Previous post on rough code had some notes notes on a few of the issues we faced at ü2k15. I also collected some notes and links about utf-8 and unicode that weren’t directly OpenBSD related.
more...
The “traditional” way of writing a for loop looks something like this:
more...
On their better days, standards groups follow a principle of rough consensus and working code. Somebody builds something, announces it to some friends and maybe a few competitors, and says, hey, if you build something similar, it’s possible for our implementations to interoperate. Everyone’s a winner. Sometimes the design isn’t perfect, but the fact that at least one person/group has built an implementation is an existence proof that it can be built. Valuable knowledge to have.
more...
The recent fuss about f.lux on iPhone made me take another look at desktop solutions for shifting the screen’s color temperature. f.lux is only available as a linux binary, but there’s a program called redshift that may work.
more...
Or everything I didn’t know about unix. The OpenBSD source tree has lots of example code for solving any number of problems, but I like to do things my own way. Occasionally this means something gets overlooked. A few examples. Previous thoughts on rewrites and reuse: out with the old, in with the less and hoarding and reuse.
more...
A few funnies sprinkled with a bit of insight and disappointment. And regret.
It’s 2015. Your team has to wake up determined and put in one hell of a work week to get web pages to render slowly. And yet so many succeed. tweet.
My modest proposal: your website should not exceed in file size the major works of Russian literature. Anna Karenina, for example, is 1.8 MB. tweet.
If your design team insists on including a lot of Javascript cruft and CSS resets, make them write it all out longhand with a quill pen. tweet.
Two steps to better mobile design: 1) Make sure that the most critical elements of the page download and render first. 2) Stop right there. tweet.
If you’re a web designer/front-end developer, It may help to think of the fan on your laptop as a shaming rather than a cooling device. tweet.
The only honest measure of page load speed: time from initial TLS handshake to when the user has finally stopped closing all the ads. tweet.
More generally, there should be an attribute to allow non-designers’ browsers to only load useful images. tweet.
Astonished to find that a blog site needs a Bloom filter daemon and has Product Scientists. “On the web we want to stay close to the metal” tweet.
I move that the web get faster as computers and networks get faster. tweet.
“We aspire to simple, powerful, yet revenue-free systems that can turn a 500 word blog post into a multi-megabyte user experience” tweet.
All this and more also collected in The Website Obesity Crisis talk.
Replaced my 5s with the new top of the line, 6s plus. Kind of an awkward name. I propose 7P and 7Ps for the next gen.
more...
Skip the middleman to save time and money by simply telling your customers exactly what you would have told your customer service team. Simple direct communications mean nothing gets lost in translation. Not even funtioning.
Best of all, if they screw up, it’s their own fault.
One of the perks of flying Lufthansa even when not traveling to Germany is their extensive catalog of German hacking movies. Well, maybe not extensive, but since there always seems to be a new one and the availability of these movies off plane is about nil, I consider it pretty extensive. Infinitely more than Netflix.
A while back I watched Who Am I? which has an English title to tell you it’s cool, but is otherwise German. It’s like a substantially better version of Blackhat, with maybe some Ocean’s Eleven style misdirection elements.
The hacking seemed realistic. No cringing. There is (as I best I can recall) a good mix of online hacking, and dumpster diving, and social engineering, and plain old sneaking about. The hackers are motivated by a combination of curiosity, respect of their peers, and embarrassment of political foes. Then it becomes slightly more serious. Nothing seemed too outrageous.
One unusual aspect was the meeting of assorted blackhats on a dark net forum was portrayed by masked figures riding a subway car. More exciting than reading chat transcripts on screen, and I think it made a meaningful distinction that this wasn’t some virtual reality that hackers were driving avatars through. Rather, it conveyed more of a mental attitude. Close enough for cinema, and much better than trying to make IRC look like a 3D video game.
More recently, I watched Boy 7 which is kind of about a hacker, but then drives more towards Manchurian Candidate style mind control conspiracy. I enjoyed it a little less, and it wasn’t particularly original, but passable.
Hoping I get another good one on my next flight...
Another new laptop to play with, the ASUS Zenbook UX305 (or UX305F sometimes). I’m a little late to the party, these have been available for some time. Amazon had a $100 rebate off the regular price, which puts it at pretty fair price I think ($599). I was looking for a second laptop, one specifically to serve as a “second” laptop, to run Windows when I wanted, etc. My laptop lifecycle seems to involve running Windows for a bit, then eventually giving up and installing OpenBSD. I’ve spent the day playing with this thing, so here are some early thoughts. It’s not my intention to use this laptop as a primary machine (although one could), but I think I’ve gotten a feel for what it would be like. The Anand Tech review is more complete than here.
more...