Abstract Just after Executive Summaries went out of style, the rise of the originally snarky & dismissive but now often acceptably self-deprecating tl;dr has taken over, with a range of possible shades of emotional meaning. Which emotional meaning is intended may often be ambiguous, especially between job function, organizational, and national…

Symmetric & asymmetric cryptography primer Symmetric encryption, using the same key to encrypt & decrypt, is nearly always used on anything beyond very small amounts of data because it is fast. The problem is sharing & updating the key securely. This can be done, but requires coordination & an unbroken security…

Your application might need windowed signaling to remain efficient, cost-optimized, and avoid crashes in parts of your system. Many developers are unaware of the possible need for windowing protocols, AKA sliding window protocols, at the application, messaging, and API levels, even if they understand that they are used in a…

On the incremental reinvention of programming languages, web browsers, operating systems, analysis & visualization Software Configuration & Scripting Hard Coded -> Configuration -> Rules Engine -> DSL -> Hard Coded — Mike Hadlow While Mike Hadlow’s Configuration Complexity Clock model for scripting & configuration is instructive and often accurate, I sometimes see similar situations…

Some or all decisions are emotional decisions. Emotions are how we total pros, cons, probabilities, etc. People with broken emotional processing (via tumors etc.) cannot make any decisions at all, no planning, no real opinion on anything. While we may process certain things with solid logic, we find our way…

Augmenting zero-trust security with a ‘context token’ in application messages. Individuals use VPNs personally to protect against exploits of insecure communications (which are thankfully mostly gone with HTTPS everywhere efforts), possible local network or ISP monitoring of the sites they visit (TLS-secured TCP-based DNS services also solve this), and to…

USB-C seems far closer to a nicely powerful universal interface than any previous attempt. For a prompt from a friend about what standardized “containers” (like a shipping container) might be good enough to be stable for 100 years, I mentioned USB-C. While it will certainly keep evolving, the full version…

Is Elon a merely awkward, sometimes embarrassing yet highly successful engineer entrepreneur industrialist who strives to save humanity, solving banking, pollution, oil dependency, road safety, green energy & transportation, gridlock, and government overspending in the mean time? Or is he a grifter who takes credit for others’ work, unfairly make…

It is perfectly fine to argue about who should be paying what taxes, how fair it is for various strata of society to pay how much, etc. These are hard discussions that don’t have fully correct answers. It is clear that we don’t have it right yet, and that a…