ocschwar the unpronounced.

Reading log.

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 02:42:34 GMT

Still in the middle of Halting State by Charlie Stross, written in 2008, and set in 2018. It's cute in all sorts of ways. (Scotland is out of the UK, kind of, but the UK is still in the EU, and so the bureaucratiic infighting is of the kind to give a science fiction author all the plot bunnies he needs to get a story going.) THe cutest detail is people using IRDA to exchange contact details between their phones. It makes me want to dig out my Palm III.

I'm also strugging to get through a big pile of PDFs, and one I think y'all might enjoy reading is To Kill A Centrifuge about the Stuxnet implant.

The important pull quote:

The minority (including this author) believes that basing national security on theories about adversaries’ motivations and wishful thinking on how to control them is a risky gamble. It advocates work ing towards effective passive defense “just in case” , making substantial cyber - physical attacks against critical infras tructure if not impossible, much more difficult, and certainly difficult enough to put them out of reach f or non - state actors.
Such is a goal that is realistically achievable for those willing to accept the challenge presented by Stuxnet to start over and find and implement new and creative defensive solutions that render cyber weapons pretty much useless.

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Craziness.

Sat, 27 Jan 2018 04:19:01 GMT

Step 1: get a Rust program written using the Diesel ORM to read a Shotwell database file and print out its contents. (Sqlite) DONE

Step 2: Put a Rust RESTful front end in front so it's (Web - Diesel - Sqlite) DONE

Step 3: Change the shotwell schema so that it can track where copies of an individual file reside.

Step 4: add a REST client in so this amalgam can make and track backups of a picture on Flickr/Google Photos/ ...

Step 5: Get this thing to cross compile to my Beagle bone.

Step 6: tada: I now have something that can keep my two NAS boxes in sync along with Flickr/Google etc.

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Programmers versus software engineers.

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 03:26:09 GMT

What it's like to be a programmer: Your manager instructs you to write code to implement something unethical. You refuse. You're fired.

What it's like to be a software engineer: your manager instructs you to write code to implement something unethical. You refuse. Your manager is fired.

On the basis of this litmus test, how many of us would qualify as software engineers?

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PANDAS rocks.

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 03:51:01 GMT

ess_p = demand_forecast-production_forecast
RTE = 0.8
CAPACITY = 500000
ess_p[ ess_p.rp > CAPACITY] = CAPACITY
ess_p[ ess_p.rp < -CAPACITY] = -CAPACITY
ess_p[ess_p.rp < 0 ] *= RTE
# hard coded initial SOE, needs to be made into something real.
# divided by sixty so we go from minutes to watt hours. 
soe = SOE * 60 -ess_p.cumsum()
soe[soe>CAPACITY*60]= CAPACITY*60
soe[soe<0]=0
ess_pd = -soe.diff()
#RT
ess_pd[ess_pd.rp<0]*=(1/RTE)

10 lines replacing insane amounts of Matlab code.

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Kaiten Nukariya: The Religion of the Samurai (1913)

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 02:09:15 GMT

Most bait & switch book title ever.

Go online and you will find lots of reviews complaining that, well, it has nothing to do with the religion of the samurai.

Still, I liked it.

It's a straight forward book on the history of Buddhism's progress and evolution from the life of the Buddha into the Zen Buddhism practiced in Japanese monasteries, step by step through China, with one foray to Vietnam. It goes enough into warts-and-all detail about abbots reconciling their devotion to practicing loving kindness with the imperative to murder rival abbots who aren't quite doing it right. It's a good book to read if you want to know about Zen Buddhism as more than a consumerist affectation labelled as spirituality, liberally salted with metajokes.

While the book goes into detail about how Japanese practices combined Buddhism with Taoism and Confucian ethics, there is nothing there about Shinto. Nothing about Bushido. Nothing about the Japanese caste system. Or the Samurai. Hence the complaints. Still, it's a Kindle freebie nd a good read.

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Cooo-weee!

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 02:36:40 GMT

If you know me and are reading this here on Dreamwidth, please comment.

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