Musings on Technology
You should never, ever post an @here, @channel, or @everyone in Slack, or Discord, or Teams, or HipChat, or Mattermost. When you do this, you turn an asynchronous communication tool into a synchronous one. You interrupt everyone's day and night regardless of what time zone they are in. It is completely incompatible with working Remote, … Continue reading @here considered harmful
Autonomic sent us all to work from home for social distancing a week before the rest of the Silicon Valley companies did, and two weeks before my father's Toronto bank did. Good on them. I very much appreciate the precaution. It was a sharp transition, because it was hitherto an office-only environment. This was less … Continue reading Work From Home Under COVID-19
There is no stealth in space. You can see a rocket burn anywhere between here and past Pluto, or any object of room temperature on infrared at the same distance. You cannot hide a spaceship. It is much the same thing in cyberspace. Anyone on the internet can attack anyone on the internet. Yet across … Continue reading Skynet Golems in Cyberspace
There's a current news story about a wallet blunder freezing up $280,000,000 of Ether, a cryptocurrency. I try to avoid posting too much opinion on my blog, but I do have a view on this. Cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ether is based on the idea of unbreakable contracts and irreversible transactions. This is … Continue reading Cryptocurrency and irreversible transactions
Adobe was recently breached and 150,000,000 user accounts were stolen. Adobe was following the one of the worst practices of password storage -- reversible encryption (rather than hashing with a salt using a good, slow algorithm like bcrypt). A very, very old throwaway password of mine was among those leaked. XKCD has referred to this … Continue reading Adobe password breach as the world’s greatest crossword puzzle
In 1997, Jakob Nielsen wrote How Users Read on the Web. His organization conducted a formal study of usability and found: Concise text (half the words) is 58% more readable than rambling text. Scannable text (bullets) is 47% more readable than wall of text. Neutral language (facts) is 27% more readable than marketese. Nielsen added … Continue reading Write to be read
Leo on Tech 