Susam's Feed
I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing . It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life. In 1992, when I was eight years old, my parents decided to transfer me to a new school because of its curriculum. They did not know it then,…
This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does not mean that nobody is allowed to write cryptographic code. Someone has to. It…
Let me share a very silly story from roughly 18 years ago! In 2008, I joined RSA , the network security company named after the initials of the inventors of the RSA algorithm, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, who were also the founders of RSA, the company. There was a bit of a nerd culture in the workplace where topics like prime numbers, combinatorics, probability theory, etc. were discussed…
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It is a commonly held opinion that educational institutions could do more to improve the pedagogy of mathematics. This is especially applicable to primary and secondary schools, where students are first exposed to mathematics as a formal subject, along with other new subjects. Poor exposition can turn students away from mathematics for a lifetime. Only the highly motivated ones continue to engage…
Last evening, a short blog post appeared in my feed reader that felt as if it spoke directly to me. It is Chris Morgan's excellent post I've banned query strings . Contents Wisdom on the Web Wander on the Web Misfeature Broken URLs Qualms Conclusion Wisdom on the Web Chris is someone whose Internet comments I have been reading for about half a decade now. I first stumbled upon his comments on…
Wander Console 0.6.0 is now available. This is the sixth release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website discover interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent website owners. To try it, go to susam.net/wander/ . To learn how it works and how to set it up on your own website, see the project README . The main change…
Yesterday, I switched my website from RSS feeds to Atom feeds. In case you are wondering whether you have somehow landed on an ancient post from 2010, no, you have not. Yes, this is the year 2026, and I have finally switched from RSS feeds to Atom feeds. Yes, I am fifteen, or perhaps twenty, years too late. Contents Impulse Coding Atom Entries Temporary Workaround Does It Matter? References…
QuickQWERTY 1.2.3 is now available. QuickQWERTY is a web-based touch typing tutor for QWERTY keyboards that runs directly in the browser. This release includes two small bug fixes. In the previous release , QuickQWERTY source code management moved from GitHub to Codeberg. During that update, the licence link in the footer was updated incorrectly. The broken licence link has now been fixed.…