Makura no Soshi

On art, design, and craftmanship …

• New Berlin rapid transit route map – Pasha Omelekhin
  A transit map should be simple, comfortable, and nice-looking, designed with loving care and for people. It should attract tourists to the city and have reasons to make residents enjoy it. Berlin has received such a map.
• Map of the Literature II – Martin Vargic
  The Map of the Literature is a truly gargantuan visualization of the 5000 years of literary masters and their works, showing how the different literary genres sprouted, branched and eventually evolved to their modern state.
• Apple’s HQ, Ruskin, Gothic Architecture, and Agile – Ian Miell
  Once you start thinking about how building encourages or discourages a means of living compatible with a human, creative and dynamic life, then you start to see it everywhere.
• wenn die leute wissen, wie würste gemacht werden … – wirres.net
  mittlerweile habe ich sogar meine zweifel, ob es sowas wie talent überhaupt gibt und ob wir talent als das wahrnehmen, was eigentlich das ergebnis von enorm viel übung, oder genauer vom festbeissen und manische verfolgen einer sache, einer fähigkeit, eines ziels ist.
• Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue – Andy Baio
  Kind of Bloop is a chiptune tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, a track-by-track 8-bit reinterpretation of the bestselling jazz album of all time.
• Peak Music – anmut und demut
  Ich schenk‘ mir dann mal einen Single Malt ein.

Misc dev advice …

• How is computer programming different today than 20 years ago? – Sedat Kapanoglu
  Here are some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years, in random order.
• Things I Believe About Software Engineering – Wesley Aptekar-Cassels
  How kind your teammates are has a larger impact on your effectiveness than the programming language you use.
• The Zen of Code Reviews: Review As If You Own the Code – Michael Sorens
  Whoever signs off on a code review agrees, essentially, that they would be able to support it in the future, should the original author of the code be unavailable to do it. Review code with the energy you’d use if you owned the code.
• Ten Platform Commandments – Charity Majors
  I talked about a bunch of the lessons learned by using and abusing and running and building platforms at scale.
• So you want to Onboard a DevOps Practitioner – Martin Jackson
  Bad environments (and broken cultures) do not attract nor retain top talent. In fact it does the opposite.
• Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design – Dave Akin
  These are some bits of wisdom that I have gleaned during that time, some by picking up on the experience of others, but mostly by screwing up myself.
• Empirical Evaluation Guidelines
  The programming languages research community often develops ideas whose worth is evaluated empirically.

On crypto and security …

• Cryptographic Right Answers – Latacora
  You should keep things simple and conventional and easy to analyze; ‘boring’, as the Google TLS people would say.
• The PGP Problem – Latacora
  Serious cryptographers have largely given up on PGP and don’t spend much time publishing on it anymore (with a notable exception). Well-understood problems in PGP have gone unaddressed for over a decade because of this.
• The New Illustrated TLS Connection – Michael Driscoll
  A revised edition in which we dissect the new manner of secure and authenticated data exchange, the TLS 1.3 cryptographic protocol.
• Curl to shell isn’t so bad – Martin Tournoij
  [It] is a very direct way to run code from the internet, whereas the other methods are running code from the internet, but with extra steps. It may ‘feel’ different, but in reality it’s just the same.
• Why Don’t People Use Formal Methods? – Hillel Wayne
  Verifying code is a hard problem. More and more people are doing it, though, as theorem provers and SMT solvers get more sophisticated. It will probably remain a specialist thing for the foreseeable future.
• Running servers (and services) well is not trivial – Chris Siebenmann
  These days, it’s often relatively easy to ‘just set up a server’ or a service, especially if you already work in the cloud. Spin up a VM or a Docker image, install some stuff, done, right? Well, not if you want this to be reliable infrastructure.

Today I ended my Pocket Premium subscription.

I have been using Read It Later (now Pocket) since 2011, quite a long time ago. In 2015 I started paying for it because I used the service a lot, I found it very useful, and I did not want it to disappear like so many others have before. The best and notable features were:

• compact list view of bookmarks with tags
• good Firefox integration
• cross-device sync (e.g. offline reading on a tablet)
• usable API (e.g. to sync with Trello)

Read the rest of this entry »

I have always had a problem with the configuration of different email addresses in different git repositories. The git configuration is split into a global (~/.gitconfig) and a local/repository part (project_dir/.git/config). This works only for simple setups with one default configuration and 1-2 exceptions with per-repo overrides.

But it does not work for me, I have multiple different repositories checked out and I always forget to configure the right email address after the git clone. And it is not only “normal/private” vs. “work” address but I also have multiple addresses for different customers and open source projects. It’s a mess.

Today I finally learned about a working solution for this with git-config conditional includes. These were introduced in 2017 with git 2.13 and I found them via StackOverflow.

Read the rest of this entry »

On too big to fail tech …

• How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash, Rana Foroohar, The Guardian
  Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all.
• Absolute scale corrupts absolutely – apenwarr
  The Internet has gotten too big.
• Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They’re the Good Guys. They’re Not. | Erin Griffith, WIRED
  Will anyone ever write another positive story about a tech startup? I said probably not.
• How Evil Is Tech? – David Brooks, The New York Times
  Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction.
• Nothing Fails Like Success – Jeffrey Zeldman, A List Apart
  Buying something you can’t afford, and borrowing from organizations that don’t have your (or your customers’) best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups.
• How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry, Dimitri Tokmetzis and Maaike Goslinga, The Correspondent
  The [EU] Commission has been trying to boost the security industry for ten years now, and nearly €2 billion has already been funneled into security research.

some politics after non-Brexit day …

• The paranoid fantasy behind Brexit, Fintan O’Toole, The Guardian
  In the im­pe­ri­al ima­gi­na­ti­on, there are only two sta­tes: do­mi­nant and sub­mis­si­ve, co­lo­ni­s­er and co­lo­nis­ed. This dua­lism lin­gers. If Eng­land is not an im­pe­ri­al power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a co­l­ony.
• Why we stop­ped trus­ting eli­tes, Wil­liam Da­vies, The Guar­di­an
  The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others.
• Die Politik ist bürgerverdrossen – Indiskretion Ehrensache
  Die Bür­ger­ge­sell­schaft wird als nicht zeit­ge­mäß emp­fun­den – al­lein Be­rufs­po­li­ti­ker ver­stün­den die Welt des Jah­res 2019 noch. […] Zu­sam­men­ge­fasst: Die Be­rufs­po­li­ti­ker möch­ten beim Weg­re­gie­ren nicht be­läs­tigt wer­den.
• Die haben das Internet nicht verstanden? Ich denke, doch.
  Meine These zur neuen Urheberrechtsgesetzgebung und deren Artikel 11 und 13 ist ja, dass die gesamte Novelle vor allem ein Versuch ist, das Internet so umzugestalten, dass es zu einem, – sagen wir mal – konservativerem Verständnis davon, wie Medien funktionieren, passt.
• Über Zugfahren in Europa
  Aber mit der Bahn über eine län­ge­re Stre­cke in ein an­de­res, eu­ro­päi­sches Land zu rei­sen, in eine Stadt ab­seits der paar Me­tro­po­len, die mit dem Rail­team er­reich­bar sind? Das kann ich nie­man­dem emp­feh­len, der nicht voll­kom­men schmerz­geil und mit einem di­cken Not­fall­geld­beu­tel ge­seg­net ist. An die­sem Punkt schä­me ich mich für “meine” Bahn, für “meine” EU.
• Für einen Neubeginn in Europa, Emmanuel Macron
  Noch nie seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg war Europa so wichtig. Und doch war Europa noch nie in so großer Gefahr.