random musings
I asked ChatGPT to describe each state of the United States as a woman, and then used the description as a prompt for Stable Diffusion. I generated the images in the style of digital paintings. The base model I used was the Copax Timeless SDXL Model (version 7). On top of those I used a…
On September 11th, 2023 I got my PhD. I finally did it. It took me a long time. I was admitted to the program in 2015, but I actually started classes in fall of 2014, so I was in school for 9 years. It took me longer than anticipated because in 2019 I had to…
My site is back! Looks like it was an issue with a bunch of plugins, especially Jetpack. I didn’t have time to figure this out because I was in the middle of writing my last paper for my PhD. I had a little bit of time today to figure out what the actual issue was….
My paper Reasoning about Sequential Cyberattacks was accepted for FOSINT-SI 2019. I had the opportunity to present the paper at the conference last month in Vancouver, where I was also awarded “Best Paper”. You can check out my paper here. I suffered a lot of heartbreak with this paper; it was either rejected for the…
I was trying to get the Artifactory OSS 6.3.3 running on Ubuntu 18.04 and ran into issues described in RTFACT-16909. The issue is that there are systemd changes in 18.04 that make the handling of PID files much stricter. When Artifactory starts up as a service, systemd runs /opt/jfrog/artifactory/bin/artifactoryManage.sh as root. But the script then…
I remember when my home directory used to be organized. I knew exactly where my documents were. Which folders had which files. All my Napster MP3s were organized perfectly by artist and album. It was beautiful. I maintained this order assiduously, between multiple installs and machines. But the internet gets faster. And there is ever…
Note: This is a rambling argument against ethical egoism; I’m saying that it doesn’t make sense to reject altruism, especially using evolution as an argument, and in fact, evolution can be used to explain how altruism can be evolved. I’m not talking about possible solutions or theories of socio-economic organization. Obviously, philosophy informs those ideologies…
Yesterday when I finally fell asleep, I was running a fever of 102.5 (it broke last night and I feel much better today – I think I’m over whatever I got). I then had a dream I was in a TV show – something like Stranger Things. At least that’s how it started out. Something…
I grew up in Oman and lived there until I finished high-school in 1999. In 1991, when I was ten years old, my father bought me a 386SX for my birthday having noticed my burgeoning interest in computers. For the first few months, I mainly played games. But even that was a non-trivial endeavor in…
I was looking through wayback machine at snapshots of my website, when I came across one from 2005. It reminded me of something I had almost forgotten. At some point in 2005, the network card in my FreeBSD server started to die. I got myself a new card and set about replacing the dying one….