Progressive Enhancement Makes Me Sad 21st March 2016 There's been a lot of talk lately in favour of progressive enhancement and 'universal' (isomorphic) applications. Apparently, server rendering increases performance, robustness, and the parsability and interoperability of content. I welcome these…

The cr.yp.to blog 2019.10.24: Why EdDSA held up better than ECDSA against Minerva 2019.04.30: An introduction to vectorization 2017.11.05: Reconstructing ROCA 2017.10.17: Quantum algorithms to find collisions 2017.07.23: Fast-key-erasure random-number generators 2017.07.19: Benchmarking post-quantum…

@softfennec and @orezpraw brought to my attention the following tweet, which I have to reconstruct from memory for reasons that will be clear in a moment: I like to think I’m okay at math, but then I stumble into Math SE and it’s Latin to me. http://math.stackexchange.com/q/1665383/58532 What a…

I understand that the New Horizons craft used gravity assist from Jupiter to increase its speed on the way to Pluto. I also understand that by doing this, Jupiter slowed down very slightly. How many flyby runs would it take to stop Jupiter completely? —Dillon More than we can afford. Spacecraft…

Update theres a more recent post that expands further on where to start optimizing specific queries, and of course if you want to dig into optimizing your infrastructure High Performance PostgreSQL is still a great read For many application developers their database is a black box. Data goes in,…

Atom is the hot new up-and-comer in the world of text editing. It is my editor of choice for building software, and it’s open source, so I decided to check out its issues to see how I could contribute. I came across a strange bug : the Atom user speter had written a line of text that, when you…

First published: 30 May, 2013 | Category: Even in Sweden. The title of geographer Allan Pred’s book, published in 2000, pops up in my head while reading international reports on the uprisings in Stockholm . In a Europe in the midst of economic, social and democratic crisis, urban uprisings were…

The first time I met Craig Federighi was the day he returned to Apple in 2009. He had left in ‘97 shortly after the acquisition. An event we at the home office in Cupertino always “hysterically” referred to as the time NeXT acquired Apple. Craig is now in charge of all of Software Engineering, but…

In my previous blog, The Programmer’s Oath , I introduced the concept of an ethical oath for programmers. In this article I want to provide the rationale for this oath. Why do I think the concept of an oath is important? Many programmers are likely to respond negatively to the idea of an oath. A few…

A little while back Steve Klabnik mentioned something on Twitter that's been on my mind a bit lately. It's about the right-wing political movement in tech, including some alarming neo-fascist outbursts. Steve wrote this: Thinking about it, the far right has never been as powerful and overtly…

People say “this is a Manhattan Project, this an Apollo Project”. Sorry, those are science projects. Fusion is a Manhattan Project or an Apollo Project... The rest of this is more like retooling for World War II , except with everyone playing on the same team. — Saul Griffith, on converting the…

November 12, 2015 Usability on Mobile Is Getting Worse The legibility of the text is only one of Apple’s many design failures. Today’s devices lack discoverability: There is no way to discover what operations are possible just by looking at the screen. Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with…

Twitter recently lost its only black engineer in a management role. The top-voted comment about this story on Hacker News begins thusly (emphasis mine): I’ve been working for over 20 years in tech at 10+ different companies around the Valley, and I can count on 1 hand the number of direct coworkers…

Undertale is a fantastic game. I might even write about it sometime. But not right now. See, Undertale’s creator said a few weeks ago that taking Undertale commissions is fine, but selling unofficial merch is not . I said yesterday that I think this is kind of uncool, and I was somewhat surprised to…

I spent a good chunk of the last four days installing an Internet web forum, which claims it can be up and running in 30 minutes. I like to think I’m pretty alright at computers. So what went wrong here? Well let me tell you. I don’t want to name and shame here, because this is not my first such…

I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among…

Do you know the name Michael Horn? He's the CEO of Volkswagen of America. You know what's going on with Volkswagen, right? Dieselgate? The fact that the software that controls the Diesel engine in some of their cars was specifically written to defeat emissions tests? Yeah, apparently that software…

Mixing signals I was very frustrated today by power-saving technology. I thought it would be a nice idea to hook up my TV, sound system, and selected other electrical macguffins to a master/slave powerboard. That way, I turn on the TV, everything comes on at once. I turn off the TV, everything turns…