Documentation is good, so therefore more documentation must be better, right? A few examples where things may have gotten out of control.

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Why don’t unix commands have any vowels in the name? cp and mv are obviously devoweled standins for copy and move. But they’re less intuitive for new users. The user wants to copy a file. Why shouldn’t the name of the command be exactly the operation the user wants to perform?

What exactly does the user want to do? Instead of copying files, maybe I want to link two files. What does that mean? In unix, we have hard links and symbolic links. If I replace the “original” file, do I want the link to refer to the original file or the replacement? Or maybe what I mean by link two files is to combine two object files into an executable. Do we call that loading instead? ln is the name of a command, but link is the name of a concept. And sometimes the concept evolves over time. The linker is called ld because it used to be the loader. (I think.)

grep is a remarkably useful tool, but with a most unintuitive name. Why not call it find like Windows does? I want to find some text, I run find. So obvious. But some users may want to find files in the filesystem, not strings in a file. What command do they run? Probably locate.

There may be a great deal of historical accident in the names of commands (what if the inventors of awk had different initials?), but that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize the value of unique and precise identifiers.

Some reflections on life, the universe, and everything after posting 1000 links to inks. I started inks on a lark because one day I was annoyed with HN or Lobsters or something and it seemed easy enough to make my own cooler version, but there wasn’t much of a mission statement. Maybe Daring Fireball but without the fucking Yankees. It’s been a few months and 1000 links is enough to notice some trends and evaluate results.

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Another little adventure in web page rewriting. I wanted to use a few more go features, and make something that would work on at least a few different sites via the Host header.

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Last week I gave a talk for the security class at Notre Dame based on features are faults but with some various commentary added. It was an exciting trip, with the opportunity to meet and talk with the computer vision group as well. Some other highlights include the Indiana skillet I had for breakfast, which came with pickles and was amazing, and explaining the many wonders of cvs to the Linux users group over lunch. After that came the talk, which went a little something like this.

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Everybody is getting real excited about yubikeys recently, so I figured I should get excited, too. I have so far resisted two factor authorizing everything, but this seemed like another fun experiment. There’s a lot written about yubikeys and how you should use one, but nothing I’ve read answered a few of the specific questions I had.

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Back in November I subscribed to a few newspapers, the theory being that paying for a newspaper was the only way to save journalism, and thus democracy. Instead of choosing one, I just subscribed to them all, figuring I could sort it all out later. Here we are, a few months later, with the introductory rates expired, and it’s time to evaluate which of our contestants can advance to the next round. Our entrants are the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

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Is it crazy that a Medium post about javascript bloat would have itself have megabytes of javascript and stylesheets? I wouldn’t know, since I didn’t see it. I have a little proxy like service running that rewrites its HTML. This particular service was an experiment to replace some python code with go, to evaluate suitability for future hacks.

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In my ongoing quest to find the most inefficient software that still appears to work, I happened to notice that mplayer was chewing up 16% CPU while playing an MP3 (an audio format from the time before youtube). This was somewhat surprising because extrapolating back to the 20 year old computer I first used for MP3 listening, this would mean in excess of 100% CPU usage. Is efficient MP3 decoding really a lost art or was mplayer spending all its time doing something other than decoding? ktrace to the rescue.

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The Solitaire cipher is perhaps the best known encryption algorithm implemented with a deck of cards. Ignoring security, it has a few drawbacks. It’s pretty complicated. I can never quite remember the rules. Sure, with practice it’s possible to memorize, but ideally we want something easy to teach. It’s also pretty slow. Even with practice, the shuffling and cutting manipulations take time.

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