“Taco Bell Programming” is the idea that we can solve many of the problems we face as software engineers with clever reconfigurations of the same basic Unix tools. The name comes from the fact that every item on the menu at Taco Bell, a company which generates almost $2 billion in revenue annually, is simply a…
This is #1 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Welcome.Previous post (#0): Stack Overflow: A Technical DeconstructionNext post...
This year (2016) I accepted as much incident response work as I could. I spent about 300 hours responding to security incidents and data…
A hands-on Docker tutorial covering containers, Dockerfiles, Compose, multi-container apps, and deployment to AWS.
Apple's not in trouble (yet) but here's how Cupertino can get its mojo back
I've never been plagued by the big existential questions. You know, like What's my purpose? or What does it all mean?
In hope that public disclosure will encourage Google to fix this, despite refusing to, here goes...
Update (2016-10-07): The official FAQ has an entry for this exact problem now. I'll leave this post as more curiously minded people.
In May last year, a new attack on the Diffie Hellman algorithm was released, called Logjam . At the time, I was working on a security team, so it was our responsiblity to check that none of our servers would be affected. We ran through our TLS config and decided it was safe, but also needed to check that our SSH…
Disclaimer: I'm digging Rust. I lost my hunger for programming from doing too many sad commercial projects. And now it's back. You rock, Rust!
ICQ is turning 20 (and that is no small potatoes). A whole generation has already grown up with the forerunner of all messengers. For this…
The Rule of 72 is a great mental math shortcut to estimate the effect of any growth rate, from quick financial calculations to population estimates. Here’s…
Firing People: a talk about firing people, by Zach Holman.
The x86 instruction set architecture is at the heart of CPU s that power our home computers and remote servers for over two decades. Being able to read and write code in low-level assembly language is a powerful skill to have. It enables you to write faster code, use machine features unavailable in C, and…
Thursday, September 22nd 2016. An email popped up in my inbox. Subject: ares_create_query OOB write As one of the maintainers of the c-ares project I'm receiving mails for suspected security problems in c-ares and this was such a one. In this case, the email with said subject came from an individual who had reported a…
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
