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Architecture For Loners
This has been sitting around in the drafts folder for a while. I’m not sure why I wanted to finish it off tonight, but I want to get all these half-finished posts done. This seemed like a good way to...
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The Knife Shop
In Tsukiji there’s a small, open-fronted shop called “Tsukiji Masamoto”, and it’s packed. The walls are lined floor to ceiling with knives in various wooden cases, row after row of every tool you’d...
View ArticlePractical Orthodonty
My dentist expressed some concern today that when he pokes my gums with a piece of sharp metal, they’re prone to bleeding. My observation that almost every part of me has that quality was not...
View ArticleInsecurity Theatre
Your new password must contain a mix of: uppercase letters lowercase letters numbers symbols symbols that are also numbers illuminati symbols hobo signs occult symbols (not illuminati) old girlfriend’s...
View ArticleA Beautiful, Momentary Friendship
For about ten minutes this morning I was in a beautiful relationship. I bike to work in the morning, and I’m pretty aggressive about it. I’m one of the scofflaw cyclists people who spend a few hours...
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Rogue Cryptocurrency Bootstrapping Robots
I tried to explain to my daughter why I’d had a strange day. “Why was it strange?” “Well… There’s a thing called a cryptocurrency. ‘Currency’ is another word for money; a cryptocurrency is a special...
View ArticleSocial Engineering
I gave this talk at FSOSS last week, in which I try to reclaim the term “Social Engineering”, so that it stops meaning “get the receptionist to give you their password” and starts meaning “Measuring...
View ArticleGo Home Yosemite You Are Drunk
anglachel:proj mhoye$ svn --version svn, version 1.7.17 (r1591372) compiled Aug 7 2014, 17:03:25 anglachel:proj mhoye$ which svn /opt/local/bin/svn anglachel:proj mhoye$ /opt/local/bin/svn --version...
View ArticleCandy For Children
My impressions of Android 5 are excitingly career-limiting, as you might have guessed from the title, but what the hell. A few weeks of using it has not substantially dulled my initial impressions, so...
View ArticleSeptember Never Changes
This is work-related; I’ll get back to the usual nonsense soon enough. September Is Coming It happens every year, a wave of students joining us in various fora hoping to make a contribution to an open...
View ArticleHostage Situation
(This is an edited version of a rant that started life on Twitter. I may add some links later.) Can we talk for a few minutes about the weird academic-integrity hostage situation going on in CS...
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“It Happens When They Don’t Change Anything.”
“Glitch in the Matrix? No, just that amazing San Francisco workplace diversity in action.” – @jjbbllkk “You take the blue pill — the story ends… You take the plaid pill — you stay in Silicon Valley.” –...
View ArticleOpaque Symbology
A collection of highway traffic signage unused pending an economical symbolic representation: Warning: Ornery Local Stereotype Completely Unremarkable Natural Phenomenon: 2 KM Something Will Happen And...
View ArticleCouch Gags Eternal
it rules that the simpsons is going to be on tv until every last one of its voice actors is dead — imogen binnie (@iphisol) September 1, 2015 There are only two of us left. The scripts and pictures...
View ArticleFailure Modes Of Novel Terminology
Somehow this has sat in my drafts folder for almost a year. At some point late in his second year, in that magical time when toilet training can be kind of touch and go but barreling around the house...
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Straps
I was complaining on Twitter that almost everyone who makes shoulder bags makes terrible straps to go with them and that it’s the most important thing to get right and nobody does and everything is...
View ArticleCatching A Moving Train
I made a joke the other day on the twitters that I was writing a job req, how I needed a way to say “Experience surfing on top of a relentless, multichannel, broad-spectrum communications avalanche a...
View ArticleThe Bourne Aesthetic
“The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can’t possibly go wrong is that when something that can’t possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to...
View ArticleBurning Down The Future
There’s an old line in the military: amateurs study tactics and academics study strategies, but professionals study logistics. It doesn’t matter how good your grand strategy is if you can’t feed your...
View ArticleThe Devil And Strong Crypto
Period scenery-chewing aside, this is largely how I feel about strong, backdoorless cryptography. When the last wires were tapped, your last passwords broken and the State finally turns on you, how...
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