In every off-season teams in every sport begin a strange ritual. Prospective coaches are flown in to meet with management about open positions — sometimes they convene at the stadium, in nondescript conference rooms, or the cabin of the owner’s plane. Whatever the locale, the scene is usually thus: The ambitious coach…
I was planning to make pulled pork the next day. That evening I set up the Weber kettle, got out the bag of charcoal and some chunks of apple wood, and laid everything out. Mise en place , as they say. I’d be waking up at 7am the next morning to light it up, and I didn’t trust my sleepy self to remember everything.
Computers store data as streams of bits. Binary files like image, audio or video files are allowed to contain just about any sequence of bits. However, we also often use text formats; for example, web pages and emails are required to be text. So how do we send images by email? How do we embed … Continue reading…
Understanding an effective way of sampling from complex distributions with 3d-demonstrations
For ten out of the last eleven years, I’ve lived in two places: New York City and San Francisco. The last two years have been in NYC. After founding Ursa Labs , a not-for-profit open source development group, I felt it was time to make my home somewhere that isn’t either of those places. After some contemplation and…
Chris Lattner, the architect of the Clang/LLVM C compiler explained the effects of the C standard’s “undefined behavior”(UB):
Mostly it's a testimony that it's possible to have a successful career in computer science without taking military funding. My position has its roots in the Vietnam War, when I was a conscientious objector, did alternative service instead of submitting to the draft, and joined the Society of Friends (Quakers). During…
I don’t own an Apple Watch. I do have a Fitbit. But the Apple Watch 4 announcement intrigued me in a way no other product has since the original IPhone. This wasn’t just another product announcemen…
I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...
Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS!
Quaternions are used to represent an orientation in 3D space. This article attempts to demystify the complexities of quaternions.
Let me assure you, the "fluxcapacitor" project is very interesting. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult to describe what it does. For this project I completely fail the elevator pitch .
(Updated 22 May 2020) This post discusses web security issues that I come across – so far thankfully mostly by reading about them. It is a work in progress which I’ll keep updating. The…
The U.S. Secret Service is warning financial institutions about a new scam involving the temporary theft of chip-based debit cards issued to large corporations. In this scheme, the fraudsters intercept new debit cards in the mail and replace the chips on the cards with chips from old cards. When the unsuspecting…
Emacs 26.1 was recently released . As you would expect from a major release, it comes with lots of new goodies. Being a bit of an Emacs Lisp enthusiast , the two most interesting new features are generators ( iter ) and native threads ( thread ).
Sometimes an insignificant interaction, or an excerpt from a book, is capable of provoking a life-changing insight. It might be an obvious lesson, but it feels epiphanic because it fits differently into my understanding of things. For instance…
React 16.3 added a new Context API – new in the sense that the old context API was a behind-the-scenes feature that most people either didn’t know about, or avoided using because the docs said to avoid using it.
Founding Stories Ignore The Most Important Parts of Starting a Business
Since February 2016, I have been participating in DIYRobocars meetups here in the SF Bay Area, wherein a bunch of amateur roboticists compete in autonomous time trials with RC cars. I had been doing very well in the competition with essentially just a glorified line-following robot, but have lately upgraded to a full…
DRUPAL Bootstrap Upgrade: MIKE IT
