Hello dear readers. If you can see this, then it means the new, redesigned
The site is now a bunch of Markdown files compiled into HTML using the Pelican framework.
Major wins:
It's been a while since I posted, and I've been spending a lot of time fighting with Redis, one of the darling databases of the NoSQL era, at work, so I thought I'd grace y'all with a brief rant on Redis, what it's good at, what it's bad at, and so on.
Redis is an open-source moderately-structured in-memory key-value store. This means that, unlike full relational databases, it doesn't have a fixed schema, and it can't perform server-side operations like joining and filtering data1, and theoretically it's faster. Redis looks an awful lot like memcache, but …
read moreSkye retweeted an article today which made me realize that I really don't understand something: what do people who are profoundly anti-gentrification want? The argument that I see usually goes like this:
I generally agree that a lack of diversity is bad but, uh, what's would society do instead?
This post is primarily a response to the article on the BART Strike from The Nation that seems to be making the rounds on Facebook, Twitter, and all of the other blagoblag echo chambers. I've adopted this post from a Facebook message conversation I had, so it might be a little strangely-phrased. I apologize for any inaccuracies, I do not speak for my employer, and all of that necessary prelude.
I found the Nation article on the BART strike this week frustrating and inaccurate and, because someone is wrong on the Internet, I had to write a response. The BART strike is one of the more visible bits of organized labor work in the last few years, and it makes me embarassed as a stereotypical liberal that those defending to it are doing such a bad job. If the union is striking for more money, then say that. But don't misrepresent statistics to justify it. And if the union is striking for other reasons, then it would be lovely as a Bay Area resident and news-reader to know exactly what those reasons are. This well-disseminated article is nothing more than one-sided, poorly-researched editoralism masquerading as news.
read moreIn light of all of the hullabaloo about PRISM and other spying technology, I thought it'd be good to remind all of your dear readers that we've had the technology to ensure private communications on the Internet for 22 years in the form of Pretty Good Privacy (and the much-more-commonly-used implementation, GnuPG). Ars Technica had an okay article about e-mail encryption with PGP which I recommend reading, although you should keep in mind that most security professionals would consider infrastructural PKI like SSL and S/MIME to be compromised by nation-state-level adversaries (and all associated MIC contractors).
Anyhow, my GPG …
read moreHello dear readers. I just thought i'd give you a life update, since it's been nearly a year since my last post. In no particular order, some things that have happened since then:
