Fricka Fracka: December 2014

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Why is the Mac DHCP Client so Awesome?

Once upon a time I worked in Apple support, even before the organization was known as AppleCare. I authored a Knowledge Base article that documented the behavior of the Mac DHCP client in Mac OS 8 and 9. It was an implicit answer to the question, “Why don't Macs behave like the other clients?” At the time that meant, “Why don't they behave like Widows?”

With that background, I’m happy to see the article, Rapid DHCP: Or, how do Macs get on the network so fast? These days, the Mac DHCP client kinda kicks ass.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Privacy Matters

Gizmodo on the Sony Hack:

The most painful stuff in the Sony cache is a doctor shopping for Ritalin. It's an email about trying to get pregnant. It's shit-talking coworkers behind their backs, and people's credit card log-ins. It's literally thousands of Social Security numbers laid bare. It's even the harmless, mundane, trivial stuff that makes up any day's email load that suddenly feels ugly and raw out in the open, a digital Babadook brought to life by a scorched earth cyberattack.

These are people who did nothing wrong. They didn't click on phishing links, or use dumb passwords (or even if they did, they didn't cause this). They just showed up. They sent the same banal workplace emails you send every day, some personal, some not, some thoughtful, some dumb. Even if they didn't have the expectation of full privacy, at most they may have assumed that an IT creeper might flip through their inbox, or that it was being crunched in an NSA server somewhere. For better or worse, we've become inured to small, anonymous violations. What happened to Sony Pictures employees, though, is public. And it is total.

The next time you hear about the death of privacy, or some idiot scolds you by saying, “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place,” remember this. There's lot of little niggling things we do every day that need to stay private just to keep our daily lives going.

Stanford Algorithms Course

Stanford is offering their Algorithms I course again (via Coursera): Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1

I took it the first time it was offered, and it was a fantastic course. They take the "analysis" part seriously, covering big-O notation fairly rigorously and covering the Master Method. It's fairly mathematical. I ran into problems when we covered probabilistic algorithms, as I never really studied probability mathematically. It will take a lot of your time, but if you can devote enough time to it, it will be worth it.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Blogger Template Formats

I looked into the Blogger template syntax, wondering if I could make a simple template on my own, using Bootstrap or something like that. Google, it turns out, has little documentation. They have a few docs in their support section, but nothing like developer documentation. This one, for example, covers two tags: b:section and b:widget. I can see others in the template: b:loop, b:if, b:else. I can make a good guess about what these do, but I shouldn't have to.

The template is a standard XML document with some blogger-specific tags. Seem like a good system. But what tags are available? What do they mean? Normally, the XML declaration has a source for such questions. Here's the tag from my current template.

<html b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>

Guess what? All those links are broken. So maybe I won't put any more time into this after all. It hardly inspires confidence. I remember what happened with the last Google product I really liked. It's a shame, because I like Blogger. It's one case where my interests align pretty well with Google's.

Later, that same decade…

A while back I started this blog to keep track of my progress through SICP. Then I put that project on hold. The problem with putting a project like that on hold is that you forget your progress, then have to backtrack. That kills the fun. I guess I'm saying that I abandoned that project. At the least, you shouldn't expect any more SICP posts here. If I start it up again, consider it a bonus.

It seems a shame to kill the blog just because I'm no longer working through SICP. So I'm going to start back, with a much less focus. I'll probably stick to the geekier end of things, but I'm no longer using this exclusively for study notes.

Pages