thunderbird to (hosted) gmail

My school (UW) recently allowed students to switch their school email accounts over to one of 2 providers: Google (via gmail) or Microsoft (via Outlook Web Access).  Feeling the inexorable pull of the cloud, I decided to take the plunge and switch to gmail, but one thing held me back.  I have used Thunderbird for a few years now and have accumulated roughly 1GB of archived messages that are generally unimportant but occasionally vital.  I’ve also espoused Lifehacker’s Trusted Trio email organization system and so many of the emails in my archive are tagged for easier organization.

I’d like to have this email archive searchable from gmail.  And I would really like to have all those tags I’ve accumulated over the years show up as gmail “labels”.  Fortunately, this isn’t too difficult thanks to the following:

powerpoint+flash interaction

One of the cool things I learned about Powerpoint the other day is that it’s possible to create interactions between an embedded Flash movie and the presentation itself.  This allows you to coordinate animations across the movie and the slide, e.g. to have a mouse click sometimes advance the slide and sometimes trigger some action in the movie.

The reason all this works is because you can do function calls up from the Flash movie, through the ActiveX container and into VBA code attached to the Powerpoint presentation.   You can also call down from Powerpoint into Flash in a similar manner, though I haven’t experimented with this.

Sharing Amazon Elastic Block Store among multiple instances

Editor’s Note: This whole rigmarole is unnecessary now that you can boot from EBS-backed AMIs that can have essentially unbounded size.  But this trick was fun while it lasted!

I love Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and have been using it to run research experiments without having to worry about multiplexing computing resources among other members of my research group.  No running top after I login to make sure I’m not stepping on someone else’s experiments: I launch an instance and I get it all to myself.

Sharing storage across instances, however, is tricky.  For my purposes, having a read-only copy distributed among my instances is sufficient; of course adding read/write access makes things substantially trickier.  Yet even given that I was fine with read-only access, none of the solutions that immediately came to mind were satisfactory:

Lockfox version 0.1 released

The first beta version of the Lockfox Firefox extension has been posted to addons.mozilla.org!  I developed this with Rohit Chaudhri as our class project for Yoshi Kohno‘s graduate course in computer security at the University of Washington.  I’ll use this blog to talk about the development of Lockfox and interact with its (eventual) users.  Right now it’s just an experimental addon (so it’s kinda hard to find) but hopefully it will soon pass AMO’s code review and be listed as a trusted, public addon!

DMP ASPLOS presentation README

Here are some instructions to help you run the presentation I gave on Deterministic Shared Memory Multiprocessing at ASPLOS 2009.  The presentation itself can be downloaded here.  This presentation uses Shockwave Flash movies embedded in Powerpoint, and interaction between the two, so there are a few steps you have to go through to get everything to work right.

Installing Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX Control

Here’s how I got the Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX Control to install under Windows Vista, so I could embed Flash movies in Powerpoint.

1. Go to the Flash Player download site.  Download the “Adobe Flash Player 10 Update for Flash CS4 Professional” zipfile – 44MB.
2. Unzip the archive somewhere, and go to the Players/Release/ directory.
3. You’ll find an executable named Install Flash Player 10 ActiveX.exe, which will do just what the name says!

This is kind of convoluted; maybe people have found easier ways?

Powerpoint + Flash = Awesome (eventually)

I recently attended ASPLOS 2009 in Washington, D.C., and put together some slides for the presentation I gave on Deterministic Shared Memory Multiprocessing. To appease my endless thirst for new technologies, I figured I’d try using Powerpoint with embedded Shockwave Flash movies for the presentation, instead of the traditional vanilla-Powerpoint. Why bother making my life so complicated? Well, there were 5 main reasons.