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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Every once in a while somebody asks if they can run flak, and the answer is usually some variant of no, not right now, but maybe after I’m done rewriting it four times. Well, it’s been stuck at rewrite number 3 for quite a while, so time to push the button. Of course, putting code on the internet requires a place to put it, but Microsoft shut down Codeplex. Guess I have to build my own.

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Apple announced a new iPad today, so I bought a chromebook. Actually, I bought it a few days ago; it just happened to arrive today. It’s a 2 in 1 flip around touchscreen tablet laptop all in wonder. I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently on my other chromebook, but sometimes I wish the keyboard would just go away. And when I’m reading on an iPad, I wish I had a keyboard. Technology is all about convergence, right? Bring on the singularity.

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Sometimes I want to play a game. On Windows. On a laptop. That weighs three pounds. This kind of limits my options, but here’s a few games that worked out decently enough. Of course, some obvious choices like old school point and click games will run fine, but what I found is that even a number of retro pixel style games can be graphically intensive. It’s hard work looking easy.

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The OpenBSD 61. It comes at night.

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The hovertext for Friday’s xkcd Borrow Your Laptop asks for scrolling mapped to undo and redo. How hard can it be? There’s more than one way to do this, but the other ways are boring. What if we’re using a program that doesn’t allow rebinding keys or buttons?

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Whenever I plug an external monitor into my laptop, nothing happens. Then I run xrandr, and gears turn, and displays appear. Not too surprising. Whenever I unplug an external monitor, nothing happens. Then I run xrandr, gears turn, and all those hidden offscreen windows come screaming back. This is absurd, right? Shouldn’t my desktop software be, I don’t know, desktopping?

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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.

Who wore it worst?

The Post is pretty bad. Beware the scary glow in the dark hacker.

The Journal is less alarming, but rather useless. Hey, look at the tubes.

Motherboard skipped the tech and went with the meteorological imagery.

Ars Technica decided to forego their usual backlit keyboard gallery for some generic secret art. Inoffensive, but irrelevant.

And finally, The Verge comes through with a completely relevant image. An actual screenshot from the bug report.

Nicely done. That’s what real cyberjournalism looks like.

I found it hard to locate a good reference explaining how various hash attacks apply to password hashing. Somebody might reasonably ask how the SHA1 collision, or an extension thereof, would apply to bcrypt. Can bcrypt have collisions? It’s a strange question if you know the answer, but knowing that much requires synthesizing a fair bit of knowledge that’s not all in one place.

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