Today marks the second session of the “Dissertation House for Employees” at UMBC.  We had some extra slots on our roster this year, so graduate students from the three campuses who’d requested a spot in any available DH were invited to join the group.  Some of our employees at UMBC are in doctoral programs at College Park, so it helped to have some of the College Park DH students present to provide connections.  At present, the room is quiet, and students in doctoral programs at UMB, UMBC, and UM College Park are working on their dissertations.  Here are some photos from last week, including books on statistics and the new APA Style Manual which are available in the UMBC Bookstore in the Commons.  Comments from participants continue in this thread: http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/todays-september-24th-dissertation-house/#comments.

If you are interested in the Stuxnet worm, take a look at this blog post from F-secure Labs, Stuxnet Questions and Answers. It’s relatively free of over ventilation and speculation. F-secure is a Finnish company specializing in anti-virus and computer security software. Here’s an intriguing example from the post that does speculate a bit.

Q: How does Stuxnet know it has already infected a machine?
A: It sets a Registry key with a value “19790509″ as an infection marker.

Q: What’s the significance of “19790509″?
A: It’s a date. 9th of May, 1979.

Q: What happened on 9th of May, 1979?
A: Maybe it’s the birthday of the author? Then again, on that date a Jewish-Iranian businessman called Habib Elghanian was executed in Iran. He was accused to be spying for Israel.

Hat tip HN.

update: Another good resource is SYmantec’s W32.Stuxnet Dossier.

“While the bulk of analysis is complete, Stuxnet is an incredibly large and complex threat. The authors expect to make revisions to this document shortly after release as new information is uncovered or may be publicly disclosed. This paper is the work of numerous individuals on the Symantec Security Response team over the last three months well beyond the cited authors. Without their assistance, this paper would not be possible.”

Tired of trekking across campus for food, only to find out that they aren’t serving something you like? Wish you could have been at the dining hall when they made your favorite dinner but you didn’t know about it? This semester, you can check out what Chartwells is dishing up on their website before you head out to eat. Three locations are now posting their menu online each week for the convenient use of students: True Grits, Fresh Fusions, and the Skylight Room.

http://www.dineoncampus.com/UMBC/

All of the meal periods and location hours are posted here along with upcoming events that Chartwells is sponsoring. This week is “Eat Local Week,” where foods from local farms will be featured on the menu. Check back often to see what other excited events will be going on around campus at different dining locations and get all the specific info!

Peter Norvig has exquisite tastes in programming, is a Lisp guru and is also a great Python hacker. Put that together and what do you get? Lis.py, an interpreter for the core of the Lisp dialect Scheme in 96 lines of Python. Norvig mentions Alan Kay’s view of Lisp as “Maxwell’s Equations of Software” in a 2004 interview with Stu Feldman:

SF: If nothing else, Lisp was carefully defined in terms of Lisp.

AK: Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.

There is also a companion essay, (How to Write a ((Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)), that shows how to add other features, like macros, quasi-quote, tail recursion optimization and continuations. Sadly, this bloats the code to well over 200 lines.