mitwhiz.com technobabble

This morning I was daydreaming about the time my server got hacked into a couple years ago. I didn’t notice for a few days, and luckily it was a spammer who wasn’t a genius and left a lot of junk lying around my server for me to figure out what was going on.

It occurred to me that normally only maybe 100 email messages get sent from my server on a given day. If that number skyrockets to 10,000 or 10,000,000 it’s pretty obvious something’s going on. Similarly, if I never log into IRC servers and suddenly I have ten open connections to IRC servers, this is another indication. I think both of these things were true the day my box became a spambot.

I could pretty easily detect this by having a very simple, separate firewall system that monitors how many packets go out on each port each day and reports oddities by emailing or paging me. I guess I could even set up something like this on my server itself, although if the server got hacked into I couldn’t rely on those measures to keep working.

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Step 1) Clearly identify your two favorite films of all time.

Step 2) Write about why you really like each film.

Step 3) If there is overlap between your list and another’s, let the negotiations begin, which may rely on…

Step 4) Identify any other films that didn’t make your top two that you care to identify, and write about why you really like them.

Alternatively, just talk about movies and stuff and what you like about them and stuff like that.

My favorite restaurant on the planet thus far is Legal Sea Foods, or as we know it affectionately, Legal’s. There’s one right by the Kendall Square T stop adjacent to the MIT campus, and some 20-30 more along the East Coast, mostly in the Boston area. It was certainly expensive for a college student, so I only made it there about once a semester.

Well, now I’m back in Boston, and gainfully employed. It’s still a bit expensive, so I don’t know how long I’ll keep up my current 2-week trend of visiting once a week. But I figured I could log my iteration through the menu items, and help myself remember what was fabulous and what was merely good. Step three: Mankind derives value (*1).

Restaurant Theory

Many restaurants have extensive menus. When you go to a restaurant for the first time, you can’t really help the fact that you’re going to judge the restaurant by that one dish you choose. I suppose we use hints like “Specialties of the House” or “Our Famous XYZ” to get something that should really be representative of the peak of their art. Or maybe a friend or food critic has recommended something to try. Still, there are obviously going to be places out there where you don’t like the first thing you try, and thus never come back, and thereby miss out on something else that you would have returned for again and again. C’est la vie.
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This is a weblog for the mitwhiz.com site, imagined home of unique, technically clever content. Well, that was the dream. The reality is more like a few one-day partial implementations of some ideas, and an ever-increasing deficit of attention preventing further progress. Oh, but the ideas keep mounting at least.

With a blog, though, who knows what might happen? I’ve noticed that a little bit of feedback can be pretty inspiring. Sure, I know from the Apache logs that at least a few hundred people have solved cryptograms here, but they’re just faceless domain names and IP addresses. Where are the stories of the people saved from the clutches of the lottery, thanks to the simulator? Or the kids who were able to cheat on their math homework, and thus probably avoid my fate of really learning (and liking) it.

If it’s not obvious, I use blue for the real content links on the site, normal black for the simple links to things I like for some reason. I sometimes turn a link red or bold when I’ve recently enhanced it. I planned to quickly fill out the home page with real, local-content links of all kinds, and out of sheer duty to such a domain name, was driven for a while to write some things. I’m still hoping to do that; at some point lame categories like career and finance will probably disappear in favor of more math and software geekstuff.

Well, there’s a sort of summary of the mission here at mitwhiz. I guess one more thing is the source of the name. When I first got DSL, I knew I had to get my own domain name, but what to choose? I discussed it with various friends, including my roommate at the time, Wes, who had also gone to MIT. A friend at work, Pat Wicker, suggested “MITwhiz”, and it was definitely more interesting than anything we had come up with.

The name carries some implicit burdens, though. First, I’m a pretty humble guy, or at least a weird mix of occasional arrogance and frequent self-deprecation. Announcing to anyone who asks for my email address that I’m an “MIT whiz” is painful to me. I quickly settled on the pronunciation “mitt-wiz”, and ceased capitalizing MIT to try to make it more ambiguous. I also worried somewhat about whether I was infringing on the school’s name, but now that I’ve heard of “MIT Cables” (not to my knowledge manufactured by a sweatshop of MIT students), I find that less threatening.

Second, once I’m using that moniker I feel like I need to deliver. My alma mater could suffer if I prove myself a clod, and with those bargain-basement tuition prices they can’t afford to beef up the marketing department. So I hope that between this site and canby.org, you can say to yourself, “I haven’t seen that before - he must be busy or he’d have done something really cool” even if “Wow, that guy is a whiz!” is unlikely.

Third, people have different opinions on the spelling of ‘whiz’. We knew that going into it. To me, though, it had to have an ‘h’, but then I was forever spelling it out to be sure people got it. That was in the days of Network Solutions. Later came GoDaddy and it’s $7/year registration fees. Then I sliced through the Gordian knot and now have both. Just don’t expect the title image to say ‘mitwiz’ for you.

- Geoff