Blog Archive: March 2014
Podcast: Collective Action the Magnificent Seven anti-troll business-model
Here's a reading (MP3) of a my November, 2013 Locus column, Collective Action, in which I propose an Internet-enabled "Magnificent Seven" business model for foiling corruption, especially copyright- and patent-trolling. In this model, victims of extortionists find each other on the Internet and pledge to divert a year's worth of "license fees" to a collective … [Read more]
The Continuing Public/Private Surveillance Partnership
If you've been reading the news recently, you might think that corporate America is doing its best to thwart NSA surveillance. Google just announced that it is encrypting Gmail when you access it from your computer or phone, and between data centers. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg personally called President Obama to complain about the NSA using Facebook as a means...
System upgrade, next step
My network connection via stable-amd64 has been working well for a couple of days, and I haven't had any of these timeouts that were irritating me earlier in the week. Time to move the connection to its final location, on eureka. Put in another network interface, and while I was at it looked for the speaker connector, which I hadn't set up when I built the machine. With good reason: this high-quality enclosure doesn't have a speaker! Not a big issue, since they almost never fail, and I had dozens of old machines from which I could cannibalize a speaker. But why didn't they include one?
Another day of photo processing
Continued with my photo processing today. Processing TIFF is even slower than processing JPEG, and it's not helped by the tools. Although I saved time by not using DxO Optics Pro , things took much longer. In particular, enblend ran literally for hours: grog 44082 100.0 17.6 13336228 5888976 ?? RN 11:43am 101:33.71 enblend --compression=LZW -- ---m 10000 -w -f15080 Looking at those large numbers is easier with top: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 44082 grog 1 108 5 7128M 3017M CPU4 4 14:34 100.00% enblend But why so little memory?
Patching Leo's notes
Mail from Harald Arnesen and also IRC comments from Jashank Jeremy today. Both have patched most of the problems in The Lions Book. But incorporating the means messing with TeX again, and I voiced my opinion about that years ago in Porting UNIX Software: I have been using TeX frequently for years, and I still find it the most frustrating program I have ever seen. In the process, discovered mail from Liu Yubao, about 4 years ago, addressing some rendering issues. I can see I'm going to have to do something Real Soon Now.
Choose the Right Fish
We had informal Saturday brunch with families of kids in our second-graders class in Old Chinatown at The Emerald, once a dim-sum joint, now a hipster supper club. The old-Chinatowners are aging out and some of the people moving in look Chinese because hey, this is Vancouver, but theyre younger and single-er and probably dont speak much ã?q. Whatever its becoming will probably be interesting, but not the same. Old Chinatown is still full of life and bustle and color, but to me theres something of a museum-piece feeling. I wonder how long therell still be this kind of shop? Lots of fish!
Reviewing the DHCP issue
I've been tracing DHCP traffic since yesterday, and it shows what I expect: cases where the DHCP server doesn't respond. And at the same time various connection resets. Apart from yesterday's example with IRC, discovered that my problems with streaming radio are also related: each time I have a hiccup like that, the radio drops out and requires 30 seconds to pull itself together again. Clearly a nuisance. But is this a problem with the DHCP server? Maybe that's just another symptom. One thing that's not only related to DHCP is the DHCP discover request: it's a broadcast, so potentially it can get through where other things can't, maybe because it has lost the ARP information.
Friday Squid Blogging: Encounter Between a Submersible Robot and a Giant Squid
Wow....
Good reads, March 2014
A summary of the interesting articles I've found this month. Why Puppet/Chef/Ansible aren't good enough (and we can do better): This is mostly about the Nix package manager and the new linux distro NixOS which is entirely Nix-based down to the bone. I haven't used it yet, but I had to admit this is what I was trying to achieve back in the 1990s with the simple package management system I made... but I didn't go far enough. These people did. I'm looking forward to trying this out. http://dec64.com DEC64 is a new (proposed) floating point format. I fear that most people don't understand how floating point numbers are stored on computers so this will be wasted.
Creating Forensic Sketches from DNA
This seems really science fictional: It's already possible to make some inferences about the appearance of crime suspects from their DNA alone, including their racial ancestry and some shades of hair colour. And in 2012, a team led by Manfred Kayser of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, identified five genetic variants with detectable effects on facial shape....
Router breakin: more analysis
Mail from Michael Hughes today. He obviously has even more time on his hands than I do, and looked at the data that my intruder was copying on Tuesday: I got to looking at the long echo line you have in your diary and the first part of it is an ELF head for a binary. It looks like they are trying to create an executable through echos. So some kind of breakin program? I'm not sure that I care that much, but it's interesting to note.
Leo's notes updated
Some time in May 1994, nearly 20 years ago, I came into my office in the morning, took a look into alt.folklore.computers, as you do, and found a large uuencoded document with the subject Leo's notes . Could it be? Passed it through uudecode, and sure enough: TeX sources for the Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code! I was ecstatic. Somehow I have lost that original post. So, it seems, has alt.folklore.computers. But I kept the files and published them. And now I get a message from Brian Foley with errata for the text, which had been scanned in by a friend I only met several years later.
Understanding DHCP
My network connection is still flaky. In particular, the IRC connections continue to drop. Traced both DHCP and IRC and came up with some interesting details. To save space, the trace shows the IP addresses in numeric form. 180.150.4.134 is my router, 180.150.4.1 is the other end of the link, and 206.86.224.149 is w3.lemis.com, my external server. First the router issues three DHCP requests and gets no reply: After 15 seconds it issues a DHCP Discover and gets immediate (47 ms) replies from the previously unresponsive DHCP server: So I was back and had the same IP address, so most TCP connections remained.
LifeSaver Works on KitKat
The 4.4 release of Android broke my LifeSaver 2 app, which migrates phone-call and SMS logs from your old phone to a new one. It was my fault not Androids, because the API for the SMS database was undocumented and thus unofficial. With KitKat, now its official. And slightly different. So I just uploaded v2.3, which seems to fix the problem. Thanks Chris! I actually didnt do the work for KitKat; a nice Googler named Chris Jones got it 80% of the way there and the last lap was pretty easy. Something had changed in the SDK in a way that screwed up my layouts, so I had to refiddle those a bit, and then Chris changes exposed a couple of other useful little refactorings.
In which I make Wil Wheaton read out Pi for four minutes
Chapter nine of Homeland opens with about 400 digits of Pi. When Wil Wheaton read the chapter, he soldiered through it, reading out Pi for a whopping four minutes! Here's the raw studio audio (MP3) of Wil and director Gabrielle De Cuir playing numbers station. There's less than a week left during which you can … [Read more]
Smarter People are More Trusting
Interesting research. Both vocabulary and question comprehension were positively correlated with generalized trust. Those with the highest vocab scores were 34 percent more likely to trust others than those with the lowest scores, and someone who had a good perceived understanding of the survey questions was 11 percent more likely to trust others than someone with a perceived poor understanding....
Danish Little Brother
Hey, Danes! There's a limited-edition Danish-language translation of Little Brother that's just come out from Science Fiction Cirklen! Tell your friends!
Tracking the network problems
Spent much of the day waiting for my sporadic network problems to crop up again. They happened, but on analysis I found that I had two different DHCP servers on the same network: one from the router and one from the machine with which I was monitoring the net. Killed the latter dhclient and let things trace again. No problems any more (apart from the 60% drop in download speed caused by the old hub). But a lack of problem doesn't mean it's gone, so left it run. ACM only downloads articles once.
Retina Screen Tab Sweep
When youre running your 15" Retina Mac in high-rez mode and you still dont have room for all your tabs, you probably have a lifestyle problem. One solution is to publish the links, so if your dont-kill-this-tab instinct turned out to be right, you have Internet Memory on your side. Roger Angell Hes been writing beautiful stories for The New Yorker for an insanely long time; This Old Man is what its like to be 93. Speaking as a male specimen of Homo sapiens rapidly approaching 60, one of my ambitions now is to be interesting as an old man, which Angell manifestly is.
Geolocating Twitter Users
Interesting research into figuring out where Twitter users are located, based on similar tweets from other users: While geotags are the most definitive location information a tweet can have, tweets can also have plenty more salient information: hashtags, FourSquare check-ins, or text references to certain cities or states, to name a few. The authors of the paper created their algorithm...
"Evil Genius 101" at LOPSA-East
I'll be teaching my "Evil Genius 101" half-day class at LOPSA-East You want to innovate: deploy new technologies such as configuration management (CfEngine, Puppet, etc.) , set up a wiki, or standardized configurations. Your coworkers don't want change. They like it the way things are. Therefore, they consider you evil. However you aren't evil, you just want to make things better. In this class you will learn how to: Help your coworkers understand and agree to your awesome ideas Convince your manager about anything. Really Turn the most stubborn user into your biggest fan Get others to trust you so they are more easily convinced Deciding which projects to do when you have more projects than time Make decisions based on data and evidence Drive improvements based on a methodology and planning instead of guessing and luck LOPSA-East is a regional sysadmin conference in New Brunswick NJ, May ...
Noah Swartz reads Aaron Swartzs afterword to Homeland
Before he died, Aaron Swartz wrote a tremendous afterword for my novel Homeland -- Aaron also really helped with the core plot, devising an ingenious system for helping independent candidates get the vote out that he went on to work on. When I commissioned the indie audiobook of Homeland (now available in the Humble Ebook … [Read more]
Goldweb GW-WR401N exploit
So who is abusing my router? Found a power supply for the 10 Mb/s Ethernet hub and put it between the router and the NTD and sniffed. A lot of false positives, but then: localhost login: root Password: root BusyBox v1.6.1 (2011-11-18 17:55:13 CST) Built-in shell (ash) Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands. # echo -e \x5A Z # mkdir -p /var/run/.zollard/ # cd /var/run/.zollard/ # rm -rf armeabi # echo -n > armeabi # chmod +x armeabi && echo -e \x5A # echo -ne \x7F\x45\x4C\x46\x01\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00 \x02\x00\x28\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00\xC4\x85\x00\x00\x34\x00\x00\x00\xB4\x00 \x02\x00\x02\x00\x00\x05\x34\x00\x20\x00\x04\x00\x28\x00\x0E\x00\x0D\x00 \x01\x00\x00\x70\x14\xFD\x01\x00\x14\x7D\x02\x00\x14\x7D\x02\x00\x08\x00 \x00\x00\x08\x00\x00\x00\x04\x00\x00\x00\x04\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00 \x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x80\x00\x00\x00\x80 >> armeabi This box (a Goldweb GW-WR401N) is wide open!
Stross (unfinished) Merchant Princes
I just finished reading the three volumes of The Merchant Princes Omnibus by Charlie Stross: The Bloodline Feud, The Traders War, and The Revolution Trade. Theyre huge. Theyre fun. There are more plotlines left dangling than at the Season-3½ point in Lost. Theyre good enough to have robbed me of considerable sleep. I started reading the series a decade or so ago as originally published, got bored, and left it behind. The story of how six blah books became three much better ones is long, and Id think really interesting to anyone who cares about how novels are written and sold; SciFi/Fantasy stories in particular.
Homeland shortlisted for the Prometheus Award
I'm immensely proud and honored to once again be shortlisted for the Prometheus Award, for my novel Homeland. The Prometheus is given by the Libertarian Futurist Society, and I've won it for my books Little Brother and Pirate Cinema. As always, the Prometheus shortlist is full of great work, including both of Ramez Naam's novels … [Read more]
CppCon 2014 Call for Submissions
More news about the first annual CppCon that was announced last week: CppCon 2014 Call for Submissions CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community and so we invite you to present. Have you learned something interesting about C++, maybe a new technique […]
CppCon 2014 Call for Submissions
More news about the first annual CppCon that was announced last week: CppCon 2014 Call for Submissions CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community and so we invite you to present. Have you learned something interesting about C++, maybe a new technique […]
Password Hashing Competition
There's a private competition to identify new password hashing schemes. Submissions are due at the end of the month....
Jake Appelbaum reads his Homeland afterword, with bonus Atari Teenage Riot vocoder mix
Two of my friends contributed afterwords to my novel Homeland: Aaron Swartz and Jacob Appelbaum. In this outtake from the independently produced Homeland audiobook (which you can get for the next week exclusively through the Humble Ebook Bundle), Jake reads his afterword at The Hellish Vortex Studio in Berlin, where he is in exile after … [Read more]
Compromising a BSD network
When I got up this morning, Yvonne's first words were We're off the web . How can I get her to distinguish between net and web? She was right, of course, and the logs suggested that something happened at midnight: 1395579442 2.02739 5 # Sun 23 Mar 2014 23:57:22 EST 246.622 ms 1395579508 0.539084 5 # Sun 23 Mar 2014 23:58:28 EST 927.500 ms 1395579571 1.35849 5 # Sun 23 Mar 2014 23:59:31 EST 368.057 ms 1395579716 0 0 hub w3 www.auug.org.au ozlabs.org ftp.netbsd.org # Mon 24 Mar 2014 00:01:56 EST 1395579806 0 0 hub w3 www.auug.org.au ozlabs.org ftp.netbsd.org # Mon 24 Mar 2014 00:03:26 EST Connectivity dropped to 0 (3rd column) pretty much exactly at midnight.
NSA Hacks Huawei
Both Der Spiegel and the New York Times are reporting that the NSA has hacked Huawei pretty extensively, getting copies of the company's products' source code and most of the e-mail from the company. Aside from being a pretty interesting story about the operational capabilities of the NSA, it exposes some pretty blatant US government hypocrisy on this issue. As...
Podcast: What happens with digital rights management in the real world?
What happens with digital rights management in the real world? Podcast: What happens with digital rights management in the real world? Here's a reading (MP3) of a recent Guardian column, What happens with digital rights management in the real world where I attempt to explain the technological realpolitik of DRM, which has nothing much to … [Read more]
Our newest book: Sneak preview at LOPSA-East
Strata Chalup, Christine Hogan, and I have been working on a new book titled, "The Practice of Cloud Administration". This new book is all new material focused on the design and operation of distributed systems or "cloud" computing. The book is two parts: "Building it" and "Running it". It is the sequel to our enterprise-focused book, "The Practice of System and Network Administration". If you want to see a preview, the only conference where you'll be able to get a sneak peek is at LOPSA-East. Otherwise you'll have to wait until at least September 2014 (we don't have the exact shipping date yet, it could be as late as November).
Isn't it time for an "Intro to Time Management"?
I'll be teaching my "Intro to Time Management for System Administrators" class at LOPSA-East. I haven't taught this class in ages so this is a good opportunity to check it out. The class covers the most important points of my Time Management for System Administrators O'Reilly book. Sysadmins have a time management problem: There are too many projects. Too many interruptions. Too many distractions. This half-day class presents fundamental techniques for eliminating interruptions and distractions so you have more time for projects, prioritization techniques so the projects you do work on have the most impact. It wraps it all into "The Cycle System" which is the easiest and most effective way to juggle all your tasks without dropping any.
An Open Letter to IBM's Open Letter
Last week, IBM published an "open letter" about "government access to data," where it tried to assure its customers that it's not handing everything over to the NSA. Unfortunately, the letter (quoted in part below) leaves open more questions than it answers. At the outset, we think it is important for IBM to clearly state some simple facts: IBM has...
Wil Wheaton reads chapter one of Homeland
Here's Wil Wheaton reading chapter one of my novel Homeland (here's the MP3, which I paid to independently produce for the third Humble Ebook Bundle, which runs for another eight days. I've loved all of my audio adaptations, but Wil's was a dream come true for me. He really, really nailed it. What's more, because … [Read more]
Wil Wheatons subconscious wants to melt some camels (?!)
When Wil Wheaton was reading the audiobook for my novel Homeland (exclusively available through the Humble Ebook Bundle for the next nine days!), I had the great pleasure of listening to the raw, unedited studio recordings before they were mastered. Together with editor John Taylor Williams, we collected some of the best outtakes, which I've … [Read more]
GPS collar for the dogs
While in town, took a look at what ALDI had to offer. Just what I was looking for! A Cocoon GT42395 GPS tracker, advertised as being usefulamongst other thingsfor tracking (presumably runaway) dogs. It cost $80, and I've since found it advertised on eBay for $250. Brought it home and took a look: How do I unpack it? That's not a package, it's a protective case, and it's screwed down, something they didn't think necessary to mention in the instruction manual.
Giant Squid as an Omen
An omen of what? An increase in the number of giant squid being caught along the Sea of Japan coast is leading puzzled fishermen to fear their presence may be some kind of 'omen' -- although experts think the invertebrate are simply a bit cold....
Pre-announcement
I'm planning on making a big announcement on Monday. Nothing earth-shattering, but watch this space.
New Book on Data and Power
I'm writing a new book, with the tentative title of Data and Power. While it's obvious that the proliferation of data affects power, it's less clear how it does so. Corporations are collecting vast dossiers on our activities on- and off-line -- initially to personalize marketing efforts, but increasingly to control their customer relationships. Governments are using surveillance, censorship, and...
Liveblogging the Financial Cryptography Conference
Ross Anderson liveblogged Financial Cryptography 2014. Interesting stuff....
Cory Doctorow: Das Urheberrecht sollte dem kreativen Schaffen aller dienen
Cory Doctorow on the Politics of Copyright from iRights.info on Vimeo.
Homeland audiobook: Wil Wheaton explains how Little Brother and Homeland make you technologically literate
The Humble Ebook Bundle continues to rock, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for a bundle of great name-your-price ebooks, including Scott Westerfeld's Uglies, Steve Gould's Jumper, and Holly Black's Tithe. Also included in the bundle is an exclusive audiobook of my novel Homeland, read by Wil Wheaton. I commissioned Wil to read the book … [Read more]
Stitching the Apostles, continued
I've continued trying to get the exposure consistent for my panorama of the Twelve Apostles. I sent a message to the Hugin forum a couple of days ago and got a couple of different suggestions: Terry Duell pointed me at this tutorial and noted that he had had good results with it; basically select Exposure fused from any arrangement in the stitcher tab. Yes, that made some improvement, but not as much as I wanted. Dave H (yes, that's all the name I have) had a different approach: lighten in GIMP before stitching. Fine, but that's exactly what I did, modulo program.
LISA "call for participation" is open: and boy is it different this year!
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa14/call-for-participation/ This year the LISA CFP is different both in content and form. This represents a big change for this conference LISA. There is less emphasis on academic talks and instead more emphasis on high-impact, cutting edge talks on what sysadmins need to know about today and in the coming 18-24 months. If you consider the changes over the last few years, soon LISA will be unrecognizable (in a good way) from LISA of the past. This year the focus is on 5 topics: Systems Engineering (Large scale design challenges, Cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, Software Defined Networks (SDN); Virtualization; HA and HPC Clustering; Cost effective, scalable storage; Hadoop/Big Data; Configuration management) Culture (Business communication and capital planning; Continuous delivery and product management; Distributed and remote worker challenges; On-call challenges; Standardization to support automation; Standards and regulatory compliance) Devops (Site reliability engineering; Development frameworks for Ops; Release engineering; API-driven ...
Early Bird Discount Reminder! LOPSA-East SysAdmin Conference, May 2-3 2014, New Brunswick, NJ
Just a reminder to everybody that the Early Bird Discount to LOPSA-East 2014 registrations ends on Sunday, March 23rd at 11:59pm - Register now before it's too late! http://lopsa-east.org/2014/register-for-lopsa-east-14 TALK TO YOU BOSS NOW. SAVE BIG MONEY. LOPSA-East is a regional sysadmin conference in New Brunswick NJ, May 2-3, 2014. Two days of world-class training on a diverse range of topics plus community-selected talks on everything from Active Directory to Code Review for Sys Admins! We have a very exciting lineup of tutorials and talks this year, you can find all of the exciting content at: http://lopsa-east.org/2014/schedule/ You can also take my "Intro to Time Management" half-day class, plus my "Evil Genius 101" half-day class.
Homeland audiobook behind the scenes: Wil Wheaton explains his cameo to the director
The Humble Ebook Bundle is going great guns, with a collection of recent and classic books from both indie and major publishers, all DRM-free, on a name-your-price basis. Included in the bundle is an exclusive audio adaptation of my novel Homeland, read by Wil Wheaton, who also appears as a character in the novel. When … [Read more]
Should RelEng also build be responsible for infrastructure?
Someone recently asked me if it was reasonable to expect their RelEng person also be responsible for the load balancing infrastructure and the locally-run virtualization system they have. Sure! Why not! Why not have them also be the product manager, CEO, and the company cafeteria's chief cook? There's something called "division of labor" and you have to draw the line somewhere. Personally I find that line usually gets drawn around skill-set. Sarcasm aside, without knowing the person or the company, I'd have to say no. RelEng and Infrastructure Eng are two different roles. Here's my longer answer. A release engineer is concerned with building a "release".
Should RelEng also be responsible for infrastructure?
Someone recently asked me if it was reasonable to expect their RelEng person also be responsible for the load balancing infrastructure and the locally-run virtualization system they have. Sure! Why not! Why not have them also be the product manager, CEO, and the company cafeteria's chief cook? There's something called "division of labor" and you have to draw the line somewhere. Personally I find that line usually gets drawn around skill-set. Sarcasm aside, without knowing the person or the company, I'd have to say no. RelEng and Infrastructure Eng are two different roles. Here's my longer answer. A release engineer is concerned with building a "release".
Keybase.io
Ive been fooling around with this for the last couple of days; you can find me at keybase.io/timbray. I think it might be pointing a useful way forward on private-by-default communication and, for what it does, it gets a lot of things right. The problem Wed like to be confident that the messages we send across the net email, chat, SMS, whatever are secure. When we say secure we mean some combination of nobody can read them but the person whos supposed to and the person reading them can be sure who sent them. In principle, this should be easy because of Public-key cryptography, which has been around for a while, is reliable enough to power basically 100% of the financial transactions that cross the net, and for which theres excellent open-source software that anyone can use for free.
Wil Wheaton has a surreal moment reading the Homeland audiobook
As mentioned yesterday, the DRM-free, independent audiobook of my novel Homeland is available from the Humble Bundle for the next two weeks, along with a collection of brilliant science fiction and fantasy from authors ranging from Scott Westerfeld to Holly Black. I commissioned the audiobook for the project, and paid Wil Wheaton to read it … [Read more]
New World Notes on In Real Life, the graphic novel based on Andas Game
As mentioned, In Real Life is a graphic novel adapted by Jen Wang from my short story Anda's Game, out in the autumn. Wagner James Au of New World News got an advance copy and had some kind words about the book, as well as its context in MMOs like Warcraft and Second Life. "Well, … [Read more]
More panorama strangenesses
Apart from the fact that yesterday's panoramas at the Twelve Apostles weren't overly interesting, there were a couple of other issues: firstly, I made the mistake of not getting the stretches of waves in any one image (something that I learnt not to do last year in Apollo Bay. That's obviously my own fault. But what about the exposure? The right-hand side of this image is far too dark: But that's not what the image said: Clearly I need to look more at exposure compensation.
¨Ëal The Wind Rises
Miyazakis latest is big and messy and disturbing and sad and very beautiful. We took two seven-year-old girls to see it because, well, Miyazaki; a mistake, this is for grown-ups. Its biographical and the protagonist is a real person: Jiro Horikoshi, most famous as the designer of the Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane, which dominated the first half of the Pacific-aerial part of WWII. The movie also has an earthquake, a Great Fire, an Italian count/airplane-designer, a tribute to Thomas Mann, a romance, and a fatal disease. Its also sl-o-o-ow. (Which is one of the things Ive always loved about Miyazaki, his willingness to take a scene, even one thats peripheral to his story, and let it run and run and run.
HOMELAND audiobook, read by Wil Wheaton, DRM-free, in the new Humble Bundle!
For the past two months, I've been working on a secret project to produce an independent audiobook adaptation of my bestselling novel Homeland, read by Wil Wheaton, one of my favorite audiobook voice-actors (and a hell of a great guy, besides!). The audiobook is out as of today, and I'm proud to say that for … [Read more]
We have CppCon?
I’m really excited about this event! Note that the first 100 registrations get a big discount ? pasting from the “registration” page: Regular registration fee is $995 but the first 100 attendees can take advantage of Super Early Bird registration and pay only $695. After that, the Early Bird registration fee is $845 and is […]
We have CppCon&
I’m really excited about this event! Note that the first 100 registrations get a big discount pasting from the “registration” page: Regular registration fee is $995 but the first 100 attendees can take advantage of Super Early Bird registration and pay only $695. After that, the Early Bird registration fee is $845 and is […]
La Barceloneta
Thats the official name I guess, but taxi drivers just say Barceloneta; its a little triangle of Barcelona enclosing Port Vell, the Old Harbor. Its not fancy but its nice, and its not like any neighborhood Ive stayed in before. I had a decent Airbnb on Carrer de Grau i Torras gotta love those Catalan names. I assume Carrer means something like alley ; here it is. I offer the night-time version first because thats when I arrived. When theres light, you can see the ocean at the end of the street.If you were here I could point out the place I stayed.
S&S Postscript
PS on the previous post regarding Stroustrup & Sutter: I had asked the organizers whether it would be possible to get a piano in the room. I just learned a few minutes ago that they will be able to arrange a baby grand. Sweet! This is going to be fun&Filed under: C++
Stroustrup & Sutter on C++: Mar 31 Apr 1, San Jose, CA
It has occurred to me that I never announced this event here& In two weeks, Bjarne and I will be doing a two-day Stroustrup & Sutter on C++ seminar in the San Francisco Bay area. It has been several years since the last S&S event, so Bjarne and I are really looking forward to this. […]
Podcast: If GCHQ wants to improve national security it must fix our technology
Here's a reading (MP3) of my latest Guardian column, If GCHQ wants to improve national security it must fix our technology where I try to convey the insanity of spy agencies that weaken Internet security in order to make it easier for them to spy on people, by comparing this to germ warfare. Last year, … [Read more]
Hyphenation Lessons
I just made a bunch of changes to the site here, which should make it run faster without visible effect. The details might be of interest to Web-tech and publishing-tech geeks. Plus, words on being sentimental about Perl code. The H&J history Back in 2011 I right-justified the text here, and for that to work you need hyphenation, which I did with Hyphenator.js on the grounds that it makes perfect sense to run this sort of publishing busywork on the Webs billions of underworked client systems, rather than on its millions of often-overworked servers. [Pop quiz: Whats wrong with that thinking?]
Community Data Science Workshops in Seattle
On three Saturdays in April and May, I will be helping run three day-long project-based workshops at the University of Washington in Seattle. The workshops are for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia, Twitter, free and open source software, […]
Strange shutdown behaviour
Shutting down the TV this evening was surprising: What went wrong there? It looks as if it was a lot of npviewer.bin processes core dumping, leaving a single dump file: -rw------- 1 grog wheel 427,184,128 15 Mar 22:19 npviewer.bin.core Surprisingly, given the lack of the final 4 seconds with no buffers dirty, the system did shut down clean. ACM only downloads articles once.
Yes, you really can work from HEAD
There is often a debate between software developers about whether it is best to branch software, do development, then merge back into HEAD, or just work from HEAD. Jez Humble and others make the claim that the latter is better. If you make your changes in "small batches" this works. In fact, it works better than branching. When you merge your branch back in the bigger the merge, the more likely the merge will introduce problems. Jez recently tweeted: which caused a bit of debate between various twitterers (tweeters? twits?) Jez co-wrote the definitive book on the subject, so he has a lot of authority in this area.
Enblend fixed!
Message from Rusmir Dusko on IRC this morning, asking me to close the bug reports against the enblend build failures. Sure enough, it seems that it has been fixed, or more likely, the vigra has. Took me several hours to bring my ports tree up to dateSubversion has had Yet Another Incompatible Updatebut at the end of it I finally had a working enblend on FreeBSD 10-RELEASE. Thank God for that! Now I can complete migrating eureka to release 10. ACM only downloads articles once.
Retina in Practice
My new 15" MacBook has a Retina screen, which I labeled a good solution to a #firstworldproblem . Now that Ive had the Retina-vs-not difference shoved in my face, I realize its more dramatic than you might think. On my desk at work is a Dell 30" monitor that Google bought for me back in 2010. Its right in front of me and most work happens there; the Mac is on a stand off to the side and I dont use it much except for telecons, hangouts, Skype, and so on. But of course when Im away from the office, Im working on the Macs screen.
Get a signed, inscribed copy of In Real Life delivered to your door, courtesy of WORD Books
As previously mentioned, Jen Wang and I have adapted my short story "Anda's Game" as a full-length, young adult graphic novel called "In Real Life," which comes out next October. Brooklyn's excellent WORD bookstore has generously offered to take pre-orders for signed copies; I'll drop by the store during New York Comic-Con and sign and … [Read more]
Security as a public health discipline, not an engineering one
In my latest Guardian column, If GCHQ wants to improve national security it must fix our technology, I argue that computer security isn't really an engineering issue, it's a public health issue. As with public health, it's more important to be sure that our pathogens are disclosed, understood and disclosed than it is to keep … [Read more]
The Web is 25
Were celebrating! I can remember, sometime in the early Nineties, being irritated when emails and Usenet postings started filling up with these new things called URLs , initially-awkward-looking agglomerations of slashes and colons and letters. I tried to ignore the Web till I couldnt and then it changed my life and then it changed the world. The change continues. We owe it a lot; what you get out of the Web depends on what you put into it. Disclosure Im hopelessly biased; I built one of the first Web search engines and benefited from one of the first Web IPOs and and consulted for Netscape and was appointed to the W3C TAG and became Director of Web Technologies for Sun Microsystems.
Snowden at SXSW: immediate impressions
Yesterday at SXSW, Barton Gellman and I did a one-hour introductory Q&A before Edward Snowden's appearance. Right after Snowden and his colleagues from the ACLU wrapped up, I sat down and wrote up their event for The Guardian, who've just posted my impressions: Snowden described the unique recklessness of an American intelligence agency undermining internet … [Read more]
Android: do I need it?
Just a couple of days ago I had more or less come to the conclusion that Android tablets were worth the trouble. And now I run into other problems: the battery of my tablet, just over 6 months old and always carefully looked after, is dying. What do I do? It's under warranty. Well, maybe they exclude the battery, but there are ways around that ( OK, then change it, and I'll pay for the new battery . Sorry, sir, we don't repair these things . OK, replace the tablet or I'll contact Consumer Affairs ), but do I want another of these tablets? In all likelihood it's a design fault that causes the battery to be overcharged.
N5-cam VI: Spanish Vistas
Since phonecams have focal lengths that are fixed and low, they ought to be credible pocket-cam replacements for wide-angle shots. But you have to worry whether they can handle massed details. Lets see. Last Friday I took a day off and visited Monstserrat, near Barcelona, where theres a Benedictine Abbey with a famous black Virgin. First, here are two photos looking down. The first shot is from a half hours (very steep) hike up from the Abbey; the second from the train coming back down. Im using the first shot as the wallpaper for my 15" Macs Retina display and it looks glorious.
Thanks, Cascadia IT 2014!
Hey Seattle! This year's Cascadia IT conference has been great! Congrats to everyone that helped put it together and attended. I look forward to seeing you all next year! (And since LISA is also in Seattle this year, I hope to see you all in November!)
New Mac Setup
In preparation for leaving Google, I wanted a new computer in time to make sure I could get all the non-Google stuff (pictures, blogging software, music) moved off my Googlemac. I got a maxed-out MacBook Pro 15" (16G RAM, 1T SSD) thus dumping an estimated $1,000 profit into Apples cash hoard. What did I get for it and how did I set it up? Ive been using OS X for eleven years now, have learned a few things, and theres a chance that some of the tricks here could be useful to others. State of the 2014 Art I got a Pro rather than an Air because I want the big screen, big memory, and fast CPU, mostly for photo-editing with Lightroom.
Punishing Peter Jackson
On a recent 10½-hour flight I watched The Desolation of Smaug. Now we have to work out how to punish Peter Jackson for this travesty. The movie extends from just after our heroes arrival at the Carrock to where Smaug decides to leave the Mountain and make trouble. Only Jackson took out a whole bunch of plot points that might have made excellent cinema, replacing them with bafflegab written by someone much less competent than J.R.R. Tolkien. OK, there are one or two good things: The palace of the Woodland Elves king, the heaped treasure under the Lonely Mountain, Smaug himself, and Stephen Fry as the Master of Lake Town.
V-Day
My friend Noah mentioned the game VVVVVV. I was confused because I thought he was talking about the visual programming language vvvv. I went to Wikipedia to clear up my confusion but ended up on the article on VVVVV which is about the Latin phrase “vi veri universum vivus vici” meaning, “by the power of […]
Android and smart phones: change of opinion?
For years I've been saying that smart phones are not worth the trouble. And now I have had an Android tablet for over 6 months. Have I changed my opinions? The first mention was a suggestion from Tom Maynard to take a smart phone to my greenhouse for identification purposes. My objections at the time were price, network coverage and display resolution. I suspect I was wrong in assuming that it would have to be a mobile network; I specifically mentioned the availability of an 802.11 network, but implicitly discounted it. And since then my assumption of a price of $800 has dropped to below $200, and the resolution of my current tablet is towards the low end at 1280×800.
Internet in 20 years?
I'm currently doing Charles Severance's course Internet History, Technology, and Security. Although I've been living in networks for decades, it's interesting, and it fills in a few gaps. One of the assignments is: Write an essay that imagines how the Internet will be different 20 years from now . That's an interesting thought, and so I wrote more than the 1000 word limit. There's nothing surprising there. I don't really see any killer app coming: it's more a social issue now. I think network speeds will stagnate somewhere between 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s, unless the unexpected killer app shows up. No more paper newspapers, few books, no more radio-frequency radio or TV broadcasts, few physical shops.
Internet in 20 years?
I'm currently doing Charles Severance's course Internet History, Technology, and Security. Although I've been living in networks for decades, it's interesting, and it fills in a few gaps. One of the assignments is: Write an essay that imagines how the Internet will be different 20 years from now . That's an interesting thought, and so I wrote more than the 1000 word limit. There's nothing surprising there. I don't really see any killer app coming: it's more a social issue now. I think network speeds will stagnate somewhere between 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s, unless the unexpected killer app shows up. No more paper newspapers, few books, no more radio-frequency radio or TV broadcasts, few physical shops.
Microsoft: no strerror ()
It seems that Microsoft space programs don't like to scare users with error messages, and when they do, they try to be as vague about it as possible. But a couple of days ago I got a different error message while trying to update dischord, my Microsoft Windows machine, something like: Can't install update: error 0x80072f78 The use of Unix-like 0x to represent a hex number shows that this isn't typical Microsoft. But what does the code mean? Why don't they have an error string, like strerror () returns?
JSON Redux AKA RFC7159
The IETF has just revised its JSON spec; the new version is RFC7159 that link is to the IETFs traditional line-printer format, Ive parked an HTML version at rfc7159.net for people who want to actually read the thing not just link to it. [Disclosure: I edited RFC7159.] Highlights RFC7159 cleans up some ambiguities and inconsistencies in various JSON definitions, none of which caused any real-world pain. More important, it captures industry experience about stupid things you can do in your JSON that are allowed by the spec but will cause problems in practice. If youre interested, I recommend opening up the HTML version and searching forward for the string interop .
4K monitors on the way?
For years I've been waiting for high-definition monitors to show up. 14 years ago I had two Hitachi SuperScan 813 monitors with a resolution of 2048×1536 (3 MP). That was the highest I had for over 12 years, until September 2012, when I got my 2560×1440 monitor, but I still don't have a monitor with a vertical resolution as high as that of the Hitachis. Now, finally, 4K TVs with a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels are coming on the market at prices people can afford to pay. Andy Snow and others on IRC pointed me at this page, describing the 39" Seiki SE39UY04.
A shampoo for Yvonne
Yvonne is also taking a large number of photos nowadays. Up until yesterday she had taken 8,523 photos or videos in less than 3 years with her Canon IXY 200F. Up to now she has been processing them with xv, which offers a relatively limited range of processing options. In particular, in view of my success with Ashampoo Photo Commander 11, I thought that I could migrate her to that as well. That required a number of things. It runs on dischord, my Microsoft box, so I had to set up a user for her and enable remote access. Here Microsoft's limitations are particularly apparent.
Podcast: Cold Equations and Moral Hazard
Here's a reading (MP3) of my latest Locus column, Cold Equations and Moral Hazard which considers the way that science fiction can manipulate our ideas about the technical necessity for human misery, and how that narrative can be hijacked for self-serving ends. Apparently, editor John W. Campbell sent back three rewrites in which the pilot … [Read more]
Cold Equations and Moral Hazard: science fiction considered harmful to the future
My latest Locus column is "Cold Equations and Moral Hazard", an essay about the way that our narratives about the future can pave the way for bad people to create, and benefit from, disasters. "If being in a lifeboat gives you the power to make everyone else shut the hell up and listen (or else), … [Read more]
A use for Ashampoo
Last night I took more silly photos of Chris Bahlo with the dogs. And I've found a disadvantage in my new Meike flash unit: though it recharges relatively quickly (about 4 s with NiZn batteries after a full discharge), the lower capacity means that the full discharge happens more often. In addition, lack of full charge doesn't stop my camera from taking photos when not enough charge is available. I need to check whether that's a camera setting, or whether there's something wrong. In any case, the result were some seriously underexposed photos. How well can I compensate for that with the processing?
Microsoft space strangenesses
House photo day today, the extended set on the first Saturday of a month. And lately I've been doing more and more of my processing on a Microsoft platform. The software may perform the required operations, but I never cease to marvel how difficult it is to interact with all of this software. Never mind that Olympus Viewer can't remember its settings from one minute to the next, or that DxO Optics Pro is slower than molasses and sometimes can't read directories: they all seem to have problems just hanging, and the lack of a window manager in Microsoft means that they can get in your way.
MWC
That stands for Mobile World Congress; it happens in early spring in Barcelona, and its mammoth; something like 75,000 people show up to wheel and deal.Theyre wheeling and dealing for big bucks; the mobile industry is huge and for four days almost everyone is here. Ive got no inside information on the nature of the deals the telcos make, with handset makers and antenna engineers and backhaul builders. But heres where they make em; almost every booth has executive meeting rooms , and one of the eight huge halls is nothing but hospitality suites and meetings. What MWC is like Big.
OpenID Connect is Here
Signed, sealed, and delivered as of February 26th. Better than that: In full-volume production at Google and Deutsche Telekom for a while now. Based on OAuth 2, which has been frozen since 2012. Not perfect, but Id call it one of the safer technology deployment bets you can make right now. Lets say OIDC for short, OpenID Connect is kind of klunky. The Basics OIDC specifies a handful of OAuth 2.0 flows; the most important result is an ID Token, which I wrote about last year; one of my favorite pieces of standards-ware in years. An ID Token is an assertion, signed by an IDP, that some particular person was authenticated for the purposes of some particular app.