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Over the long Easter weekend, I flew back to the UK to see my family. I’m using the extra time travelling and not working to make progress reading Rhythms of the Brain (I’m currently about 1/4 of the way through, and it’s very good so far), and continue with Coursera courses on Maths for ML and Computational Neuroscience.
I’ll be working from Manchester next week & will likely be doing lots of social events in the evening, before going back to Munich next weekend.
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Happy Christmas everybody!
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I’m reading Oathbreaker by Brandon Sanderson, it’s not networking, it’s not sci-fi, but it certainly is good!
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For more fantasy, I’m reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson. It’s ten books and I’m currently about to finish the sixth. Definitely a great read for anyone who loves good worldbuilding or fantasy characterization.
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it’s not networking, it’s not sci-fi,
Honestly, I’m really eager for that kind of discussion around here. I get tired of everyone recommending the same circle of tech books or science fiction.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll take a look!
Edit: Oh… it’s fantasy. Erm, I suppose the tribe doesn’t wander far from the community-approved genres.
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If you like history, I’m still chewing on Empire of the Steppes. The book is always described as “majestic” and “sweeping”. I’ve never read another history book that provides such an encompassing view. Its scope extends from mainland China, to the silk road oasis kingdoms, to Persia, to Kiev, to Attila’s march on Rome. It’s fascinating how a military campaign in China can set off a chain reaction like billiard balls and cause an invasion in Europe.
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Another amazing history is Jonathan Spence’s God’s Chinese Son, but really, you cannot go wrong with Spence. He is a magician.
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I can’t talk about my work, but I am immensely enjoying solving each day’s Advent of Code problem.
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Day 3 kicked my ass but day 4 was easy. If you didn’t know, we have a GitHub group/IRC channel for doing it with your fellow crustaceans.
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Yeah, I cheated for the second part Day 3 by looking it up in OEIS. That’s because I’ve been doing them at the end of the day and was afraid to miss the “deadline”. But once the pressure to get an answer quickly went away, I went back and actually redid part 2.
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- Domain: Computer Science (anything up to and including Bachelor level), anything about software engineering (employability/code review etc), general life.
- Location: remote/Munich
- How to get in touch: (my email is here)[https://todddavies.co.uk/contact]
- Notes: I think informal mentoring is rewarding for both parties. I’m a little time constrained but am sure we can work around it.
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I play guitar and bass. Or really, I learn to play guitar and bass. I played saxophone for 10 years previously, and by comparison there seems to be so much to learn about and around guitar that I’ll be a perpetual student. This might be a long shot, but if there are any other musicians here from the Toronto area, I’d be down to meet up and jam.
The other thing I’m interested in is climate change. A couple months ago I decided that understanding and taking some action against climate change is important to me. Right now, I’m doing a lot of research and reading to try and understand what kinds of problems I might be able to help with.
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For sure! One of the things that I’ve noticed from investigations so far is that there are a lot of people who care about this but don’t know what to do. I’m following a 100:10:1 process right now, generating a big list of ideas, then picking a smaller subset to research in depth.
An interesting place to start might be this post from Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange
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I try to keep myself as busy as possible; I’m lucky enough to be young, active and healthy and don’t want to waste this time. This is roughly what I get up to in a typical week outside of work:
Intellectual:
- Learning German (I just recently to Munich, and think it’s important to make the effort to fit in culturally)
- CS Tutoring: I’m tutoring a student over Skype for 2 hours a week on average, plus another 2-4 hours of preparation time
Sport:
- Weightlifting (4x a week)
- Lindy Hop dancing (once a week)
- Swimming (once a week)
- Indoor bouldering (< once a week)
Misc:
- I spend most Saturdays shopping because I’m trying to upgrade my wardrobe and it takes me a while to find clothes that aren’t too expensive, fit well and go with the other clothes I have.
- I’m also lucky enough to have a few groups of friends that I like to do stuff with outside of work, which will usually take up one evening per week.
- Working through the Malazan Book of the Fallen series
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I use tarsnap because it’s so cheap and very redundant. I don’t think it’s a perfect solution though; it nukes my internet connection whenever I’m trying to upload or download anything (I get the impression that it creates many simultaneous connections, but I’ve never investigated it), and of course, private key management is always a concern.
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With regards to private key management: you could always put a really hard passphrase on the key and then not worry too much. ;)
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The problem is that unlike many systems, the key itself needs to be backed up somewhere. It’s completely impossible, via any means, to bootstrap a new system into restoring without a copy of the key. It could be offsite or etched in stone tablets or whatever, but there’s zero chance you’re going to memorize everything you need.
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My solution was to create two keys. One can only write new backups and can’t read them. The other can read backups and is passphrase protected using high scrypt parameters, so it takes around a minute to decrypt, and that key is stored on a cloud storage thing that I could still access if my house burned down.
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Is there anything in particular you wanted to know more about? It’s a fairly basic setup once the keys are made. The hardened key is just something like:
tarsnap-keymgmt -wrd --outkeyfile master.key --passphrased --passphrase-mem XXX --passphrase-time YYY tarsnap.keyThe hardest part is figuring out tarsnap/scrypt’s rules for resource usage, as the options specify “up to” what resources to use. The KDF uses the memory you specify but tarsnap allocates only half of that, so “–passphrase-mem 8589934592” uses 4GB, and it seems to be quite bad at determining the CPUs scrypt performance, on my machine at least “–passphrase-time 600” makes it take around 1 minute 10 seconds.
One caveat is that tarsnap will refuse to allocate more than half of the available system memory. I have one machine with 16GB RAM and one with 8GB, and the key requires 4GB to decrypt, so the key can’t be decrypted on the machine with 8GB (tarsnap will just complain that the file requires too much memory to decrypt and exit), at least not without modifying the tarsnap source (apparently there’s an option coming in a future tarsnap release to override this).
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Not at all, feel free. I look forward to reading it.
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TL;DR: I don’t actually want to back up very much stuff, git works fine for source code, and tarsnap for everything else.
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I’ve been looking at my backup strategy (inspired by this post), and doing CS tutoring while I wait to move to Munich for my new job. Doing tutoring has been really helpful for me, apart from the financial incentive, it keeps me on my toes, and gives me an excuse to code up some algorithms and datastructures that I wouldn’t normally spend time on.
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Not really sure what I’m going to be doing this week. I got engaged last weekend, and spent most of the last week telling family and spending time with my new fiance. I’ll probably try to get back into blogging at Suspect Semantics.
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I’m working through the Rust exercises for exercism.io, and organising my permanent move to Munich to start my new job in December, which involves cancelling some student loans I took out (I dropped out and no longer need them) and moving my stuff to my parents house so I can collate it all and box it before I ship it over.
I also started a blog post (my first) and hope to start blogging more frequently in the future.
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I’m improving my Prolog knowledge by working through some books and exercises. I decided to double down on Prolog as a means to better understand logic programming in Shen and Oz. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Prolog implementations are quite capable development systems in their own right for the types of things that I do.
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Some things I’ve used it for include:
- Static site generation
- Tools for inserting/retrieving data from Freenet
- System administration. I have a machine in state X, I want it to end up in state Y, Prolog tells me an efficient set of commands to do it. Currently I have it spit out an Ansible playbook but I could see a useful alternative to Ansible-like tools being done in Prolog or Oz.
- Gathering statistics from instances and generating reports and data from them.
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Prolog Programming in Depth is available in PDF form and was a good start for me. Clause and Effect by William Clocksin is a useful workbook. Art of Prolog and The Craft of Prolog once I had a better grip of the language. SWI Prolog is the implementation I’m using and it has good documentation, including writing web applications. SWISH is an online IDE for using SWI prolog for trying things out without installing.
For learning about constraint logic programming in prolog I used Logic Programming and Prolog supplement and Constraint Logic Programming over Finite Domains.
Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming was useful for mapping to/from Oz.
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Cheers; I’ll take a look at some of those :) I’ve worked through Programming in Prolog so I think I’m ready for something a little more advanced.
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I was given an offer from Google today, so (as was planned in this eventuality) I dropped out of university and began preparations for starting (working out what I’ll take to Munich, shopping etc).
I also started a notebook this week that I’ve been writing, well, notes in while I read blog posts. The aim is to increase retention, jot down (instead of forgetting) any ideas that I have, and to enable me to reference it when I can’t quite remember where I read something a few weeks ago. So far, it’s been great.
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Today is the first day of my master’s degree at Imperial, so this week I’ll be settling into both the university and the city. Choosing what courses to take is proving difficult; I hope that taking the harder and more interesting courses is a gamble that will pay off!
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I’m currently back in the lovely tiled arms of i3wm.
I really appreciate the tiled window layout approach, but i3 also plays nice with dialog windows, and it has an explicit floating mode for when you really need it. At work and at home I use a Dell Ultrasharp IPS with 2560x1440 resolution.
- website: http://i3wm.org/
- subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm
- demo screencast by the author: https://youtu.be/Wx0eNaGzAZU
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i3 as well. The thing I like about it, over other tiling window managers I’ve tried, is that layout is manual: you can decide on the fly how you want windows laid out, rearrange them, restack, etc instead of having a single hardcoded layout that everything goes in.
I also use this tool by fellow lobster @cmhamill to get wmii-like dynamic workspace tagging. Just using numbered workspaces, I frequently tend to run out.
(I migrated to i3 over wmii, which is similar but a bit more restricted, mostly for a more elegant internal model and support for a small handful of additional window manager hints. There is something (several somethings, really) to be said for the fact that wmii’s event loop is literally a shell script, but I wasn’t making any use of the capabilities. i3 supports massively more sophisticated layouts than wmii, but the interface makes my brain hurt, so in practice I don’t use them much.)
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i3 for me too. I am interested to see how things evolve; I’m running Fedora which is shaping up to make a move to Wayland; others will almost certainly follow. As I understand it i3 doesn’t currently support Wayland, so it’ll be interesting to see if the maintainers make the port, or if Sway will become the replacement.
Either way, I love i3.
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It’s a lot more complicated than that. The Wayland- aware applications (some QT versions and some GTK versions) can be forced to ignore drawing decorations, and a lot of applications run from XWayland which is “all of the Xorg.server inside a .so and some conversion” that follow the old model. THEN you have unstable protocols that extend wayland, like the one used by KWin that says ‘no, decorations should be server-side’. A rant from the WLC developer (that provides most of the compositor implementation for Sway):
https://github.com/Cloudef/orbment/issues/141#issuecomment-227720157
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As others have mentioned, I consume fiction on my Kindle, but read technical books in a physical format. I often export (technical) blog posts to my Kindle with this Chrome add-on, which is fine since there is rarely the need to flip back and forth between sections of technical blog posts; they’re usually a relatively linear read.
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I’m waiting on a potential job offer this week (hopefully not for too long), and looking over Programming in Prolog in preparation for university next year. I’m staying with my parents for most of the week, and then I’ll move down to London and being university next week :)
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I finished my internship in Munich last Friday, and moved to London on Saturday. Now I’m spending the week at my parents house in Northern England for a holiday :)
I’m planning on looking at two things this week:
- Programming With Prolog (a requirement for University next year).
- Rust; I started writing an ARM emulator a few weeks ago, and promptly realised that I should take the time to understand the language more deeply first; lifetimes and ownership in particular were concepts that I didn’t pick up simply through using them. My first voyages into Rust-land were great fun though; it feels like a language that I can come to really enjoy working with.
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I’m reading I Am a Strange Loop since I found it in the library at work, and was interested after having had read GEB seven or eight years ago. I’m not reading any fiction at the moment, but might be soon, since some of the fantasy series mentioned in this thread look interesting!
I’m learning to sew (I want to be able to modify & repair my clothes), going to a lake, and a friends place for dinner. Work is quite intense at the moment, so being able to completely switch off at the weekends is fantastic.