Events

Over the last few days we've had ridiculous weather in Chicago. I will now ridicule it. Friday it rained and didn't. All day. From moment to moment it was unclear whether we'd get rained on or not. Saturday was similar, but we walked from sun to snow and back, block for block. Then Sunday it was 22°C at one point, and -3°C at another. The Tribune has a graphic about it. I walked around with, at one point, my jacket, sweater, and outer shirt in my backpack. Yesterday? Snow, of course. Today? Sunny and...

On Thursday I merged in the latest Github code from the BlogEngine.NET project and published it to Azure. I didn't realize at the time that the update contained a new widget called "newsletter" that let anyone sign up to receive a notification for each post on the blog. By the time I got my weekly email report with its hundreds of bounces, apparently every robot from here to Vladivostok had signed up. So annoying. Well, I now know the widget code a lot better, and I've killed the thing. I hope my bounce...

This little box here contains 32 gigabytes of RAM, and cost me $1 per 162,842,362 bytes. As I mentioned Thursday, this is considerably more RAM for considerably less money than the RAM I bought in January 1993 to upgrade my 4 MB ZEOS computer to an 8 MB computer. Those 4 megabytes cost about the same as these 32 gigabytes in total. But back then, I got only 20,972 bytes per dollar. Put it another way: this RAM is approximately 8,000 times less expensive than the RAM I bought in 1993. It's also somewhere...

Reddit recently published their 2015 Transparency Report, in which they tell how many times they received official requests for user information. However, NSA letters often require that the companies receiving them keep the letters themselves secret. So how to let the world know you've received one? Kill a canary: At the bottom of its 2014 transparency report, the company wrote: "As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence...

Again, the post Friday was not an April Fool's joke. And since then I've had non-stop things going on, including today going over the silent auction donations for our coming Apollo After Hours fundraiser. Tomorrow should be a little calmer.

The driving reason behind ordering a new kick-ass development computer is that I am no longer the CTO of Holden LLC. The company and I worked together over the past two months to shift their technology support to a new partner organization and eliminate the CTO role entirely. After leading the development of their flagship software product, I joined Holden, with the goal of transforming the technology side of the business into an quasi-independent product-development center. But over the past year, we...

This was originally published on 31 March 2016. You can see an updated version of the table in a post from 26 January 2024. In late March 2016, I ordered what may turn out to be the last desktop computer I'll ever buy. I think this may be true because (a) I've ordered a box that kicks proportionately more ass than any computer I've bought before; (b) each of my last three computers was in use for more than two years (though the one I bought in 2009 would probably have lived longer had I not dumped a...

For a big reason that I'll announce tomorrow afternoon, I've just ordered what may turn out to be the last desktop computer I'll ever buy. I think this may be true because (a) I've ordered a box that kicks proportionately more ass than any computer I've bought before; (b) each of my last three computers was in use for more than two years (though the one I bought in 2009 would probably have lived longer had I not dumped a bowl of chicken soup on it); and (c) each of the previous 2-year-old computers was...

Bruce Schneier explains: The FBI...has been given whatever vulnerability it used to get into the San Bernardino phone in secret, and it is keeping it secret. All of our iPhones remain vulnerable to this exploit. This includes the iPhones used by elected officials and federal workers and the phones used by people who protect our nation's critical infrastructure and carry out other law enforcement duties, including lots of FBI agents. This is the trade-off we have to consider: Do we prioritize security...

The IANA time zone database published an update a couple days ago, and yesterday I uploaded the changes to a few of my web applications. Then one of the applications blew up. This is because I hadn't accounted for the possibility that a time zone abbreviation could include non-alpha-numeric characters. Within an hour I'd updated the affected code and published an updated NuGet package. So now it's fixed. I just have to update a couple of applications that have all their time zone data in caches, so that...