i missed my ketones terribly. i started (back) on a ketogenic diet to lose weight. over the past 10 years i’d gained over 30lbs, and it certainly wasn’t muscle. what became quickly apparent was the incredible effect of ketosis on my mental state. whereas i normally have extreme mood swings based on my blood sugar, in ketosis i noticed being hungry, but it was hardly a distraction. i also started waking up earlier, without an alarm, and feeling much more rested. the downside is that it is a lot of effort to eliminate carbohydrates and the simplest solution is to eat a lot of meat and cheese, with a few, specific vegetables. it gets boring.

then, over the course of a week of going away parties for friends and other, minor celebrations, the carbs came back. and along with them, my mood oscillated wildly, my productivity dropped essentially to nothing, and i was miserable. that was three weeks ago and i have just pushed back into ketosis. the initial transition brought a bout of (twitter) mania, but, thankfully, that has passed. the past few weeks have been a useful, if unpleasant, experiment in using diet to manage my (unruly) mind. i don’t think i’ll be repeating it soon.

but enough about me, here are some interesting fragments from the past few weeks:

• coda hale found yet another timing vulnerability in a common cryptography library and took the opportunity to remind us all about the subtleties of properly implementing this stuff. nate lawson recently delivered a great presentation at google on the same topic that you really must watch.

• scala is all the rage of late, as evidenced by the sudden appearance of a bunch of books about it. there’s beginning scala, then programming scala, then that other programming scala, and, finally, programming in scala. in the tree killing business, at least, scala is a language to watch.

• vmware has been doing great work in hardware virtualization performance measurement. this paper from 2006 is well-written and informative. consider it a must read. some further results, based on vmware’s vmark benchmark, covering performance with nested page tables, are in this blog entry from february of this year.

• i received a copy of what is shaping up to be an excellent book: applied ballistics for long range shooting. new goal? shooting accurately at ranges and in situations where coriolis effects matter.

• finally, there is the slow web. it’s like slow food. but, the web. savor it.