Standards for handling passwords
Every time we sign up for a new service on the net, we have to make a new account and pick a password to go with this account. We’re going to be stuck like this until something like OpenID becomes...
View ArticleSonos finally adds search!
At long last, the world’s best digital music system has fixed a glaring UI hole. With today’s release of v2.5 of their software, Sonos controllers (both hardware remotes and PC/Mac based software) can...
View ArticleHeavy laptops: there’s no excuse
The way I see it, there’s no compelling reason to buy a heavy laptop. Light laptops are great because they’re portable. Their processors might be a little slower, but local processing power rarely...
View ArticleThree weeks inside Google
Sorry for going dark for a little while there. As expected, starting a new job while taking a full load of classes at school has been challenging. Also unsurprisingly, the Google job is very...
View ArticleDRM-free music sales
I’m glad the music industry is finally allowing legal sales of music online without DRM. Before this, the situation was absolutely screwball. Consumers had three choices for getting music onto the...
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Flashbacks to College Math
Callin’ out to all the Mudders in the audience. Ever take math class from Dr. Benjamin? I did. Sophomore year I think. Real Analysis maybe? It bent my brain sideways. Fun class. Got an A. I...
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Recovering a RAID Array after Lightning
The EVMS RAID 5 array in my linux fileserver crashed recently due to a lightning storm, and I thought I’d lost everything. But with some luck and intuition I was able to recover all my files. I’ll...
View ArticleXMPP PubSub: a great compliment to Atom/RSS
I spent the day yesterday at XMPP Summit #5 alongside OSCON in Portland. It was a great chance to catch up with old friends and meet a few new ones. But my favorite part was the break-out discussion...
View ArticleHow to protect yourself from DNS hacks
A couple weeks ago, Dan Kaminsky found a flaw in DNS. Without getting into details, this flaw enables a malicious attacker to fool your web browser into connecting to the wrong computer to get your...
View ArticleRepairing a degraded EVMS RAID 5 array
A while back, lightning scrambled one of the disks in my home RAID 5 array. I figured out how to recover it. And I got the critical data off. Here I describe the steps I took to add a new drive and...
View ArticleRAID repair successful
For everybody who has been waiting with baited breath to hear whether or not the repair of the RAID array worked or not, it did. It took several days, but since we were away on vacation seeing my dad...
View ArticleMoving from Typepad to Blogger
For a while now I’ve wanted to move this blog from Typepad to something else like Blogger. I keep finding more reasons to do this as Blogger improves and Typepad stagnates. Some reasons include:...
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Rhapsody Profiles FTW!
Excuse my newbie exuberance, but OMG Rhapsody.com finally launched profile pages!!! They’ve been up for a while now, which makes me think they’re for real this time. A couple of you might remember...
View ArticleBlogger file format converter for MovableType / Typepad
I recently blogged about my efforts to move from TypePad to Blogger. My friend Brian pointed out that Google just announced a set of tools to convert to or from popular blog export formats, including...
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Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons is a type of license, which is somewhere between a traditional all-rights-reserved copyright and public domain. There are many variations of CC licenses, and they’re onto the 3.0...
View ArticleDinocams – The legacy of SLR cameras in the 21st century
DSLR cameras make very little sense today. Modern imaging technology is rapidly turning them into dinosaurs. The forces keeping them alive are a combination of a physical legacy in hunks of glass,...
View ArticleParticipatory Culture and the Democratization of Information
An example of the trend towards information democracy is the democratization of culture. “Participatory Culture” is the modern trend of many individuals contributing to the mass of popular culture...
View ArticleEscape from Typepad to WordPress
It took a long time, but EmbracingChaos has finally escaped form Typepad. About a year ago (just before the end of the previous billing cycle) I started trying to move this blog to blogger. I like...
View ArticleLearning to do Math in your Head
I recently picked up a book called Secrets of Mental Math written by one of my college math professors. It has very practical advice on how to learn to multiply large numbers in your head. He gives...
View ArticleCreative Commons Notification Required
I love the Creative Commons licenses. I use them for most of my photos and rely heavily on other people’s CC licensed material. As a result, my photos have ended up in all sorts of fascinating places...
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Google chat adds web-based file transfer
I’d like to extend congratulations out to all my friends over on the Google chat team. They just announced a set of improvements to the web based chat clients in both iGoogle and Orkut. If you...
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Good April Fool’s Jokes
Nothing exciting here to report, but I thought I’d share pointers to some of the jokes I’ve stumbled upon that I like. UniXKCD command line console My favorite webcomic, Randall Monroe’s brilliant...
View ArticleiPad pre-launch security
Arrington managed to get his hands on an iPad for a test drive before launch day, presumably from a company that had been given one to build apps for it. His description of the security under which...
View ArticleOmnipotent Self-Aware Botnets
My buddy Scotto wrote a play titled “When I come to my senses, I’m alive!” which will be performed at Annex Theater on April 23 – May 22. I read an early draft of the script and am quite excited to...
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Space Weather
Recently some of my friends were discussing solar activity, and I learned that there’s a system for rating geomagnetic storms. This recent one was a G3, which is fairly common and not that serious....
View ArticleHow Apple Segments the Market
Apple has done a fabulous job in recent years of asserting itself as a major player in the computer industry. One of their tools for accomplishing this has been a fanatical commitment to high-quality...
View ArticleApple and Wal-Mart: Bargaining on your behalf for lower prices
Even though Apple products are expensive, there’s a surprising similarity between Apple and Wal-Mart: both companies push hard on other parts of the value chain to deliver lower prices for consumers....
View ArticleHow Social Media will change Marketing
A number of years ago, a bunch of my friends were reading Naomi Klein’s book No Logo and getting really riled up by it. The book is certainly written to make you angry, describing how brands and logos...
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Choosing a web framework: Python, Django vs. Ruby on Rails
One of my responsibilities in my new job is to lay the groundwork for development of the company’s technology. One decision that was pretty easy to make is that we’ll be building tools that you can...
View ArticleIs oil exploration getting safer?
Recently one of my friends asked whether or not there was a general trend towards improved safety in oil exploration. Coming from a mechanical engineering background, he noted that things like bridges...
View ArticleI’m speaking at django-seattle tomorrow
Tomorrow night I’m giving a presentation to the django-seattle group. If you’re interested in Django come join and meet like-minded folks. When: Tue, Dec 14th 6:00pm – 7:30pm (Meetings are on 2nd...
View ArticleIntroduction to South Migrations
Here’s the presentation I gave to the Django-Seattle group earlier this week. (Full link here.) It gives an introduction to South, which is the most popular database migration tool for Django. If...
View ArticleFighting buffer-bloat on DD-WRT
Recently, 20th century software pioneer Jim Gettys has been doing a bang-up job raising awareness about performance problems with the internet known as “buffer-bloat.” The details are technical and...
View ArticleReal-time Web Development in Python with Hookbox
Tonight I’m giving a guest lecture for a class on web development in Python. I’m talking about building real-time web sites using Hookbox. It draws on my experience building the software version of...
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The ironic challenge of nuclear power safety
In studying the history of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the ongoing events at Fukushima, a subtle but important connection appears. The problems at Fukushima today share a fundamental similarity...
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Democratizing HTTPS
Dear Google, Please democratize SSL certificates. The ability to serve HTTPS:// pages without scaring users is currently controlled by a handful of “trusted authorities” whose business is to make it...
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Macbook Crashes, Kernel Panics and coping with an Apple “Genius”
So your Mac is crashing a lot, and after a trip to the “Genius Bar”, you’re starting to think maybe that “genius” you talked to is anything but. Is this where you are? If so, join the club, because...
View ArticleSorry for the downtime – we got hacked
My apologies that the blog has been down for the last few days. Some hackers got into my PHP and inserted some malware onto the blog. A helpful reader alerted me to the problem within hours of it...
View ArticleMaking software architecture choices analytically with CodeTrend
Modern software gets assembled from parts as much as it gets built from scratch. It used to be you just picked your operating system and programming language and went to it. Nowadays you need to pick...
View ArticleNet Neutrality does not make the Internet fair
A lot of people are concerned that the FCC will “destroy the Internet” (or something similarly hyperbolic) by loosening so-called net neutrality rules. But the fact is that today’s system is actually...
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