simont | (no subject)

So there's a silliness going round LJ at the moment, which is to think up ten (originally six) things you've done which none of your regular readers have also done (or at least you think that's reasonably likely). I normally don't participate in LJ memetic sillinesses, not least because this diary appears on both Monochrome and LJ and a lot of them would look a bit odd to readers on the former; but this one's fairly self-contained, doesn't require much explanation, and is unusually interesting and fun. And in fact I'm startled at how extremely difficult it is.

I'd have thought that being the author of PuTTY ought to have netted me some reasonably unusual things, and indeed I have

been sent money by the tax office of a country of which I'm not a citizen and indeed have never even visited
had an e-mail correspondence with a Pentagon official, which was interrupted (thankfully temporarily) by 9/11
been the sole cause of three computer security advisories
been personally targeted by a computer criminal.

As a result of other free software interests I have

been both praised and criticised in unsolicited private email by ESR.

My life outside free software is a lot less remarkable. Let me see. I've

attempted to start a software company with a friend while we were still in secondary school.

(Outstandingly, we managed to sell zero copies of the program. We had three conditional orders from people who each said they'd buy it if it had one extra feature. So I worked hard to add all three features, but by that time all our customers had gone elsewhere. I've made more money out of free software than I ever did out of commercial!)

After that, though, my imagination starts to run out. The best I can conveniently think of is that I've

asked for directions in a foreign country from a stranger who turned out to be of my own nationality

although that one crops up so often in elementary language textbooks that although I was very amused when it actually happened to me, it probably isn't all that unusual.

The calibre of my readership makes things difficult as well. I could try mentioning that I'd

been awarded Certificates of Excellence for two of my four A-levels

but since quite a lot of my readers are Oxbridge graduates at least as intelligent as I am, I actually doubt that's unique.

Beyond that, nothing springs readily to mind. Perhaps I'm being too picky; perhaps there are perfectly normal things I've done which aren't unusual in the sense of being remarkable, but are merely unusual in the sense that not many people happen to have done them. With a bit of preparation, for example, I could announce proudly that I bet nobody else had

rolled a six-sided die (or electronic equivalent) twenty times and got 43562522633613246253

but it wouldn't be terribly interesting.

Still, it was fun thinking up this many. Perhaps I'll finish the list at some later point…

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

been both praised and criticised in unsolicited private email by ESR.

Who/what is ESR?

Eric S. Raymond, one of the best known names in the free software world. (Also one of the looniest, which appears more strongly correlated to fame in free software than in more conventional fields :-)

Heh, though has ESR ever pulled a gun on you? I can claim that...

Goodness. Actually pulled a gun on you, as in pointing it at you with intent to threaten, or just near you?

In any case, no, I can't claim anything like that since I've never met him in person, although in his praise email he did say he'd like to.

(Er, like to meet me, that is, not like to pull a gun on me! He didn't even say that in the critical email. :-)

You know, I could wander over and tell this, but, meh, and all that.

hStill, the story it goes like this. Nowt wrong with a bit of self-aggrandization, I always say:

Random dull Hilton conference centre downtown Portland, a pile of geeks
(and me) standing in foyer deciding on which bar to head to next. ESR
wanders over, trying to look cool. We all ignore him. To which he
declares _very_ loudly 'Don't you know who *I* am?' to which I reply
'goodness, Mr Stallman, you have shaved the old beard' to a lot of
laughter all round. He pushes back the trenchcoat, whips out some shiny
piece, and says 'wise guy, huh?' to which I broaden my accent and say
'oh yes' back to him. He actually backed down, I laughed again, and we
all went to his for a rather bizarre party for the rest of the
night/next day.

Though, to be honest, I was absolutely bricking myself when he produced
the (what I have since been saying when I retell the story) magnum .45.

Hm...
(1/6)^20 = 3656158440062976
These CPUs can roll and compare 1.25 million sets of 20 dice per second with a naive program. I've got 26 such CPUs easily available.

That's still an average of 3.5 years work to match that achievement. I wonder if I could get it to be as much as an order of magnitude quicker if I took the time to write it in assembler? Probably not.

*grin*

In any case, replicating achievements after they're announced is obviously much easier in general. There are items on a lot of people's lists which would be easy enough to do once you knew what they were.

mpinna's "visited the tomb of Tutankhamen" springs to mind.

Oh, and (1/6)^20 is 1 over 3656158440062976. Over 31 orders of magnitude out in a single computation. I'm impressed >;->

Yeah, that was the way my thoughts were going. OTOH, you wouldn't need to generate the random data yourself, you'd just need enough of it to exist and define it as your dice throws. There must be thousands of computers spending lots of time generating pseudo-random numbers, so you just need some canonical arranging of their streams into result sets of 20 dice, and you could in principle find any of the results, and one of them will have come up 43562522633613246253 a.s. :)

"been sent money by the tax office of a country of which I'm not a citizen and indeed have never even visited" ?

They used PuTTY internally and decided they wanted to send us a load of thank-you money. The slight catch was, being a government agency they weren't allowed to make dodgy donations to people via PayPal, so instead they asked us to send them an invoice.

It's quite difficult writing an invoice for doing no (specific) work, when you're reasonably sure it will be read by part of a general accounts-payable department who isn't the guy who fully understands what the money's for. I ended up writing on the invoice "PuTTY development, as discussed in <message-id>" and printing my contact's name prominently, in the hope that the accounts department would either just accept it or check with him for approval. I don't know which one happened, but we did get the money :-)

Aww. That quite restores my faith in taxmen :) It really is nice.

And I wanted to check if it was just money from a tax office, or if it was in some way tax money.

I think I might have been asked for directions in Paris from a stranger who turned out to be of my own nationality, but it's possible that I was doing the asking, so maybe you escape that one.

Your wording implies that you think I said I'd been asked. In fact I didn't use the word "been" in that one: it was in fact me doing the asking. (Stop me if I've misread you as if you were misreading me :-)

Oh, yes. Either way, I'm not sure what happened to me. (-: