Blog Archive: February 2015
Balitmore area folks: Come see me this Wednesday!
As previously blogged, if you are in the Baltimore area, check out the Baltimore LOPSA chapter meeting ("Crabby Admins") on Wednesday, March 4th when I'll be talking about my new book, The Practice of Cloud System Administration. Even if you have zero interest in "the cloud", I assure you this talk will be relevant to you. More info here. (The meetings are at the office of OmniTI, in Fulton, MD)
Catching Trees
Recently, I wrote this about the Fujifilm 10-24mm ultra-wide lens: Im finding it hard to get comfy with. What I really need to do is go out for a couple of photowalks with just this puppy and force myself to see the kind of picture it wants to take. Here are some of those. Warning: Heavily-processed photos ahead. The street where I live is blessed with a variety of trees, including a few really big ones. Today we had a clear blue spring sky and it set them off nicely. With this kind of a lens you can stand right in front of a big tree and snap away.
ABS's 2015 Academic Journal Guide
The UK-based Association of Business Schools recently published the 2015 Academic Journal Guide (AJG) as an update to its 2010 version, sparking controversy in its press coverage . Following a study I've been performing on the impact factor of computer science journals for the past eight years based on the yearly Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge updates of its Journal Citation Reports , I decided to look at what has changed in the AJG from 2010 to 2015.
Photo backup: complete!
As a result of the problems I had with photo backups recently, decided to make a backup using rsync's checksum feature. Normally it goes through directory trees and updates files with a different modification timestamp or EOF; that can be done from the inode and doesn't require accessing the file itself. But that clearly doesn't help if the file in the backup file is corrupt (contains a zero block, for example). The checksum feature creates and compares checksums of all files, which is at least an order of magnitude more work. And it shows. Here the summary information for my last two backups: Sun 22 Feb 2015 17:03:16 EST Disk 6 Sun 22 Feb 2015 17:13:26 EST Photo backup ended Wed 25 Feb 2015 16:46:21 EST Photo backup started Thu 26 Feb 2015 21:58:49 EST Photo backup ended ...
Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System
Several problems in Distributed Systems can be seen as the challenge to determine a global state. In the classical “Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System” Lamport had laid out the principles and mechanisms to solve such problems, and the Distributed Snapshots algorithm, popularly know as the Chandy-Lamport algorithm, is an application of that work.
Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System
Several problems in Distributed Systems can be seen as the challenge to determine a global state. In the classical "Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" Lamport had laid out the principles and mechanisms to solve such problems, and the Distributed Snapshots algorithm, popularly know as the Chandy-Lamport algorithm, is an application of that work. The fundamental techniques in the Distributed Snapshot paper are the secret sauce in many distributed algorithms for deadlock detection, termination detection, consistent checkpointing for fault tolerance, global predicate detection for debugging and monitoring, and distributed simulation. An interesting anecdote about the algorithm is told by Lamport: "The distributed snapshot algorithm described here came about when I visited Chandy, who was then at the University of Texas in Austin.
Friday Squid Blogging: Humboldt Squid Communicate by Flashing Each Other
Scientists are attaching cameras to Humboldt squid to watch them communicate with each other. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
Data and Goliath Book Tour
Over the next two weeks, I am speaking about my new book -- Data and Goliath, if you've missed it -- in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. Stop by to get your book signed, or just to say hello....
Internet-fired elections and the politics of business as usual
I’ve got a new Guardian column, Internet-era politics means safe seats are a thing of the past, which analyzes the trajectory of Internet-fuelled election campaigning since Howard Dean, and takes hope in the launch of I’ll Vote Green If You Do. The Obama campaigns went further. Building on the Dean campaign, two successive Obama campaigns... more
Internet-fired elections and the politics of business as usual
I’ve got a new Guardian column, Internet-era politics means safe seats are a thing of the past, which analyzes the trajectory of Internet-fuelled election campaigning since Howard Dean, and takes hope in the launch of I’ll Vote Green If You Do. The Obama campaigns went further. Building on the Dean campaign, two successive Obama campaigns... more
House construction waste
While looking round the house, found this, not far from the front door: It's a Cat6 cable, of course, one that I had left in the room that will become the office. Why did they throw it out? It looks OK, though. ACM only downloads articles once.
RFC 7464, JSON Text Sequences
Heres a nice little RFC describing a nice little trick that might even be useful. Short form: People like to write JSON into logfiles. Text sequences make reading them easier and more robust. The trick You precede each JSON log entry with little-known Unicode character U+001E INFORMATION SEPARATOR TWO, and you stuck a newline (0xA) after it. This makes it easy to pick the byte stream apart into chunks you can hand your friendly local JSON parser, and cleanly survive the not-terribly-uncommon scenario where something blew chunks while logging and left behind a truncated/malformed entry. Im not going to reproduce the RFCs explanation; its perfectly transparent.
Everyone Wants You To Have Security, But Not from Them
In December, Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was interviewed at the CATO Institute Surveillance Conference. One of the things he said, after talking about some of the security measures his company has put in place post-Snowden, was: "If you have important information, the safest place to keep it is in Google. And I can assure you that the safest place...
Snowden-Greenwald-Poitras AMA
Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Edward Snowden did an "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit. Point out anything interesting in the comments. And note that Snowden mentioned my new book: One of the arguments in a book I read recently (Bruce Schneier, "Data and Goliath"), is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not...
"Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems"
New paper: "Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems," by Bruce Schneier, Matthew Fredrikson, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Thomas Ristenpart. Abstract: Revelations over the past couple of years highlight the importance of understanding malicious and surreptitious weakening of cryptographic systems. We provide an overview of this domain, using a number of historical examples to drive development of a weaknesses taxonomy. This allows comparing different...
Twitpic
On Monday, I asked Adm. Rogers a question. EDITED TO ADD: The question....
Blackbox now available via "MacPorts"
My open source project BlackBox is now available in the MacPorts collection. If you use MacPorts, simply type "sudo port install vcs_blackbox". There was already a package called "blackbox" so I had to call it something else. Blackbox is a set of bash scripts that let you safely store secrets in a VCS repo (i.e. Git, Mercurial, or Subversion) using Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG). For more info, visit the homepage: https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox I'm looking for volunteers to maintain packages for Brew, Debian, and other package formats. If you are looking to learn how to make packages, this is a good starter project and will help people keep their files secure.
AT&T Charging Customers to Not Spy on Them
AT&T is charging a premium for gigabit Internet service without surveillance: The tracking and ad targeting associated with the gigabit service cannot be avoided using browser privacy settings: as AT&T explained, the program "works independently of your browser's privacy settings regarding cookies, do-not-track and private browsing." In other words, AT&T is performing deep packet inspection, a controversial practice through which...
Getting back on the net
At 9:00 this morning we were still off the net, so called up Aussie Broadband support and spoke to John. Asked to be connected to Will or Ricky, the people I had spoken to on Friday. Will would not be in until the afternoon, and Ricky was on another call. I asked him to inform Ricky of the urgency of the matter and then connect me to company management. He didn't understand, and I had to repeat. Sorry, the whole company management had been at a fair over the weekend, and they had the day off. Technical support manager was on leave.
Cell Phones Leak Location Information through Power Usage
New research on tracking the location of smart phone users by monitoring power consumption: PowerSpy takes advantage of the fact that a phone's cellular transmissions use more power to reach a given cell tower the farther it travels from that tower, or when obstacles like buildings or mountains block its signal. That correlation between battery use and variables like environmental...
Usenix SREcon15: Now with more con!
Usenix has announced the schedule for the second SREcon and the big surprise is that it is now 2 days long. The previous SREcon was a single day. I wasn't able to attend last year's conference but I read numerous conference reports that were all enthusiastic about the presentations (you can see them online... I highly recommend the keynote). I'm excited to also announce that my talk proposal was accepted. It is a case study of our experiences adopting SRE techniques at StackOverflow.com/StackExchange.com. The full description is here. I've heard the hotel is nearly full (or full), so register fast and book your room faster.
Goodbye GoDaddy
perspectives.mvdirona.com Nov 26, 2007 Back in 2005, I maintained a blog accessible only inside of Microsoft where I worked at the time. Having the blog internal to the company allowed confidential topics to be discussed openly, but over time, I found much of what I was writing about might be useful externally. And I knew,...
Out of inodes again!
My photo backup failed again today with an out of inodes message. I had that only a week ago, and it proved to be incorrect. How could it happen again? It has nothing to do with the disk: this is a different disk. And once again the message was incorrect: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~ 42 -> df -i /photobackup/ Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/da1p1 3,814,654 2,449,390 1,327,117 65% 814,196 1,352,586 38% /photobackup So I umounted it and remounted it, and this time got a console message: Feb 22 15:25:46 eureka kernel: WARNING: /photobackup was not properly dismounted How did that happen?
35mm Seasonals
Just possibly I may have already touched here on the excellence of the Fujifilm 35mm F1.4 prime lens. This is just more of that, with illustrative late-winter/early-spring shots. This time of year it gets dark early. If you wait for good light to shoot, you wont get much. Or any light, actually. The world is full of photographic subjects, but all the most interesting ones are faces. This is my friend Michelle. Whats better than one face? A whole choir-load! Got a little lucky with the light here, but give the lens credit too. And then there was February sun! I was zoned in on these backlit roseleaves and then when I was processing the pic I kept having the feeling that the background was the foreground.
Barbecue at the O'Deas
Over to the O'Deas in Enfield this afternoon for a barbecue and to let the dogs run together: It's interesting to note how Leonid and Nikolai (¾ brothers) look so different, and Zhivago and Bindy (father and daughter) also look so different. On the other hand, Nikolai and Bindy look so similar that we sometimes mistake them for each other, despite the significant difference in size, and Zhivago and Leonid also bear a significant resemblance to each other.
Off the net!
Into the office this morning to discover that we had been off the net since 4:34. As always, Damn! No indication of any fault on the NTD. Had they decided to implement yesterday's change to a static IP address without telling me? Tried stopping dhcpd and setting the IP address manually. No go. Called up Aussie Broadband support and spoke to Aaron, who told me that he was only level 1 support, and that the level 2 people (including Will and Ricky, who had been looking at my DHCP issues) didn't work on weekends. Neither do the network people. It seems that I'll be off the net until Monday!
NBN DHCP issues: insights
Long phone call with Will of Aussie Broadband support today. We investigated a DHCP handshake from both ends. Here a summary, seen from my end: 13:36:08.117371 IP 180.150.4.128.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35, length 300 DHCPREQUEST on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 Other end: receive two packets send two ACKs. Neither arrived here. 13:36:15.118323 IP 180.150.4.128.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35, length 300 DHCPREQUEST on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 Other end: receive two packets send two ACKs.
Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - RAID: High-Performance, Reliable Secondary Storage
Disk arrays, which organize multiple, independent disks into a large, high-performance logical disk, were a natural solution to dealing with constraints on performance and reliability of single disk drives. The term “RAID” was invented by David Patterson, Garth A. Gibson, and Randy Katz at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987.
Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - RAID: High-Performance, Reliable Secondary Storage
Disk arrays, which organize multiple, independent disks into a large, high-performance logical disk, were a natural solution to dealing with constraints on performance and reliability of single disk drives. The term "RAID" was invented by David Patterson, Garth A. Gibson, and Randy Katz at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. In their June 1988 paper "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)" they argued that the top performing mainframe disk drives of the time could be beaten on performance by an array of the inexpensive drives that had been developed for the growing personal computer market. Although failures would rise in proportion to the number of drives, by configuring for redundancy, the reliability of an array could far exceed that of any large single drive.
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Can Recode Their Genetic Makeup
This is freaky: A new study showcases the first example of an animal editing its own genetic makeup on-the-fly to modify most of its proteins, enabling adjustments to its immediate surroundings. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
Man-in-the-Middle Attacks on Lenovo Computers
It's not just national intelligence agencies that break your https security through man-in-the-middle attacks. Corporations do it, too. For the past few months, Lenovo PCs have shipped with an adware app called Superfish that man-in-the-middles TLS connections. Here's how it works, and here's how to get rid of it. And you should get rid of it, not merely because it's...
Just announced: I'll be speaking at the BayLISA (Sunnyvale) meeting in March.
I don't get to California often so I'm excited to announce that I'll be the speaker at the March meeting of BayLISA. For more info check out their MeetUp page: http://www.meetup.com/BayLISA/events/219854117/ I'll be talking about our new book, The Practice of Cloud System Administration.
NSA/GCHQ Hacks SIM Card Database and Steals Billions of Keys
The Intercept has an extraordinary story: the NSA and/or GCHQ hacked into the Dutch SIM card manufacturer Gemalto, stealing the encryption keys for billions of cell phones. People are still trying to figure out exactly what this means, but it seems to mean that the intelligence agencies have access to both voice and data from all phones using those cards....
Another NBN outage
Another National Broadband Network outage today, from 13:38 until 14:04: 1424313521 27.3112 5 # Thu 19 Feb 2015 13:38:41 EST 36.615 ms 1424313662 0 0 hub www www.freebsd.de ozlabs.org ftp.netbsd.org # Thu 19 Feb 2015 13:41:02 EST ... 1424315071 0 0 hub www www.freebsd.de ozlabs.org ftp.netbsd.org # Thu 19 Feb 2015 14:04:31 EST 1424315092 0 5 # Thu 19 Feb 2015 14:04:52 EST 1424315153 27.2985 5 # Thu 19 Feb 2015 14:05:53 EST 36.632 ms Clearly a communication issue: the ODU ( Outdoor unit , i.e.
eBay: Losing the edge?
I've been buying and selling things on eBay for over 15 years, and it's still one of my main sources of many kinds of item. But note that still: you'd think that they're going out of their way to annoy you. Last June I had such problems trying to sell a camera that I gave up, especially as they have now restricted sales to Australia onlywhy? I also receive daily messages with custom search results. Once upon a time they were legible. Now they're modern, so when looking for Olympus lenses I get a display like this: What is that lens?
Database of Ten Million Passwords
Earlier this month, Mark Burnett released a database of ten million usernames and passwords. He collected this data from already-public dumps from hackers who had stolen the information; hopefully everyone affected has changed their passwords by now. News articles....
Bill Nye to Headline NECSS 2015
[This is not directly about system administration but it is of interest to many system administrators.] The Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) announced that world-renowned science educator Bill Nye will headline NECSS 2015. In addition to giving the conference keynote address on Saturday afternoon, he will be the special guest star of Friday night's SGU Skeptical Extravaganza (a special show open to both conference attendees and the general public) and sign copies of his latest book, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation. Bill will join the existing speaker lineup, which is quite impressive. NECSS is a four-day celebration of science and critical thinking held each year in New York City.
The Obsolescence of Submarines
Interesting article on the submarine arms race between remaining hidden and detection. It seems that it is much more expensive for a submarine to hide than it is to detect it. And this changing balance will affect the long-term viability of submarines....
AWS Certification for DevOps Engineers
One of our guiding principles at AWS is to listen closely to our customers and the feedback that I am getting about our training and certification program is very positive. Many architects and engineers know the Cloud is the future of development and IT and the are gearing up to be as succesful as possible in this new normal.
AWS Certification for DevOps Engineers
One of our guiding principles at AWS is to listen closely to our customers and the feedback that I am getting about our training and certification program is very positive. Many architects and engineers know the Cloud is the future of development and IT and the are gearing up to be as succesful as possible in this new normal. This is why Im excited to announce the availability of a new Professional level certification from AWS that has been high on the list of our customers. With the growing adoption of cloud computing, we see more of our customers establishing DevOps practices within their IT organizations as a way to increase IT efficiency, improve agility, and in turn innovate faster for their own customers.
LOPSA-NJ March meeting: Elastic Search
My co-worker Peter Grace will be the speaker at the Thursday, March 5, 2015 LOPSA-NJ meeting. His topic will be: "Systems Log Aggregation using ElasticSearch/LogStash/Kibana" For more info: http://www.meetup.com/LOPSA-NJ/events/220599343/ The meetings are near Princeton, in lovely Lawrenceville, NJ. Don't forget to RSVP!
IRS Encourages Poor Cryptography
I'm not sure what to make of this, or even what it means. The IRS has a standard called IDES: International Data Exchange Service: "The International Data Exchange Service (IDES) is an electronic delivery point where Financial Institutions (FI) and Host Country Tax Authorities (HCTA) can transmit and exchange FATCA data with the United States." It's like IRS data submission,...
Debugging photo processing scripts
My photo processing includes a number of kludgy scripts, mainly Bourne Shell. It makes things a lot easier than using Microsoft-space user-friendly GUIs, but of course there's room for bugs. Lately I've found that when I run the mkcompare script, which creates a web page comparing before and after running through an automatic optimizer, it presented comparisons with photos I had taken a couple of days before: a blast from the past. How can that happen? Simple, of course: I don't need the comparison page for more than a few minutes, so I create it in a fixed directory. But I had forgotten to clean out the directory before doing the image conversions, and since I use make, it didn't replace any images which were already there.
The Equation Group's Sophisticated Hacking and Exploitation Tools
This week, Kaspersky Labs published detailed information on what it calls the Equation Group -- almost certainly the NSA -- and its abilities to embed spyware deep inside computers, gaining pretty much total control of those computers while maintaining persistence in the face of reboots, operating system reinstalls, and commercial anti-virus products. The details are impressive, and I urge anyone...
Co3 Systems Changes Its Name to Resilient Systems
Today my company, Co3 Systems, is changing its name to Resilient Systems. The new name better reflects who we are and what we do. Plus, the old name was kind of dumb. I have long liked the term "resilience." If you look around, you'll see it a lot. It's used in human psychology, in organizational theory, in disaster recovery, in...
Apple: Monitor plug and play
Just before breakfast this morning, heard some growling from Chris Bahlo's direction. She had connected her Apple laptop to a Dell monitor, and the monitor didn't want to know. After breakfast we took another look, and by a process of elimination came to the conclusion that it was the operating system, which wasn't producing any output to the display. With some experimentation, she got it to drive the monitor (native resolution 1920×1080) at 800×600, but not higher. And the only resolutions it offered were 4:3 aspect ratio. Why? I'm not an Apple man, so I asked some of the renegades on the (BSD) IRC channel.
Zoom! Zoom!
In recent days Ive bought two new Fujifilm lenses. The choices werent easy and Im far from convinced I did the right thing. Have a look and see what you think. 10-24 Back before Christmas I bought the (take a deep breath, official name here) Fujinon XF 10-24mm F4 R OIS Wide Angle Zoom Lens. It was sort of on impulse; new job, Christmas coming, felt in the mood for a toy, stumbled across a great deal in a local camera shop. By way of background, its one of the few Fujinons thats outside the focal range of the two lenses I originally picked up back in March 2013, the 18-55mm and the 35mm F1.4.
New tutorial at Cascadia IT Conference, March 13, Seattle
Registration is open for the Cascadia IT Conference 2015 in Seattle, WA on March 13-14, 2015. Cascadia is a regional conference, but people travel from all over to attend. Why? Because it is worth it. I'll be teaching 2 tutorials on Friday and giving a talk on Saturday morning. The tutorials are: Time Management for Busy Devs and Ops How To Not Get Paged: Managing Oncall to Reduce Outages On Saturday morning I'll be giving a talk called "Live Upgrades on Running Systems: 8 Ways to Upgrade a Running Service with Zero Downtime". This will be a condensed version of what I taught at LISA 2014.
Spurious out of inodes
Ran photo backup this afternoon. The results weren't what I expected. I got so many out of inodes messages that the email message exceeded the maximum message size, so I couldn't find out how it started. How did I run out of inodes? Yes, I had specified far fewer inodes than standard for the disk. The standard assumes an average file size of 4 frags, or 8 kB. The average photo file (including thumbnails and other smaller images) is still closer to 1 MB. What did I see? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/21) ~ 46 -> df -i /photobackup/ Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/da1p1 3,814,621 2,449,845 1,326,629 65% 812,391 1,354,391 37% /photobackup 37% used?
5k: The Köln Concert
What happened was, I was gonna make the traditional Sunday-morning pancakes and bacon and, as I do every other week or so, told the eight-year-old to turn the damn cartoons off already because I wanted music. I threw the ancient vinyl of The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett on the turntable and all these years later, I kept having to stop making pancakes because Keith had grabbed me where you have to listen when they grab you there. The Context Wikipedia has the story, dating from January 24, 1975 (wow, 40 years ago). Its an interesting story and this sort of thing has happened more than once: Famous players, adverse conditions, fantastic result.
Disposing of old computer stuff
In preparation for moving house, I've already disposed of a lot of my old computer stuff, but some remains. Yesterday I found a Chris (surname unknown) on Freecycle looking for components, so I suggested he come along and help himself. To my surprise, he was really keen on having a lot of my old junk. Also gave him the laser printer that I bought 5 years ago. It still works, but it will soon need new toner. And then he looked longingly at my old HP field service oscilloscope. No, sorry, that's staying. After all, I only have 3 oscilloscopes. And when did I power the last one on?
Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - Exploring Complex Networks
After a year of absence I am bringing back the Back to Basic Weekend Reading Series. We'll continue to look at the fundamental works of Computer Science and Engineering, and other interesting technical works. We will start this year with a topic that spans many sciences: that of complex networks. It is relevant to everything from biology, life sciences, social sciences to computer engineering. There is no one better suitable to teach us about the fundamentals of complex networks than Steven Strogatz, the well known author and applied mathematics professor from Cornell University. You can find much of Steven's work on his personal website.
Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - Exploring Complex Networks
After a year of absence I am bringing back the Back to Basic Weekend Reading Series. We’ll continue to look at the fundamental works of Computer Science and Engineering, and other interesting technical works. We will start this year with a topic that spans many sciences: that of complex networks. It is relevant to everything from biology, life sciences, social sciences to computer engineering.
More OBD fun
Yesterday I didn't get very far with my OBD apps: Torque only worked in the Commodore, and OBD Car Doctor PRO didn't work at all, but was too polite to say so. But there are other apps to try. How do you start? The toyshop doesn't give you the opportunity to list them by popularity or price. On a real web browser, you can eliminate payware and apps with less than 4 stars, but they're still not sorted. The browser on the tablet doesn't even offer that, and appears to display fewer stars than the computer browser does. So I had to use two browsers and try to find correlations between the display of both of them.
Diagnosing the car
My ELM327 clone arrived today. It's a modern device, so of course there's no documentation whatsoevernot even information on the PIN I need to connect it (which, after some searching, proves to be 1234; why do they bother with PINs if they're all the same?) . So: what do I do with it? It's a Bluetooth connect, so went looking in the toyshop for appropriate apps. That's a lost cause, of course; I've never found a good Android app, and today was no exception. A Commodore forum suggested Torque, which comes, of course, with no documentation whatsoever. Found the OBD connector on the car (directly above the driver's legs, just forward of where the underside of dashboard ends) and plugged it in.
Kuchisake-onna Decision Tree
Mika recently brought up the Japanese modern legend of Kuchisake-onna (ãÂQs). For background, I turned to the English Wikipedia article on Kuchisake-onna which had the following to say about the figure (the description matches Mika’s memory): According to the legend, children walking alone at night may encounter a woman wearing a surgical mask, which is … Continue reading Kuchisake-onna Decision Tree
Silly Java Strings
Being a hyper-pedantic note about turning bytes into Java strings and a small fix for a smaller and almost-purely-aesthetic but ubiquitous problem. [Update: Heavily revised with a better solution.] [Most of the comments below apply to the original solution Id been using, which turned out to be sub-optimal.] So, its like this: Youve received some bytes over the wire and run them through a JSON parser and youre looking at a few of them that you know damn well are a field name in UTF-8. So, you say: final String name = new String(bytes); Then your perfectly sensible reviewer points out that its a Best Practice to call the constructor with the charsetName argument because otherwise itll use the platforms default charset .
Controllers are OK in ReactJS
The React community seems to eschew the use of 'controllers' within a React application. In fact, there is a tendency towards positioning React/Flux as an entirely new paradigm. As much as I am extrememly happy to be able to use React to build web apps, those of us old enough to have built desk-top applications are familiar with the notion of an immediate-mode UI (see blog post from James Long where he talks about retained vs immediate mode UI development). After having been involved in prototyping an application in React for a few weeks, it still feels to me as though there is a place for controllers in this universe.
Bucks County DevOps Meetup this Wednesday!
I'll be speaking at the Bucks County DevOps meetup this Wednesday. If you are in the New Hope, PA area, please don't miss this! I don't get out to Pennsylvania very often! http://www.meetup.com/Bucks-County-DevOps/events/206523752/ Tom
#ActualGameplayFootage
Good heavens, I started writing about Ingress in 2012, but havent since last July. Yeah, I still play, not obsessively but regularly. Im a greybeard so my bodys in use-it-or-lose-it territory, and as of today Ive walked 766 kilometres playing this game. Also, its enriched my life; see here and especially these pictures. But mostly, check that hashtag in my title; the thing is, I like to go outside and see things. #ActualGameplayFootage, looking out over Howe Sound. Operation Creek Slide What happened was, Resistance agent Ba1r0g got this idea for a nice big field two of whose three anchors would be way off the beaten track in places with little or no cell data, requiring cool network-engineering techniques, of which agents @Whydahlabtech and @NeddLudd have a rare command.
No future for you: cultural institutions cant afford to play along with pointy-headed bosses
My new Guardian column, Go digital by all means, but don’t bring the venture capitalists in to do it, is an open letter to the poor bastards who run public institutions, asking them to hold firm on delivering public value and not falling into the trap of running public services “like a business.” When you... more
No future for you: cultural institutions cant afford to play along with pointy-headed bosses
My new Guardian column, Go digital by all means, but don’t bring the venture capitalists in to do it, is an open letter to the poor bastards who run public institutions, asking them to hold firm on delivering public value and not falling into the trap of running public services “like a business.” When you... more
DxO and TIFF
From time to time I've chosen TIFF images instead of JPEG for the intermediate stages of my photo processing. That makes perfect sense, but it's not easy. Some of the issues seem to be related to DxO Optics Pro . Some years ago I discovered that TIFF images produced by DxO don't align as well as JPEG copies of the same image. Why? Then a little over a year later I tried again and got many error messages. They're still there. If I take an output TIFF from DxO and try to convert it, I get a large number of relatively harmless warnings: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~/Photos/20150204/orig 209 -> convert P2021583.tiff foo.jpeg orig: Unknown field with tag 50341 (0xc4a5) encountered.
DRM-free audiobook of Eastern Standard Tribe
Blackstone audio has produced a professional, DRM-free audiobook of my 2003 novel EST, a novel about jet-lag, conspiracies, management consultants, crypto-contracts and P2P that William Gibson called “Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar — a hard combination to beat (or, these days, to find)” Warren Ellis called it “just far enough ahead of the game to... more
DRM-free audiobook of Eastern Standard Tribe
Blackstone audio has produced a professional, DRM-free audiobook of my 2003 novel EST, a novel about jet-lag, conspiracies, management consultants, crypto-contracts and P2P that William Gibson called “Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar — a hard combination to beat (or, these days, to find)” Warren Ellis called it “just far enough ahead of the game to... more
New switches
A present in the mail today: Those are three 8 port gigabyte Ethernet switches, donated by David, surname unknown, but with surnom Carneous . That's very generous of him. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Dead backup disk
My nightly backup failed last night: mount: /dev/da0s1d: R/W mount of /backups denied. Filesystem is not clean - run fsck.: Operation not permitted How did that happen? Ran fsck and found out: THE FOLLOWING DISK SECTORS COULD NOT BE READ: 1953267040, 1953267041, 1953267042, 1953267043, What caused that? Trawling through the logs found no bad sector messages, only: Jan 31 21:04:08 eureka kernel: Device da0s1d went missing before all of the data could be written to it; expect data loss.
Text Editors for Freedom
The press coverage says Court Orders IRS to Release Computer-Readable Charity Tax Forms. Theres this guy Carl Malamud who runs Resource.org, which is in the business of making public legal materials actually public. What, you exclaim, Public legal filings arent already public?! Nope, not unless citizens can get full-text versions for free. This is the story of how I helped Carl (in a small way) to stick a small wedge into a wall of really stupid public-sector resistance to openness. Theres this law in America called 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(3)(B) ( E-FOIA ) that says (if I understand correctly) that nonprofits tax filings should be public, but that they dont have to disclose who their donors are.
2014s best science fiction and fantasy
Locus magazine has published its annual recommended I was delighted and honored to find that my stories “Petard” (from Twelve Tomorrows) and “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (from Hieroglyph) (excerpt) made the cut (both have also been selected for several of this year’s Year’s Best anthos, for which I am extremely grateful!). For me,... more
2014s best science fiction and fantasy
Locus magazine has published its annual recommended I was delighted and honored to find that my stories “Petard” (from Twelve Tomorrows) and “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (from Hieroglyph) (excerpt) made the cut (both have also been selected for several of this year’s Year’s Best anthos, for which I am extremely grateful!). For me,... more
Second-guessing car diagnostics
It's now been a week since my car problems, and since the following day we've had no indication whatsoever of problems with the car. We'll find out when my diagnostic interface arriveshopefully. In the meantime, I've been trying to guess what I might find. Looking back at the facts, we have: The car's electronics display the very unspecific message Check Powertrain . What does that mean? I'm reminded of the quote: Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design.
Super Stifado
My Super Bowl Stew has become a tradition, so I should share it. With some tech magic too. What happened was, eight years ago Prince played the Superbowl and I made a Stifado for guests, a Greek version of a fairly straightforward beef (or rabbit) stew distinguished by heavy oregano. I got the idea from a fellow-employees piece on the late lamented blogs.sun.com. I later refined the recipe with ideas from another foodie site, also now vanished, A Spoonful of Sugar (I think), dedicated to stews and suchlike. Anyhow, this morning two miracles happened; I was poking around the Internet not liking any of the Stifado recipes, when Lauren suggested looking in the Wayback Machine, and there it is: Beef Stifado by Paul Humphreys.