Blog & Notes
December 2015
- C64 gets Wi-Fi. Finally.
- Docker and root privileges. Wow.
- CVE-2015-8370 is Bug of the Year 2015. Goto fail, Grub2.
- Just as a reminder: EFF has put up a great resource on Surveillance Self Defense (SSD).
November 2015
- Welcome to the wonderful world of Finite State Transducers. Read up on the journey on how they (and a few tricks) brought a 100x speedup of fuzzy queries to Lucene.
- The Internet is dying. All the curiosity described in The Hacker Manifesto, written nearly 30 years ago, is slowly being strangled by regulation, corrupted by politics and replaced by echo chambers masquerading as social networks.
- A 12701 character regexp to check for divisibility by 7.
- Gareth Bale stops driving sports cars. Because: Hamstrings.
- Common Crawl: If you ever need a large corpus of crawl data.
- “With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.” Remember The Twelve Networking Truths (according to IETF)?
- Two nobel prize winners, George Akerlof and Rober Shiller, sum up what's wrong in the world in their new book Phishing for Phools.
- The Advertising Bubble. It's gonna blow.
- 16 bit vs. 8 bit audio: Can you hear the difference? No, you can't.
October 2015
- The volkswagen package detects when your tests are being run in a CI server, and makes them pass. Also: phpunit-vw.
- Just 3 more months to go… Death to IE (at least version < 11). Finally.
- Relive 9/11 with your Oculus Rift: 08h46.
- Dynamics.js: JavaScript library to create physics-based animations.
- Ways to think about cars by Benedict Evans.
- Abusing Unicode: Mimic is pure hell.
- The world has gone mad, part 8173: Investing in lawsuits.
- Web development finally found WndProc. Everything old is new again, and people go “yay”.
- What Happens Next Will Amaze You. Maciej Cegłowski. Also: Haunted by Data.
- “The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they'll figure out how to do it. They don't need to be managed at all. … What they need is a common vision. And that's what leadership is. You need to articulate that, and get a consensus on a common vision. … We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did. But not necessarily those seasoned professionals. Who had, on the tips of their fingers and in their passion, the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that technology. … The neatest thing that happens is that when you build a core group of, say 10 great people, it becomes self-policing as to who they let into their group.”—Steve Jobs
- Probably everybody has heard of Moore's Law. But there is a very different mechanism at work coined “Eroom's Law” that states that it gets (exponentially) harder to innovate on pharmaceuticals. Interesting that there isn't even a Wikipedia article about it. You can find the original article on Nature and many describing the effect in their own words.
- Unfit Bits, or: How to spoof your fitness tracker.
September 2015
[W,s,v] = svd((repmat(sum(x.*x,1),size(x,1),1).*x)*x');- I didn't know there was a name for this. “Conversational narcissism is a term used by sociologist Charles Derber in his book, The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life. Derber observed that the social support system in America is relatively weak, and this leads people to compete mightily for attention. In social situations, they tend to steer the conversation away from others and toward themselves. "Conversational narcissism is the key manifestation of the dominant attention-getting psychology in America," he wrote. "It occurs in informal conversations among friends, family and coworkers. The profusion of popular literature about listening and the etiquette of managing those who talk constantly about themselves suggests its pervasiveness in everyday life."“
- Windows sounds ambient, if you just slow it down by... say 4000%.
- E. M. Forster was right on track to describe the early 21st century in The Machine Stops (Wikipedia).
August 2015
- Streaming music is ripping you off and what to do about it.
- “Enlightened Imagination for Citizens” by Alan Kay.
- Signal vs. Noise is still full of little gems like The difference between time and attention, Fire the workaholics, or A good day's work.
- Keep Learning. A nice collection of web sites that foster learning and creativity.
- Kelsey MC2: This is how Rallye cars should look and sound.
- The state of Windows in 2015. Just when you thought MS was back on track they disappoint you big time. What are they even thinking?!
- Oliver Sacks died on 30th Aug 2015… Anonther genius gone. R.I.P. A reading list.
- Go 1.5 is out. Go makes me happy as a programmer. It's rock solid and down-to-earth and that's really something you don't get too often in the hype-driven and almost hysteric tech industry.
- Public datasets on Amazon.
- Netflix Falcor is a JSON model graph library. These kinds of things come up a lot lately, see Facebook Relay with GraphQL.
July 2015
- Thinknum is GitHub for the financial analyst.
- Mobile is eating the world by Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz.
- “Spending money you don't have for things you don't need to impress people you don't like.”—Walter Slezak (Wikiquote).
- The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction. Highly recommended reading!
- There's a recent trend towards Material Design frameworks, e.g. MUICSS and now Material Design Lite by Google.
- How enterprise sales of software works, in a nutshell.
- “Lorem Ipsum has had a good run. Let’s replace it with data.”—Pure UI
- No backdoors for governments. 14 of the world's leading cryptographers and computer scientists publish a paper describing their insights.
- Caddy: The HTTP/2 webserver made for humans.
- “Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace!”—Maciej at its best
- “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge”—widely attributed to Stephen Hawking, but likely from historian Daniel J. Boorstin.
June 2015
May 2015
- RFC7540: HTTP/2 is now an official standard.
- The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car: “After 1.7 million miles we’ve learned a lot — not just about our system but how humans drive, too.”
- How Bohr, de Hevesy and others saved Nobel Prize Medals in the 2nd World War: Dissolve my Nobel Prize. Fast!
- Lovecraft. Oh my.
- Shane Koyczan: To This Day ... for the bullied and beautiful
- CurveCP: Usable security for the Internet
- “I’m not young enough to know everything.”—Oscar Wilde
- A distributed RW mutex for Go. Nifty.
- “Unsichtbar wird die Dummheit, wenn sie genügend große Ausmaße angenommen hat.”—Bertolt Brecht (zugeschrieben). Aus dem Vortrag Schwarmdummheit von Gunter Dueck bei der re:publica 2015.
April 2015
- Chocolatey. yum for Windows.
- Analyzing the chord progressions of 25000 songs
- I think I'm experiencing the Osborne Effect.
- The Machines Are Coming. It will happen eventually.
- Read The Society of Mind from Marvin Minsky online.
- Yes. You can catch insanity.
- I learned a lot, today.
March 2015
- grpc looks interesting for some of my use cases.
- ASCIIFlow, for drawing ASCII diagrams.
- Two very creative security issues: Reconstructing frame buffers from VRAM and Exploiting DRAM rowhammer bug to gain kernel privileges.
- Richard Hamming (yes, THAT Hamming): Video series on Learning to learn.
February 2015
- Just found that Thomas Piketty did a talk at TEDSalon Berlin 2014. After all these years, TED is still great. How schools kill creativity by Ken Robinson is still one my favorite talks ever.
- Mathe Blog der Zeit (German)
- gokit. Let's see.
- #DaftPunKonsole. Yay!
- Dark patterns in user interfaces
- “What should happen to your photos, emails and documents when you stop using your account? Google puts you in control.“ The Inactive Account Manager.
- Dashing: An exceptionally handsome dashboard framework.
- These SASS Guidelines make perfect sense for my projects. I tend to follow these.
January 2015
- For reference: The SSL/TLS handshake process.
- The GDELT Project: A global database of society.
- Keypress: A robust JavaScript library for capturing keyboard input.
- People often forget that Machine Learning code also needs to be maintained, just like any other code.
- Bret Victor: The Humane Representation of Thought, and the video.
- Giada is a free, minimal, hardcore audio tool for DJs, live performers and electronic musicians.
- Hello Firefox. Nice to meet you.
- “The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.“—Richard Feynman
- Sometimes, at least once a year, you have to say Thank You! for a project that you use virtually everywhere, without even noticing. Thank you for Unicode and the CLDR. Obligatory link.
- lunr.js: Simple, full-text search in your browser.
- Matter.js: A 2D JavaScript physics engine.
- It's great to have Mozilla deploying tor relays. Let's hope they get into the exit node business as well.
- Learn the GitHub flow.
- How GitHub works on documentation.
- CS193p, the best introductory course on iOS programing, now in Swift.
- Some good reads about product design, UI & Capability, and product development by Ryan Singer of Basecamp.
- suckless.org: Software that sucks less.
- The Propaganda Model Revisited, by Edward S. Herman. Noam Chomsky talks about the Propaganda model in this video. There's a lot more good stuff at his homepage.
- Localization is hard.
- Smells like teen spirit, by Patti Smith.
- Test if your browser supports Public Key Pinning Extensions for HTTP (HPKP) and HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS).
- Spreeblick schreibt einfach schöne Sachen. Jaaaa, der Artikel ist alt. Und?
- I don't understand why they are pushing hard on JavaScript and invent new programming languages to expire JS when all it takes is to agree on a browser bytecode. Yes, asm.js paved the way, while NaCl is trying to boil the ocean. I'm pretty sure the area that used to be JavaScript would flourish.
- A curated list of awesome machine learning frameworks.
- Habits and how to change them: Ideas for winning your competitor's customers.
- snabbt.js: Minimalistic animation library in JavaScript
- Vessel, because competition is good, isn't it?
- I wonder how long tylertreat/Comcast will be on GitHub: Simulating shitty network connections so you can build better systems.
- Alan Kay: Complex vs. Complicated.
- Thunderstrike, one of my favorite talks at 31c3.
- SASS Guidelines: A styleguide for writing sane, maintainable and scalable SASS code.
- “I'm more surprised that the Go 1.4 compiler is written in C. Writing a compiler in C sounds very unpleasant compared to a language like OCaml. Does anyone know why they made this choice for the initial design?“ — “Ken Thompson wrote it. He's pretty good at C.“
- Interesting read trying to frame the “Make something people want“ theme.
- ECharts: Another chart library, this time from China.
- Sonic Pi audible computing. Get your kids to love music and programming. Wonderful project! More links: Video with Sam Aaron, the author of Sonic Pi; Overtone, an Open Source toolkit for designing synthesizers and collaborating with music; Freesound, a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds.