A few weeks ago I gave a guest lecture at the Windesheim University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. Being a Windesheim graduate myself I’ve always kept in touch with my former teachers. One of them told me recently that a lot of students want to learn more about IT security & hacking and invited me to give a…
What if you’re not a superstar programmer? What if other people work longer than you, or harder than you, or have built better projects than you? Can you succeed without self-confidence? I believe you can, and moreover I feel that lack of confidence can actually make you a better programmer.
For most of us, the title of this post may not be very surprising. Any time we allow 3rd party scripts to run on our sites, we effectively relinquish control of the code that executes on the client. This is particularly important when integrating ad network scripts since they are inherently more dynamic than most…
Numerical Optimization is one of the central techniques in Machine Learning. For many problems it is hard to figure out the best solution directly, but it is relatively easy to set up a loss function that measures how good a solution is - and then minimize the parameters of that function to find the solution.
Although I made the move to industry a bit more than five years ago, I still serve on program committees and review articles for journals a...
Today I set out to the task of upgrading a set of views crafted with the React library. The upgrade was necessary because one part of a view using React stopped working in Chrome Version 48.0.2564.116 (64-bit). I don’t know why this happened, I didn’t find anything related to it and as it stands this was probably the…
Let's start with a quick quiz: Take a look at haveibeenpwned.com [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and tell me where the traffic is encrypted between: You see HTTPS which is good so you know it's doing crypto things in your browser, but where's the other end of
Michael Gove, the UK’s Secretary of State for Education, has expressed a wish to see almost all school pupils studying mathematics in one form or another up to the age of 18. An obvious quest…
My first design job was an internship on Microsoft OneNote in 2007. Our intrepid leader was the product founder Chris Pratley, who…
This is the state of Linux security. With the most important updates around Linux and open source security. From conferences to self-protection.
It’s not easy having a software superstar for a little brother. That’s something that Robert Garriott, president of Origin Systems , had more and more cause to realize as the 1980s wore on. Whilst Richard Garriott quite literally lived out his fantasies, it was Robert who was left to deal with all the mundanities of…
This article is a quick walk-through to gaining root privileges in the NetBSD, since it's so 90s you can play Captain Jack [3] , or [4] [5] if you prefer polish disco, just to feel the atmosphere while reading. Really, do it! ;)
In the summer of 2003, Brad Burnham and I set out to raise a $100mm early stage venture capital fund. We had both been successful VCs in other firms and we had a thesis that the second wave of the Internet was upon us and that large networks were going to get built in this […]
How to close patches for your open source project you don't want.
My blog about making and modding, 3D printing, electronics and other experiments.
On C++ Having programmed in C++ professionally for well over 10 years I have learned all of it. I have all the books, I know all the tricks...
Epistemic status: exhortatory and personal, but pretty confidently my true belief CW: suicide mention When I was a teenager, I was depressed. And the way I thought mental illness worked, the way I…
An oft-repeated fact on programming forums these days is that a decent optimizing compiler will always beat a puny human's attempt at hand-written assembler. There are rare cases, like MPEG decoders, where making good use of the SIMD instructions can allow assembly to massively beat the compiler. But generally you'll…
Moving a big software project to a new compiler can be a lot of work, and few projects are bigger than Chromium. In addition to the main Chromium repository, which includes all of Blink, there are …
It doesn’t have to be so thought out.
I've always held a fascination for maps; from my first days exploring the GeoDjango project, to writing clustering systems and map renderers, to my experiments in indoor 3D mapping .
