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Glom – Restructured Data for Python
Thoughts on FOSS and fintech, layered by Mahmoud Hashemi
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RHEL is deprecating KDE
By a strange coincidence the news broke this morning that RHEL is deprecating KDE. The real surprise here is that RHEL supported KDE all. Back in the 90s they were entirely against KDE and put lots of effort into our friendly rivals Gnome. It made some sense since at the time Qt was under a not-quite-free licence and…
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The Mathematics of 2048: Optimal Play with Markov Decision Processes
Finding provably optimal strategies for 2048 using Markov Decision Processes
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Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic
I was conducting some experiments on how Googlebot parses and renders Javascript, and I came across a couple of interesting things about the way it does so. The first…
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Strace – My Favourite Secret Weapon (2011)
I’m often asked in my technical troubleshooting job to solve problems that development teams can’t solve. Usually these do not involve knowledge of API calls or syntax, rather some kind of insight into what the right tool to use is, and why and how to use it. Probably because they’re not taught in college, developers…
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Google Home (in)Security
TL;DR: An undocumented API in Google home devices is easily exploitable. This command will reboot any on your local network: nmap –open -p 8008 192.168.1.0/24 | awk ‘/is up/ {print up};…
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Why is Rust difficult?
Rust is considered difficult to learn by many people. Indeed, when I learned it, I considered it to be the hardest programming language up to that time I’ve met. And that says something, since I have a habit of learning whatever language I find interesting. Looking back, I’m not sure I was correct, C++ is probably…
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At least it wasn't Oracle
What it was like for relatively new Red Hat employee, Chris Short, during the IBM acquisition announcement and the week that followed.
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A Not-Called Function Can Cause a 5X Slowdown
Subtitle: Making Windows Slower Part 3: Process Destruction In the summer of 2017 I wrestled with a Windows performance problem. Process destruction was slow, serialized, and was blocking the syste…
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Ways to think about machine learning
Everyone has heard of machine learning now, and every big company is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. But we don’t yet have a settled sense of quite what machine learning means - what it will mean for tech companies or for companies in the broader economy, how to
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Javascript: call functions without using parentheses
A nice to know feature, good for impressing others
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How I Became a Knife Steel Metallurgist
Thanks to Jon Broida of Japanese Knife Imports and Anton Kudris for becoming Knife Steel Nerds Patreon supporters! When I was 16 I went with my father to the Las Vegas Custom Knife show. My interest in custom knives up to that point had been pretty limited. My father, Devin, has run a Damascus steel… Continue reading…
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Twitter's Secret “Guest Mode”
Twitter has an undocumented feature which lets you follow accounts without being logged in. Here's how I found it, and how you can use it. My crappy old TV has a crappy old web browser on it. One boring Sunday, I decided to see which websites worked and which didn't on a 6 year old browser. Anything using LetsEncrypt…
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Arguing against using protobuffers
I’ve spent a good deal of my professional life arguing against using protobuffers. They’re clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has. If these problems of protobuffers remained quarantined in serialization abstractions…
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New US Tariffs are Anti-Maker and Will Encourage Offshoring
The new 25% tariffs announced by the USTR , set to go into effect on July 6th, are decidedly anti-Maker and ironically pro-offshoring. I’ve examined the tariff lists ( List 1 and List 2 ), and it taxes the import of basic components, tools and sub-assemblies, while giving fully assembled goods a free pass. The USTR’s…
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You might not need Kubernetes
Why use something bloated when you could use something minimal.
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JavaScript fundamentals before learning React
All the fundamentals in JavaScript for learning React. Often React beginners realize that most of the learnings are JavaScript, because React has only a small API ...
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Is Rails still relevant in 2018?
Few days ago I’ve received email where I was asked for an advice from a web developer who was considering switching from Ruby to something else. I was asked ...
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Growing from 0 to 4M users on our fashion app with vertical machine learning
My name is Gabi (my bio), and I’m the CEO and co-founder of Chicisimo. We launched three years ago, our goal was to offer automated outfit…
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How to start a Go project in 2018
This post is fairly old. See the updated version Starting a Go project in 2023 Getting started with a Go project in 2018 is frankly a little more painful then getting anything else started IMHO. With …
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Why Searching Through 500M Pwned Passwords Is So Quick
In the immortal words of Ricky Bobby, I wanna go fast [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qJGsSuFRIg]. When I launched Pwned Passwords V2 last week [https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/], I made it fast - real fast - and I want to talk briefly here
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TLS 1.3 and Proxies
I'll generally ignore the internet froth in a given week as much as possible, but when Her Majesty's Government starts repeating misunderstandings about TLS 1.3 it is necessary to write something, if only to have a pointer ready for when people start citing it as evidence.
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The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm Explained
The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm teaches your computer how to riff. The algorithm takes in an archetypical input, and produces procedurally-generated outputs that look like it.