Steve Wilhite is the most prolific programmer I’ve ever known. He’s mostly remembered for creating GIF but he spent 30 years writing piles of amazing software which helped set the stage for the Web.
Figure 1: CompuServe XF4 Fortran Manual
Day 02 of #100DaysToOffload.
A few years ago, my mother went through the effects of her cousin after she died. It turns out Thelma Jane wrote poetry. Nobody knew. It wound up in the trash.
Thelma lived alone. Her husband had died in his 40s. They had no children. Her mother, my great-aunt Bess, lived to 102 and took her first motorcycle ride at 100. My mom had to go through Thelma’s stuff and Aunt Bess’ stuff, most of which Thelma still had. I now have some of the leftovers. But nobody wanted the poetry. So it’s gone.
This brings me to the question this article explores: why write?
#100daystooffload #whywrite #poetry
Daniel Boone is quoted (via Hubert Humphrey) as saying
when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too crowded and moved further out into the wilderness.
Mark Twain said
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
I find that when I stay glued to twitter (pick your social-media-of-doom-amplifier) I tend to get a rather gloomy view of life. There is indeed a lot one can be gloomy about these days. But if you just go for a walk and look around you may be surprised:
I found this art sidewalk art at just about the exact place where last fall I had purchased a cup of lemonade from 4 eager young entrepreneurs. I suspect the ring leader of that optimistic young bunch.
Figure 1: Sidewalk art
And on a happy note…my son Bryan has finished his Masters of Piano Performance at Duquesne University and will be headed to Penn State to pursue a Doctor of Musical Arts. You can watch listen to Bryan Jones’ masters degree piano recitle at Duquesne on Youtube.
Bash uses linear search to insert values in to associative arrays. This is all well and good for small numbers of keys. I was adding millions1. I went poking around the bash source code today (2020-04-18) to confirm my suspicion and gauge the difficulty of adding an option to do something more sensible.
In less than a day after I reported it, there is a patch https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2020-04/msg00114.html My timing code and pre and post patch timings are here: https://github.com/eludom/snippits/tree/master/bash/tests
I spend a good amount of time hiking in Shenandoah National Park and surrounding areas. I’ve seen quite a few #bears and I’ve followed one down the trail. I’ve been growled at by a mother bear when I unknowingly came between her and her cubs. This is going somewhere related to #cybersecurity. I promise. You can’t outrun a bear. Climbing a tree won’t help. If a bear actually decides to attack you, the odds are not in your favor, but fortunately they almost never attack.
“I’m passionate about…” I’ve always hated that phrase. Because I thought it was fake. I thought it was trendy. I’ve reflexively reacted against trendy things for decades. Pet Rocks, Disco, TED talks, cryptocurrency… But I am coming to see what the phrase is getting at. And I think I like it. In a work world where human beings are called “resources”, where intelligent, creative, inquisitive, motivated people are subjected to management practices derived from 19th century steel mills and automotive assembly line production, the phrase “I’m passionate about…” is (can be) an attempt to re-assert humanity.
I’m looking for repositories of “reproducible security analytics”. As an addict of Emacs Org mode, one of the papers that got me started thinking along these lines was A Multi-Language Computing Environment for Literate Programming and Reproducible Research. I realize for most of the rest of the world this vision is now realized more in things like Jupyter and Zeppelin notebooks. Your loss :-) One thing that looks promising is mitre’s cyber analytics repository.