Recurse Center, 2014-06-22

I finished parts of the phonebook task today. The code looks ugly, and very un-haskelly. I asked for feedback on it, but I guess its just too ugly for anyone to take the time out to comment on it, and help me improve it.
I also tried to read up about Monads, and worked through exercises from a few different places. I haven’t yet finished the exercises in Chapter 12 of the UPenn course. I just looked at them today, and they seem like a complete bouncer at first glance.
I went on a really long walk with Naren, and food-hopped with him while he was telling me stories about the various places he worked at and the kinds of things he has been working on, and things he liked and disliked about them. It has been a good weekend to spend with Naren!
Also, the long walk and talking to Chaitu cleared my head a bit, and I decided to pause the Haskell tutorials and learning for the next couple of weeks. I don’t really have a project that needs me to learn Haskell, right now. I should stick to project and need based learning, which I enjoy the most.
Right now, I feel like working on an key stroke acoustic emanation based key-logger. Just before applying to Hacker School, I came across the idea of side-channel attacks, and it sounded pretty exciting. I don’t intend to snoop onto anybody, but the project seems to be challenging enough, and I will have quite a bit to learn about. It will involve signal processing, and learning – both areas that I have seemed interesting to me for long, but I haven’t really done anything in them. I plan to work on the idea for a couple of weeks, and review my progress and chart my future course. The problem appears to have 2 parts to it.
- Processing audio, and extracting key-strokes from it.
- Identifying the text, based on a sequence of key-strokes. Though, in reality each press of a key may not sound the same, for a start assuming we are able to accurately get a sequence of key-strokes, the problem would reduce to solving a simple substitution cipher. I plan to start with this, tomorrow.
Also, I plan to hang out a lot more with Hacker Schoolers, and let myself be distracted a lot more by random discussions and activities, than I have allowed myself to be, in the past few weeks. I should be writing as much code as I can, while I’m here. But, I should also be rubbing elbows with the awesome folks, which I will only be able to virtually, once I’m out of here.
Thanks to Amber, I also came across this interesting looking book called Apprenticeship patterns. I plan to read it over the next week or two.
I haven’t been playing almost any Ultimate here. I atleast need to work out a conditioning and throwing practice schedule and start working on it, early next week. Tomorrow won’t work since it’s 5am and I’m still awake!
I also probably need to get enough sleep!
Looking forward to the next couple of weeks!