4. btsync, where have you been all my life

   Well, that was easy.

   I've been using KeePass for password management for roughly five years, ish. I like that it's free, that it runs on all my devices and that it integrates with any password-protected application (not just my browser). Syncing the database to all said devices, on the other hand, has always been a minor headache. I don't want to rely on free cloud storage providers, so I substitute various incarnations of personal servers, and I sacrifice the nifty auto-syncing clients. I could run something like SparkleShare, but that seems like overkill for one lousy file ...

   read more

5. casedCamels and underscores

   Ah, coding styles. A favorite holy war. Are your braces one true or K&R? Is your indenting tabbed or spaced? Are your variables underscored or camelCased? In my case, respectively K&R, spaced and camelCased — but that's just my preference. It's not like any one style is objectively better than any other. Let's all just get along, people.

   Unless you're CompSci researchers in Maryland, in which case you should do a study:

   A family of studies investigating the impact of program identifier style on human comprehension is presented. Two popular identifier styles are examined, namely ...

   read more

6. monobar gets a monomenu

   Way back in the dark ages of less than a year ago, I read what was to become a classic Linus Torvalds rant on the inadequacy of Github pull requests. Afterwards, I started seeing it everywhere: text boxes that tell me nothing about the text! I mean really, the nerve. How am I supposed to write pretty text for ancient, barely-used applications like Lynx and mutt if I have no idea what the text is doing?! SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.¹

   Doing something!

   So I made a Chrome extension. When you're in a text field (specifically a <textarea> field ...

   read more

7. solving problems with threads

   A programmer had a problem. He thought “I know, I’ll solve it with threads!”. has Now problems. two he

   leonsbuddydave

   Still giggling, fifteen minutes later.

   read more

8. pernicious kingdoms

   From Seven Pernicious Kingdoms: A Taxonomy of Software Security Errors

   One of the first studies of computer security and privacy was the RISOS (Research Into Secure Operating Systems) project [in 1976]. RISOS proposed and described seven categories of operating system security defects...:

   • Incomplete Parameter Validation
   • Inconsistent Parameter Validation
   • Implicit Sharing of Privileges / Confidential Data
   • Asynchronous Validation / Inadequate Serialization
   • Inadequate Identification / Authentication / Authorization
   • Violable Prohibition / Limit
   • Exploitable Logic Error

   The study shows that there are a small number of fundamental defects that recur in different contexts.

   Heh. You could say that, yes. Here we are, 40 years later, dealing (or more ...

   read more

« Page 2 / 3 »