Matrix outage
I accidentally torched the Matrix DB this evening and moved to a new server as a result. You will need new credentials; please reach out.
Jeff Casavant
Recent content on Jeff Casavant
Latest posts
Beetle Bailey
At what point are there so many Beetle Baileys that they constitute a claim that all of World War II was taken up by mildly funny office quips?
A bit of speculation on DAOs
There have been a couple of interesting DAOs recently.
Good metrics
What makes a good metric?
Wireguard gotchas with multiple tunnels
Wireguard has a bit of a gotcha when running multiple independent tunnels, one
of which has a default route associated with it.
2018 in review
As this year of blog posts comes to an end, I’d like to look back at what I wrote this year.
Project idea: annotating political bias in internet articles
Here’s an idea: a browser addon that injects bias annotations into articles you’re reading.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: Russian Literature for the West
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs exemplifies the feeling the Coen brothers seem to go for: the same bleak, lonely realism found in Russian literature.
On Bond
I watched the first Bond movie, Dr. No, this weekend & have some thoughts on James Bond as a cultural icon.
What Matrix needs
Matrix is pretty dang solid overall; there’s still some room for improvement if you’ve got the drive and the time.
JWTs
There’s a lot of talk about whether or not to use JSON Web Tokens and how to use them if you choose to. I’ll go over some of the basics here.
Tim Cook, Facebook, and GDPR
Tim Cook said this past week at a privacy conference that he, and Apple, are “in full support of a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States.” I’d like to take a look at one point in his argument.
Google envy
I ran across a good one this week: Hire people who aren’t proven .
Mastodon: an update
I just haven’t used it.
Projects I'm working on right now
I’ve got a few irons in the fire right now and I’d like to talk through them.
Why not Twitter?
I got a question this week - why didn’t I get into Twitter? Or more accurately, why didn’t it stick?
Fail Fast
One of the more generally applicable ideas that comes from programming is “fail fast”.
Mastodon: distributed, decentralized social networking
I wrote a couple posts about Matrix a while back. On the topic of distributed services, I’d like to talk about Mastodon.
Gridlock is essential
I firmly believe that gridlock is the essential feature of the American political system.
HipChat and the advantages of open source
Atlassian has discontinued their on-premises chat system in favor of Slack.
Kanban Mail
Kanban is an agile methodology uniquely suited to the way I do email.
Python's BDFL abdicates
Guido van Rossum, the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Python project, has stepped down.
Hidden value
Are brands known as “the best” because of their attention to detail?
Details
A remarkable amount of conscious effort goes into details in everyday products - details that we often just overlook.
Modern Tailor update
This shirt is well worth the money spent.
Choosing the wrong abstraction: Tesla Autopilot
I talked last week about choosing the right abstraction to present to your users. Tesla’s Autopilot feature is a textbook case of choosing the wrong abstraction.
Choose the right abstraction
I think there are a lot of issues that stem from the wrong choice of abstraction - either in a user interface or deeper within a system.
Remarkable demo: Google Duplex
Did you see the excellent demo of Google’s new Duplex AI booking a hair salon appointment with a human over the phone?
The student response to the Tom W Davis Clock Tower
The Tom W Davis Clock Tower in Ohio State’s North Campus area is pretty run-of-the-mill. The student reaction to it - now that’s what’s interesting.
Online made-to-measure clothing
I’ve always had a problem getting shirts that fit. Here’s a new approach: order clothing made-to-measure online.
Some of my favorite RSS feeds
Here’s some real gems that I make sure to keep up on.
On the value of impractical philosophy
I think there’s quite a lot of value in impractical, disconnected-from-reality, argumentation.
Project idea: identifying influence and subgroup identity with TF/IDF
I wonder if you can pick out what writing influences someone, and what subcultures they identify with, based on what terms and phrases they use.
Matrix: bridges, rooms, and clients

 I’ve spent the past week using Matrix, and here are my general impressions so far.
Matrix: distributed chat that talks to everything

 Matrix is the chat platform of the future.
What will replace email?
What’s going to replace email?
Long predictions about remote work
I was discussing remote work with a friend a couple of months back and ended up coming to a couple of interesting conclusions about how remote work would cause societal change if it were to become mainstream. The discussion was motivated based on the idea of a completely distributed office with no centralized location. I thought these two ideas in particular were worth sharing.
Simple internet security improvements for the average person
I’d like to present here a couple of simple internet security improvements that won’t slow you down too much and will improve your personal security posture dramatically.
Must see: the Furby Organ
On today’s HackADay: the Furby Organ . This is technically impressive, and it’s highly rewarding when he starts playing music on it.
Values a programming team should have
One of the things I think about regularly is how to properly manage a programming team.
My Linux desktop setup
I run Arch Linux both at work & at home and I use a few utilities between them to make them reliable and myself productive. Here’s an overview of some of the choices I’ve made to make it that way.
Propercasing last names in Python
I wrote the first draft of this article around three years ago. I found it in my drafts and touched it up for this week’s post.
Unusual internet puzzles
I’ve run across a few interesting puzzles on the internet over the years.
Long-term concerns about programming as a business
Being in the programming and technology sector comes with some unique concerns from the business angle.
Advertising & social signaling
Do you think advertising convinces you? 
 I don’t.
Python list comprehension gotcha
List comprehensions in Python are handy.
PostgreSQL text search
Happened upon another good writeup on PostgreSQl’s excellent text search
functionality. It details an actual use-case where speed is required, and how
to extract that speed from PostgreSQL using indexes and a modified search
function.
Text Adventure
I’ve always been a fan of a good text adventure; this probably comes from my
first computer gaming experience, Myst (not a text adventure, but a good puzzler 
 
 if you haven’t played, it’s on GOG, check it out). I’ve been entranced by
Zork, but it’s rare to find a well-done text adventure like it. 

6-2 News
It was recently brought to my attention that the website I ran with Alvin Gao and Paul Conrady back in middle school is still around, in all its 90s glory. Feel free to check it out .
Bournegol
The original Bourne shell, the ancestor to the Bourne-Again Shell (bash) was
written in C. 
 Well, almost.