Talking about “types”
My essay “In Search of Types” attempts to be a dispassionate review of some of the different concepts, purposes and attitudes surrounding the word “type” in programming. I imagine that my passions are still rather thinly veiled in places. But in this post I'm going to come out with a more unabashedly ranty take…
Sony and Panasonic announce the Archival Disc format
Tokyo, Japan - March 10, 2014 - Sony Corporation ("Sony") and Panasonic Corporation ("Panasonic") today announced that they have formulated "Archival Disc", a new standard for professional-use, next-generation optical discs, with the objective of expanding the market for long-term digital data storage.
You can't dig upwards
When I first learned to drive a car, shortly after turning 15, my mother insisted that I learn on my father’s Mazda Miata: a silver, two-door convertible with a soft-top roof.
What makes for a stable marriage?
Randy Olson reviews a research paper that outlines what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S.
Why browse the Web in Emacs? (2008)
“Are you browsing Slashdot in Emacs?”, W- asked me after he glanced at my screen.
Don't Trust Google (2002)
Many people have been writing about Google this week - either in response to the Newsweek cover story , or to the recent Wired article about Google’s growing pains, and its happy motto: “Don’t be evil”.
Escaping the Safari sandbox with a kernel GPU bug
Posted by Ian BeerTL;DRAn OS X GPU driver trusted a user-supplied kernel C++ object pointer and c...
Craig Gentry named MacArthur Fellow for work on fully homomorphic encryption
Fueling a revolution in cryptography and theoretical computer science through his breakthroughs in fully homomorphic encryption, leading to the possibility of more secure cloud computing.
Bash bug: the other two RCEs, or how we chipped away at the original fix
The patch that implements a prefix-based way to mitigate vulnerabilities in bash function exports has been out since last week and has been...
Careful with that Buffer
Last week I was sorting through several sets of Microsoft C 5.1 disks from 1988 (more about that later). While I was comparing the disk images to see whether the disks were the same or not, despite different labels and part numbers, I did a double take when I realized that a file with random e-mail fragments was, in…
The Log: An Epic Software Engineering Article
There's some sort of inflection point where a "long read" becomes an "epic article." I'm not quite sure where that inflection point is, bu...
Target Hackers Broke in via HVAC Company
Last week, Target told reporters at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters that the initial intrusion into its systems was traced back to network credentials that were stolen from a third party vendor. Sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the vendor in question was a refrigeration, heating and air conditioning…
Python on Wheels
A quick overview into wheel based Python deployments.
Ultima IV
There’s lots of somethings to be said for sheer audacity in art, for a willingness to stick your neck out and give your audience something they never, ever expected from you. I think sometimes about how the first folks who listened to Revolver must have felt when the erstwhile cuddly Fab Four unleashed the…
A Critique of “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture”
I enjoyed Brian Chesky’s recent post Don’t Fuck Up The Culture, where he proclaims to the employees of Airbnb the importance of culture in everything they do. I like Airbnb and it’…
Architecture of a Real World Haskell Application
There were numerous posts on reddit, SO and the like which were asking for how to architect real world Haskell applications. Well, this is my go at it for an in-house testing tool which is used extensively. I would not claim myself an advanced Haskeller, some of the code is probably not idiomatic Haskell (and also…