Austin Bats Pictures

Correction: The bats eat about five to ten tons of insects each night, not ten to fifteen, according to BCI.

We went on the Austin riverboat for a sunset and the bats tonight. The weather was just clearing, so the clouds made a perfect backdrop for the Congress Street bat colony.

Bats in the sunset

Bats over the river

People on the Congress Street bridge to see the bats

I probably need to get a camera with a faster CCD sometime since ISO 100 mode is relatively limiting.

There are about 1.5 million bats living under the Congress Street bridge, and they eat about five to ten tons of insects every night.

The Little Schemer

I just finished reading The Little Schemer for the first time. It's a wonderful little book for an introduction to the Scheme programming language.

The book starts off slowly, and is somewhat tedious, but the exercises are good, and the book quickly requires the reader to think a lot about the questions it asks. The penultimate chapter develops a derivation of the applicative order Y combinator and requires several readings to get the gist of it. I'm still not sure that I understand it. The final chapter gives an implementation of a simple Scheme interpreter written in Scheme.

Linux Hard Drive Encryption

Encryption is required on my new work laptop, and since my employer does not have an official Linux encryption recommendation, I was allowed to implement one for our group. I actually implemented two because I realized (thanks to a coworker's suggestion) after developing the first method that using Logical Volume Management (LVM) would be nicer and, I think, simpler.

Hard Disk Encryption for Linux using LVM, LUKS, and Ubuntu 6.06


The original way, not using LVM.