Discovery of the day: on Fedora, simply setting "NM_CONTROLLED=no" in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX does not stop NetworkManager from managing the interface. You also need to specify the appropriate MAC address as the HWADDR. This took me way too long to figure out.
It also took me a while longer than I'd anticipated to discover that NetworkManager 0.8 does not support ethernet bridges. While this was fairly expected, I was still a little frustrated that I couldn't find this in the documentation for a long time.
BiD lunch today was pretty awesome - not only did Anuj and Nick walk to Cheeseboard and back to get six delicious pizzas, Jonathan Bachrach came and gave a slick talk on his ideas for the future of materials, CAD/CAM, and construction. He presented a technique for constructing many types of solids by chained tetrahedra by proving their satisfiability, doubling the voxel resolution, incrementally merging paths into a single loop, and then exploding the solid into a chain, tracking angles at each tetrahedron's bounds to produce the folds necessary to fold the desired solid from a straight chain. It was like doing protein folding backwards - start with what shape you want, know that it's possible to make, and then work backwards to a starting point. The best part is that each tetrahedron in the chain can be represented as a single bit. Sweetness. Sample application: reconfigurable materials. Turn your desk into a chair, a fan, an addition to your house, anything. I was impressed. One of the coolest things was that his "slides" were not done in Powerpoint, or Keynote, or anything that you normally do slides in. He had a full hour's talk prepared as a long sequence of interactive 3d models, which he'd flip through like a slide deck (but so much slicker). I am inspired to give awesome presentations.
I meant to go swing dancing tonight, but my garage gate opener is defunct (or perhaps the gate motor or receiver is, or something), so I would have wound up missing much of the lesson and not being able to give a ride to my compatriots, so I decided to bag dancing tonight in favor of calling my parents, which worked out nicely. I hadn't talked to them in rather a long time, and it was great to catch up.