Breaking ciphers with regular expressions
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. — Jamie Zawinski
non-O(n) musings
Sometimes linearity is overrated.
Latest posts
Z3 adventures and fast Boolean matching
Over the past few weeks I’ve been fiddling with Z3, a theorem prover and SAT/SMT solver from Microsoft Research. Z3 makes it pretty easy to write down some NP-complete problem instance and then push a button to get the answer. (Well, hopefully. I mean, they’re NP-complete problems, it’s hard.) It’s also open source (released under an MIT license), and, as I’ve learned, it has a delightful…
How not to improve video conferencing
Over the last year, a lot more people have been using video-conferencing platforms, such as Zoom, because they couldn’t safely meet in person.
XCB: protocol specifications as data
This year is the 20th anniversary of when I started writing XCB, and I’ve been thinking about how best to implement network protocols ever since. I have a lot to say on that topic but in this post I just want to tell the story of how XCB’s protocol specification language came to be.
Quickly building minimal Docker containers with Nix
For several years now I’ve been using Dokku on my personal web server as an easy way to spin up new web apps I want to play around with. Like the Heroku platform on which it’s modeled, Dokku allows me to deploy a new version of an app by simply running git push, but Dokku is fully open-source and I can self-host it.
Feed reader cache coherency with JMAP and RFC5005
RSS feed readers don’t work as well as they should. Today I’d like to talk about issues from an application and server developer viewpoint; I’ll save some thoughts about usability in various use cases for another time.
WebSub plus Push
There are a lot of situations where it’d be nice to know when the contents of a web page change, and the modern way to do that is the WebSub standard, formerly known as PubSubHubbub.
Authenticating shared web caches
I was doing a mental exercise and it went someplace that I think is not terribly useful but still interesting enough to share.
The most general reverse proxy
Deploying web applications is hard to do, and there are a bewildering variety of ways to do it. Today I’d like to confuse the matter further by proposing yet another approach. As a preview, here are the components I’ll discuss:
Transit fares are not about money
I live in Portland, Oregon, with a metropolitan area of about 2.5 million people. We have a pretty decent mass transit system here, called TriMet. I don’t have a lot of experience with other cities’ transit systems, but I do know a few things about this one.