently someone got the idea that it would be a good idea to drop you into a splash screen rather than your edit buffer when you say "emacs -nw filename". Sending an edit command, such as control-L to refresh the screen, shows you the buffer you wanted to edit. Good plan.

Anyway, I finally found the right Google search, and found out how to turn this behavior off. "(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)" in your .emacs will kill the splash screen off altogether. (Nice inverted variable sense, by the way.) If you just want it when you're not editing a file, it gets more complicated, and I haven't figured out a good plan. See this discussion for details. Note, however, that files seem to get opened after the .emacs is run, which invalidates the technique that discussion suggests.

So, a friend's project tried to blind me today with a hideous "random color" for a large area of text. The quotation marks are because it's hard to say what a "random color" even means. For most purposes, it means a color that is chosen solely as a label, and that therefore can be anywhere in the color palette. The usual constraint is that a set of labels need to be chosen, and so successive random colors should be easily distinguished…

I always forget to take notes when I do a Drupal upgrade. This blog entry will be my notes for this upgrade of my home boxes. I will use it in turn to upgrade FOB, and then hopefully use it again when it's time to upgrade again in the future…