Dan Connolly's tinkering notebook
I hit 1,000mi on my e-bike this month! One of my trips ended at 1,000.0mi even: Electric cars are kinda cool, but I don't think they fit into a sustainable future. Bikes, buses, and trains! As much as KC is steeped in car-culture , it was a breath of fresh air to see this on Issues — Amy Scrivner for City Council : People should have the option to live in a neighborhood where it is safe, easy, and…
Self-hosted Obsidian LiveSync using CouchDB on Proxmox LXC container, secured with Tailscale VPN and end-to-end encryption. Proxmox VM / Container Host I have Proxmox VE 9.1 running on an old (circa 2013) laptop. It has USB 3 ports, but only USB 2 seems to work for booting from a thumb drive. SHA256SUM: 6d8f5afc78c0c66812d7272cde7c8b98be7eb54401ceb045400db05eb5ae6d22 sequenceDiagram actor USER as…
Say... Google photos no longer lets me embed photos in blog items such as my 2017 SFO item : What does archive.org say? Ooh! so long as your content does not violate our terms of use you are welcome to upload and serve/embed them on your site. -- Internet Archive Forums: Archive.org as media file host? Originally appeared as a comment on use archive.org, IPFS for commons, esp media .
Formalization has trailed cutting-edge mathematics for some time: the four color theorem was proved in 1976, but it wasn't formally verifed until 2005. This was one of the objections of the QED manifesto in 1993: Objection 4. Mechanically checked formality is impossible. There is no evidence that extremely hard proofs can be put into formal form in less than some utterly ridiculous amount of work.…
The number of stars on my awesome-ocap repo has grown steadily since My Capability Security 2017 Wish-List . My github feed shows new stars now and then, which made me curious about how folks are discovering it. I expected the growth would be episodic -- prompted by events now and then. The nearly straight line over 7 years is quite a surprise! TODO: check the linear hypothesis with pandas. Get…
Generative AI can definitely be a productivity booster... 'I'm kinda scared of my python site builder now,' I wrote way back in 2016. I've been sort of stuck since then. Then I learned about aider , 'pair programming in your terminal'. It took just 2 and 1/2 hrs to re-created the features of my blog with modern JavaScript tooling. After setting up billing, we start start it with aider --sonnet .…
I wasn't sure how long it would last when I replaced my car with an ebike. After a year, I have not once wished I had my own car. When one of my kids moved out last spring, I gave him my car, a 2006 Infinity G35X. Shopping for a replacement was a depressing prospect. I had gotten a great deal on that G35 in 2019 (paid about $5k, including $1.5k in repairs), and I had little hope of finding another…
I'm ready to say goodbye to my copy of Ubuntu 5.10 for i386 on CD, after nearly 2 decades of keeping it as a combination keepsake and software supply chain anchor. I donated it to archive.org: While brainstorming about Merkle trees for file access, I noticed that not only does archive.org OCR the PDF I gave them of the cover and support browsing of the contents of Ubuntu 5.10 i386.iso , but they…
walk-n-talk? That's short for: would you like to talk with me as I take my dog on a walk? When the pandemic hit, I traded in my commute to KU Med Center for a walk with my dog Mojo. While we're out walking, I like to talk with a friend, family member, or some colleagues. Mojo really likes it because I lose track of time and she gets to smell everything more. Usually it's a plain 1-1 phone call (or…
One of my favorite patterns of cooperation is Office Hours . I open my office, virtually, and welcome questions and other open discussion, mostly about the way object capabilities can be used to form patterns of cooperation without vulnerabilities, but also wider discussion of Web Architecture, open source, project management... and occasionally, to fill gaps, guitar :) Agoric Dev Office Hours on…
In this year's holiday lull, I got closer to a 'capabilities all the way down' workstation using Genode , an OS framework with capability-based security. Sculpt is a Genode-based general-purpose OS. Genode has a choice of low level microkernels at the bottom. Sculpt uses the NOVA microhypervisor : ... the NOVA microhypervisor uses a capability-based authorization model and provides only basic…
I spent much of this year's annual file purge recovering from Flickr going back on their 1TB storage offer . While tinkering with Genode and catching up on Metamath (RIP, Norm Megill), I made a lot of use of github issues as my lab notebook; I can search copies of my comments in my email since I'm a closet librarian and I don't trust cloud services completely . One of these searches led me to the…
It was loud. I mean really loud. Like guns going off over my head. The noise from the nailguns and hammers from the hardwood floor installation going on right above my office. I apologized to the other folks in the meeting about the background noise, but since my business in the meeting was urgent and the noise wasn't going to get any better, I pressed on. They dind't hear it. At all. They…
Hello, Spritely Institute ! ... ActivityPub, social networks, smart contracts, object capabilities, and secure distributed virtual worlds. ... freely licensed open source ... Yum, yum, gimme some! Can't wait for mind-boggling stuff like this VRChat hack , but powered by ocaps and open source! Privacy & moderation issues have triggered the permanent shutdown of millions of networked communities and…
A colleague suggested we shouldn't delete calendar items of old meetings. I said I don't rely on my calendar for records of the past. Then I admitted that actually, I keep version-controlled backups of my cloud-hosted calendars. I'm content to use the Google calendar export feature manually. I tend to do it in preparation for travel or perhaps when reviewing a trip: gdata$ hg log10…
After 15 years at W3C and 10 years at KU Med Center, my next gig is at Agoric . Here I answer some questions, some recently asked and some anticipated. Q: I see a NY Times feature about Tim Berners Lee and his new company, Inrupt. Did you work with Tim Berners-Lee? A: yes, from the early 1990s to 2010 we worked together building the Web at W3C. Q: Are you working with Tim at Inrupt? A: No, but I…
This was great fun... especially working with @suhailski . https://t.co/11uJri3Wvv — Dan Connolly (@dckc) December 7, 2020 @agoric · Dec 7 2/ 📽️ Umqhele: @dckc, @suhailski, and @tgrecojs built a #dapp that allows you to auction and trade #NFTs that grant access to live video streams. This dapp demonstrates Agoric contract composition, offer safety, and object capabilities.…
Genode is a microkernel operating system with capability-based security; in the 20.05 release they added capability-based security using seccomp on Linux . That got me excited enough to make some real progress on JavaScript on Genode using the Moddable XS engine and on Genode on an HP Envy laptop. In genode-js-xs I got this JavaScript code running on genode: export default function main() { let…
I read CS papers by turning notation into ( @idrislang ) code. Slow going, but the only way I really grok. e.g. https://t.co/8Y34KMgiXd more: https://t.co/AecWRmyFJG — Dan Connolly (@dckc) February 19, 2020 The Rosetta Stone paper by Baez and Stay has been on my to-read list since a conversation with Stay on a bus a few years ago. The scope is a bit intimidating: Category Theory Physics…
I'm typically connected to IRC channels for a few ocap projects etc.: #erights #genode #idris #indieweb #monte #ocaml #sandstorm #swig I use hexchat to connect to these channels on freenode but netsplits and other failure modes inherent in IRC make for annoying little gaps in the connection from time to time. An ice storm here in Kansas City gives me a chance to install the znc IRC bouncer in my…
After months of indecision, I decided to go to San Francisco Blockchain Week in hopes of syncing up with the Agoric team. I'm glad I did! I have been working remotely for a few months on SwingSet on xs : A key to Agoric's smart contract platform is compatibility between widespread understanding of best practices in JavaScript development with object capabilities and fail-stop deterministic…
Inspired by mention of a gRPC client and server library in Tokio alpha release with async & await , I tried building an rchain wallet client in rust. A couple hours later, I had the hello-world client from tower-grpc adapted to talk to the shiny new 0.9.12 release of rnode : ~/projects/spendr$ cargo run Compiling spendr v0.1.0 (/home/connolly/projects/spendr) Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo]…
In Writing sustainable Python scripts ( lobsters discussion ), the initial prototype looks like: import sys for n in range(int(sys.argv[1]), int(sys.argv[2])): if n % 3 == 0 and n % 5 == 0: print("fizzbuzz") elif n % 3 == 0: print("fizz") elif n % 5 == 0: print("buzz") else: print(n) I have a process for turning this sort of thing into production code that I quite enjoy. I just did it for this…
Working on RChain was fun for a while, but I am no longer be comfortable with the RChain Cooperative's business practices. I am inclined to keep my distance until I see quarterly financials on time ('no later than 20 days after the quarter ends' per IOB 1 from the 2018 annual meeting ) the board carry out IOB 4 member participation in governance timely board agendas and minutes some details re…
A lot of the friction around my blog has been running the build step: re-constituting python dependencies, running the build, manually tweaking the results, and committing the build results to github pages[^1]. pmoorman turned me on to Netlify last fall, so I gave it a try: Holy shnikeys! it worked 1st try with no tweaks whatsoever! I told it my build command was ./site build [^2] and it picked up…