January 2011
1 post
1 tag
Help me Roberto, my web server just got hacked!
Reposted with kind permission from Robert Moir
… I wrote ages ago back when I could still be bothered to blog.
This question keeps being asked repeatedly by the victims of hackers breaking into their web server. The answers very rarely change, but people keep asking the question. I’m not sure why. Perhaps people just don’t like the answers they’ve seen when searching...
December 2009
1 post
Minimum Standards
You’re a knowledge worker.
A fancy term that just means you use your computer for actual honest real creative work. Not talking about time-sheets and a contact list here. That spreadsheet that serves as your companies ERP. The irreplaceable original files making up your portfolio. The curriculum for the class you’re teaching. The knowledge that you’ve gained and reified into...
May 2009
9 posts
Other Games of Life
I’ve been playing with duplicating some of the results on the emergence of cooperation in variations of iterated prisoner’s dilemma.
An interesting (if somewhat trivial) thing to note is how easily behaviour similar but distinct from the Game of Life. A small grid randomly populated only with Defectors and Cooperators, for instance, often produces glider-like patterns.
My goal is to...
Minting is Rare
Or, “How to resolve revocation with an immutable capability-secure world.”
A path is stored not by minting a new reference to the target (a hardlink), but rather by storing the path itself (a symlink). Each segment of a path represents a node that serves as a proxy for the rest of the path (onion routing)
Now, where does this leave me if I want permissions to be baked into a...
Notes on the Implementation of a Blog
Publishing is currently a three step process consisting of writing an entry perfectly, publishing it to a staging point, and then committing contents of that stage point to the real blog. This causing me a small amount of grief:
Links don’t work on the staging site
Comments are published to the staging site rather than the front page (this is not quite a feature)
Approaches I’ve...
A question about PyPy's JIT
A question about PyPy’s JIT
Although I’m sure this is already obvious to the PyPy people, I’m quite interested to see how close they are to a system that would be capable of efficiently executing interpreters written on top of the existing system.
PyPy is a python implementation written in python. The translation and jit architecture (as I understand it) uses manually inserted...
Wait, I know what happens next...
Interesting service being launched today by Wolfram Research
Any teenager is capable of making a machine from scratch that can seriously injure a person. The difference between a motor that you can stop with a bare hand, and one that will simply take your hand off can remarkably incremental.
I wonder how close we have to get to that threshold in order to have enough experience to see how close...
Kelly criterion
Aside from the obvious issue of compensating for errors, I don’t have a good intuitive understanding of why one wouldn’t want to maintain a bet as close to the kelly bet as possible.
It seems that the usual complaint seems to be that you want to minimize your downside risk in the short term, and a kelly bet is concerned only with maximizing the long term gains.
What doesn’t sit...
HTML is to the web as assembler is to computing
I’m kinda surprised that there haven’t been more projects taking a translation/compilation approach to working around IE’s rendering deficiencies. We have a good specification of how things are supposed to work, and many years of experience with how they actually work in various browsers.
Is it that the folks interested in compilers and such just aren’t interested in web...
Card-counting and evolutionary algorithms
I’m a bad blackjack player. Bad enough that I refrain from playing anywhere except a friendly home situation with no money at stake, where I definitively demonstrate how bad I actually am.
That said, I find myself intrigued:
Given a population of players based on existing counting techniques, with crossover and mutation, and a fitness function that included optimizing for function size and...
Sustaining my messy approach to browsing
My messy browsing habits may yet become sustainable!
Mozilla wiki on multiple processes
I’m a messy guy.
I know exactly where any one of several hundred index cards, articles and scraps of equipment are at any given point. And like any self respecting geek, my electronic life is in all ways a reflection of my real world self.
Which implies that my browser profile is a mess too.
Now,...