computing
Will Faught
August 2016
Why Some Diversity Thinkers Aren’t Buying Tech Industry’s ‘Pipeline’ Excuses
“Diversity thinkers”? Who comes up with that terminology? The pipeline is a valid argument because that’s exactly what’s happening. Anyone who disagrees ought to first take a look in the mirror: have you ever bought your kid a gender-specific toy? A doll for a girl? An action figure for a boy? Because if so, that’s the problem right there. The problem is you. The problem is social. The problem is parents holding their girls back by only giving them “girly” things.
coding computation computer science computers computing feminism npr planet money programming tech technology
1 minute
June 2015
1Password Is Ready For John The Ripper
Time to crack 1Password passphrases by number of words in the passphrase: 3: 2 days, 17 hours 4: 58 years 5: 449,528 years 6: 3.5 billion years 7: 27 trillion years 1Password uses PBKDF2 to achieve this. They recommended four or five words per passphrase in 2013.
1 minute
Toward Better Master Passwords
I’ve been making my passwords all wrong. You can find Diceware here.
1 minute
February 2015
While looking into Docker I discovered CoreOS. This also looks very interesting: CoreOS is designed to be a modern, minimal base to build your platform. Allows for very quick PXE/iPXE booting. Utilizes an active/passive dual-partition scheme to update the OS as a single unit instead of package by package. This makes each update quick, reliable and able to be easily rolled back. Applications on CoreOS run as Docker containers. Containers provide maximum flexibility in packaging and can start in milliseconds.
1 minute
Comparing Virtual Machines And Linux Containers Performance
Containers unsurprisingly perform better than virtual machines: The results show that Docker equals or exceeds KVM performance in every case tested. For CPU and memory performance KVM and Docker introduce a measurable but negligible overhead, although for I/O intensive applications both require tuning. Containerization can be IaaS as well as PaaS: Conventional wisdom (to the extent such a thing exists in the young cloud ecosystem) says that IaaS is implemented using VMs and PaaS is implemented using containers.
1 minute
November 2014
I really like the Bash prompt I use now. It’s just a $ followed by a space. The $ is green if $? is zero and red otherwise. If the current working directory is in a Git repository, the name of the checked-out branch appears before the $ in blue with a space in between. Red, green, blue. Simple and elegant. It’s great. function customprompt { EXITSTATUS="$?" BOLD="\[\033[1m\]" RED="\[\033[1;31m\]" GREEN="\[\033[1;32m\]" BLUE="\[\033[1;34m\]" OFF="\[\033[m\]" BRANCH=$(__git_ps1 | tr -d ‘( )’) if [ !
1 minute
June 2014
An interesting overview of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. I had no idea about some of this stuff. On optimizing the performance of trivial functions: If every use of such a function really required a function call, efficiency would be terrible. One solution is to make the compiler treat certain functions specially; another is to use a pre-processor to replace a “call” with the desired inline code. All of these solutions are unsatisfactory in one way or another, especially as another solution is so obvious: simply inline the function.
3 minutes
Go FAQ: The case-for-visibility rule is unlikely to change however; it’s one of our favorite features of Go. This is one of my least favorite features. Variables are so ugly: strconv.Itoa. Yuck.
1 minute
Go Isn’t So Parallel After All
Effective Go: The current implementation of the Go runtime will not parallelize this code by default. It dedicates only a single core to user-level processing. An arbitrary number of goroutines can be blocked in system calls, but by default only one can be executing user-level code at any time. It should be smarter and one day it will be smarter […] So, at best, the default Go runtime can be called non-blocking, but not parallel.
1 minute
May 2014
Tim Berners-Lee: There is a crazy notion that pages produced by scripts have to be located in a “cgibin” or “cgi” area. This is exposing the mechanism of how you run your server. You change the mechanism (even keeping the content the same ) and whoops - all your URIs change. […] […] “cgi-bin” and “oldbrowse” and “.pl” all point to bits of how-we-do-it-now. Says the page ending in .html.
1 minute
April 2014
Produce the binary representation of a float f where 0 < f < 1. Examples: binary(.5) produces 1 binary(.25) produces 01 binary(.75) produces 11 binary(.875) produces 111 Python 2.7: def binary(f): if not (0 < f < 1): raise ValueError('Must be greater than 0 and less than 1') symbols = [] while f > 0: f2 = f - 2 if f2 >= 1: symbols.append(1) f = f2 - 1 else: symbols.
1 minute
Examples: X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X Python: def diamond(height): if height % 2 == 0: raise ValueError('height must be odd') half_height = height / 2 for row in xrange(height): if row <= half_height: indent = half_height - row else: indent = row - half_height if row <= half_height: fill = 0 if row == 0 else row - 2 - 1 else: fill = 0 if row == height - 1 else (height - 1 - row) - 2 - 1 left = '%sX' % (' ' - indent) right = '%sX' % (' ' - fill) if fill else '' print left + right
1 minute
September 2013
Ben Thompson: With the loss of friction, there is necessarily the loss of everything built on friction, including value, privacy, and livelihoods. And that’s only three examples! The Internet is pulling out the foundations of nearly every institution and social more that our society is built upon. His blog is really good.
1 minute
August 2013
July 2013
Primary, Secondary, And Tertiary Directories
Linux distributions should stop separating things into the three directory hierarchies at /, /usr, and /usr/local. Just put all the binaries in /bin, all the libraries in /lib, etc. Why can’t that work? There’s no need to have files on separate partitions nowadays; it’s not like it’s running on a toaster. Probably.
1 minute
OpenSUSE Boot And Shutdown Scripts
If you want to run scripts on OpenSUSE when booting or shutting down, use /etc/init.d/boot.local and /etc/init.d/halt.local.
1 minute
July 2008
I’m going to puke if I read about “the cloud” or “cloud computing” one more time. It’s become popular in the past half year but it doesn’t describe anything new. Sometimes the computer tech industry has more ridiculous fads than fashion.
cloud computing fad life reflections
1 minute