Tag Archives: Tech

Encoding, encryption, and hashing: those are three different things only loosely connected. It never occurred to me that anyone in our tribe wouldn’t understand the difference among them but according to Eric Mann there is confusing about them. Mann has … Continue reading →

“Yak shaving”. It is, at base, an opprobrious term but with a touch of indulgence and humor. Sort of like “rascal”: naughty, yes, but lovably so. It’s clear why yak shaving has a bad reputation. It’s a distraction from what … Continue reading →

As most of you know, I try to avoid Google as much as possible. In particular, I haven’t used the Google search engine in years. But that’s because of privacy concerns and Google’s sordid record of vacuuming up as much … Continue reading →

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite implementation techniques is finite state machines. I started using them for communication protocol implementations but soon discovered that they could be applied to several sorts of problems. It’s easy enough to sketch … Continue reading →

I’ve used most of the traditional editors. By “traditional” I mean editors like ed, ex, vi/vim, Emacs, Acme, and even—back in the day—brief. One editor I’ve never tried is Sam. Sam, like Acme, was written by Rob Pike so if … Continue reading →

Everyone seems to have a love/hate (for some, a mostly hate) relationship with email. Some even speak of it in terms of punishments appropriate to the ninth circle of hell. I don’t get that exercised probably because I’m parsimonious about … Continue reading →

Back in 2017 I wrote about Goodhart’s Law, the notion that any measure used as a target, ceases to an effective measure. It stops being effective because those being measured learn to game the system in such a way that … Continue reading →

Sorry non-Appleheads, but this post will probably interest only Mac users. I’ve been running macOS Monterey since it was released but I just learned about an interesting new feature: networkQuality. It’s a command line utility to measure the quality of … Continue reading →