Professionally, I work pretty close to a bleeding edge (not the bleeding edge, but it’s still hairy here): Most of my job involves cross-domain work of one kind or another, and we prize reliability and performance in equal measure - one dropped packet in 10 billion is too many, and single-digit Gbps on 25Gbps interfaces is too slow, even with a complete protocol break and physically guaranteed…
tl;dr: If you think of git branch as a verb meaning diverge from this path, split my tree and think of the branch name as a label that tracks the most recent commit on this new path, a lot of stuff about git becomes clearer. You might already understand what detached HEAD means . Koan1: If I am on a branch but not at a branch, I am detached. Koan2: I can always get where I need to go, if I am…
A recent paper on Closed Time-like Curves has editors the world over asserting that paradox-free time-travel is now possible! Readers have gotten pretty excited too…. Fantastic! If we travel back in time and cause an accident, we’ll still exist when we get back! Well, no. Or at least, not quite. These headlines are inaccurate: a more accurate headline might be “Paradox-Free Time Travel Possible,…
Q for my Pythonista friends…. I’ve several utility functions for processing complex data in a file, each function being pithy: read from the file, validate the data, display it if in debug mode, process it, etc. Each function exists in its own module. None have output, they either return valid data or raise appropriate exceptions. Just this morning I created a Class to represent the structure…
Once, and I don’t recall why, I said, probably to someone else, “I am nothing if not patient”. Later, with grudging head-bobbing, self noted that I wasn’t (always) (particulary) patient. Did I mention that my degree’s in physics (meaning I studied more math than anything else) and that I got most of the way to a degree in philosophy? So, yeah, there is a strong inner logician. He sleeps a lot, but…
tl;dr? Jump right to the recipe For reasons lost in the mists of time, I’ve been a Mac guy since 2013 - but I’ve been a command line (CLI) guy since 1990 (or earlier, hard to remember), and still am. A few years ago, I discovered brew, aka homebrew after finding out how out-of-date were so many of the standard UNIX/Linux tools included with Mac OS, e.g., bash. Generalizing, the hardest part of…
Someone posted in an FB group indicating they were going to buy a 2012-or-later Wrangler and asking whether they should get the Rubicon or the Sport. Well, my comment was longish (surprise, surprise), so I thought I would reproduce it here. I bought a Rubi new in 2014. It was my daily for five years, and was wheeled hard. Now it is a trail queen, and will, eventually, be a trailer queen (my truck…
Five years is a long time. Why stop? Why start again? And why was restarting so (technically) painful? tl;dr It was 2014; I thought I should learn git and GitHub - didn't use it, just thought it would be cool. The blog was a practical exercise in both. I'm not sure why I kept it going (not that it went very long). Work changed. Life changed. Now I use git on work's self-hosted GitLab sometimes…
New software is net new but most people work on maintaining or incrementally improving their status quo. Factor in their lack of understanding of what it takes to develop complex systems, and you might suddently understand why their reaction to your shiny new thing is "What took you so long?" A colleague works outside IT and seems to have a pretty good grasp of how complex IT really is. I…
A thought-provoking blog post by Scott Aaronson provokes more thought than I bargained for.... Scott Aaronson has a rare combination of genius and communication skill: He does first rate research on computational complexity and follows the implications of that work in fields as disparate as drug research and evolutionary theory, AND writes about some of the most complex technical topics in a clear…
When should you refuse a search? Always. To do otherwise is to erode privacy rights, one concession at a time. A friend posted a video of a girl being tased because she refused a search and lipped off to a border agent (this was in the US, the friend is American, the commenters were a mix of Yanks and Canucks). Predictably, one comment was to the usual effect, that if she had nothing to hide, she…
I got interviewed about our upcoming movie, Skipper Smith ! If you want to contribute, please visit our Indiegogo campaign ! Q: Tell us a little about your acting background. What are some of the other films you have been in? I started acting about 7 or 8 years ago: My daughter and I auditioned for the local community theatre’s annual Christmas pantomime. It was a great way to spend time together…
tl;dr:Trying to set up "send as" as a new email address in an existing gmail or GAE account? Remember that Google disables both IMAP and POP3 by default in new accounts. If you read and retain nothing else, read and retain that. It will save you considerable grief. I’m doing some work that requires a dedicated email address, one that contains neither my company name nor any personal identifier.…
tl;dr: The Canadian Government's online security screening application supports pretty much all browsers on all platforms for 99% of the process - but that last one percent is Windows only, IE only, and Adobe only. Many of us have neither Windows nor IE, let alone Adobe, and even on Windows many of us use neither IE nor Adobe. The solution is simple: Upgrade the server side of the app - which…
Update summary, 2015-02-14: Working as described, with one additional milestone, Unsure. More towards the end. A major reason for having this blog here and not elsewhere was to learn git and GitHub (cf the Colophon ). Part of that is using GitHub Issues to manage things. Over the last ten or so years, I’ve become a huge fan of issue-based development management, or, perhaps more accurately,…
(Another Facebook-inspired post, this one because of a comment “you should always get paid, never act for free”.) Why is everyone assuming that people act because they want to get paid for it? The likelihood of me making as much acting as I do on my day job is, well, practically infinitesimal. I act because I thrive on it. I act because I crave the art. Payment is lagniappe. My cheese commercial…
(From a comment on yet another Facebook conversation….) When I first read of the 2000, I was stunned. Then I realized that that was all I would ever be: Stunned. I simply do not have the mental or emotional capacity to perceive 2000 sudden brutal deaths. That’s twice our entire high school population, 6 times our graduating class, killed in a matter of hours. Call it a human failing. I fancy that…
This afternoon a Facebook friend wrote to me in a comment, I’m sure you’ve been fascinated by this entire ordeal [The Sony compromise, accusations against North Korea, etc.] too! I mean really, an unencrypted folder called “Passwords”? sigh Fascinated? Not so much fascinated as jaded. Most large corporations simply fail to take security seriously. In 25 or so years in the field, I’ve seen far too…
tl;dr: What do you want me to write about first/next? The experience of setting up this blog? IT Security? Acting? Something else altogether? Let me know via the various social/feedback links available herein. I’d been thinking of setting up a blog for long time. Actually, I’ve been thinking of setting up two, one personal (right here!) and one for EdgeKeep , my consulting company. But there were…