There’s an article Change the World in the May 27th New Yorker. (Two kids with weird looking lollipops or something on the cover.) Covers the intersection and interaction between Silicon Valley and the world of politics. It’s an awesome article because it confirms all my opinions of the Web 2.0 tech scene. Worth reading the whole thing online, but here’s some highlights and scattered thoughts of my own.
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Everything that is wrong with the rest of this country, succinctly represented on one map. This one is also pretty good. I can absolutely confirm this one as well. Some people just don’t know how to talk.
Nothing too surprising for anyone who’s talked to people from different parts of the country, but this is the best visual representation I’ve seen.
A long time ago, OpenBSD added bcrypt, a function to securely (slowly) hash a password. Sometime later, a similar but more general standardized password -> hash function was developed, PKCS #5 PBKDF2. How that winner of a name caught on but bcrypt didn’t is a mystery to me.
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While working on boehm-gc, kurt ran into a threaded test case that sometimes got stuck, spinning on the sched_yield system call. In theory, yielding allows other processes to run, but on an otherwise idle machine, it just ends up using all the CPU itself, in a futile effort to not run. This initially looked like a case of trying to recursively acquire a spinlock (not supported) somewhere in the guts of librthread. Peering at the test case, this seemed a reasonable explanation (it was doing some twisty stuff, creating a new thread in a dying thread’s thread specific data destructor), but further inspection revealed that librthread is careful to release its internal locks before calling the destructor. The bug remains a mystery.
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We keep remaking old movies. Why doesn’t anybody rewrite old books?
AP English was like 900 years ago. Whatever The Great Gatsby is supposed to be about, I’m sure I didn’t care. And if I had cared, I lacked the perspective to appreciate it. Does anybody in high school care about somebody who forgets it’s his 30th birthday?
Before Sam Waterston was a big deal district attorney, he was a lowly bond salesman trying to make it in the big city. Follows the book fairly closely as far as I can tell.
Leonardo DiCaprio. Great Gatsby or Greatest Gatsby? I honestly think he’s better cast than Redford (more urbane than folksy charm). However, Redford played the part with more cool confidence, which is how I’d like to think of Gatsby, but DiCaprio may be closer to the book? Hard to tell.
Don’t think I’ve seen a more anachronistic movie. If it’s necessary to freshen things up, then just go for the full effect as in Romeo + Juliet, but don’t overlay a 1920s period piece with Jay-Z and electronic beats. Or completely tacky Moet product placement. If you need an original soundtrack, I think sticking with Lana Del Rey wouldn’t have been so bad, and then I could overlook lesser transgressions (I find it unlikely that Carraway would be unpacking Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, even if he did have aspirations as an author).
Complaints aside, probably close enough to the book to pass English class, too.
Apparently Gatsby didn’t sell well in Fitzgerald’s life. Would a modern rewrite do better today, when the only decent character in the story is selling bonds on Wall St.? Yeah, right. Maybe The Bonfire of the Vanities is that rewrite.
Regarding Mr. Ripley and morality, a point of view about the meaning of evil from BBC Magazine.
This was a great issue with more than a few worthy articles. A strong technology focus (apparently the “Innovators Issue“). Gears and conveyor belts and falling apples on the cover.
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Here’s a fun game I sometimes play on OpenBSD. Pick a directory under src and see what’s in it. (ok, it’s not Skyrim, but it’s also free to play.) I recently switched from being an i386 holdout to running amd64 and so this seemed like a good time to see what’s hiding under the libarch directory. libarch is an assortment of code specific to each platform that’s wrapped up in a convenient place, even though it’s completely unportable. What surprises will we find in the amd64 subdirectory of libarch?
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Got the new Roku 3. I had the very first original Roku (video player) from not long after it came out, then the upgraded XD model which honestly changed just about nothing. The model 3 is significantly improved.
It’s much faster. This shouldn’t have been an issue (how hard is it to scroll a few thumbnails? why was that slow?), but in any case it’s much snappier.
The remote uses radio instead of infrared. Major usability improvement. Worth the price of admission on its own? Maybe.
Very small. Meh. The previous models were hardly consuming too much space.
The USB port works well with a hard drive of movies (other previous models had them, but not mine), and is more convenient than turning on one of the other USB video playing devices.
Roku the company is in a precarious position. There are so many devices plugged into my TV it needs an HDMI switch. Every one of them is Netflix and Hulu and whatever capable. What use is a device that can only do streaming video? Because, for now, they do it better, mostly by being always on. If the PS4 comes with a 4W always on mode that can stream video, Roku is going to be in serious trouble.
According to The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7 Chapter 2 (POSIX), there is a very narrow list of functions which are safe to call in a signal handler. This list appears in section 2.4.3 and notably omits strcpy and all the other str functions. But there’s a workaround.
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Here’s a new twist on password hashing schemes. The Honeywords Project introduces what I think is an interesting, but ultimately futile, approach to password security. There’s a paper linked that describes the scheme (worth reading) and an FAQ that doesn’t answer any questions I or anyone interested in the scheme is likely to ask (not worth reading).
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