Life, liberty, and the pursuit of privacy

Privacy is my hobby, and should be a hobby of every technically competent American. Within the eyes of the law I have a right to secure the privacy of my information. At least that’s the current law - many officials are trying to subvert that right. I figure that we’d better exercise that right while we have it, so that we know how to keep exercising it once it’s illegal and all the information about it dries up.

One particularly annoying coworker often brings up, “what do you have to hide?” Though it would defeat the purpose to explain what I’m hiding, let’s assume that what I’m hiding...

Understanding pointers

I was recently chatting with a new contributor to Sway who is using the project as a means of learning C, and he had some questions about what void** meant when he found some in the code. It became apparent that this guy only has a basic grasp on pointers at this point in his learning curve, and I figured it was time for another blog post - so today, I’ll explain pointers.

To understand pointers, you must first understand how memory works. Your RAM is basically a flat array of octets. Your compiler describes every data structure you use as a series of octets. For the context...

Meet Ozlo

Two days ago, a project I’ve been working on for a little over two years was unveiled to the world. Meet Ozlo, your friendly AI sidekick!

First things first: if you haven’t signed up yet, hit up this link which includes a VIP code to fast-track you into our invite-only app.

A lot has been said about Ozlo already: Charles Jolley (co-founder), John Lilly (investor), Lloyd Hilaiel (friend & colleague), Todd Agulnick (friend & colleague) and even Buzzfeed! Here’s my perspective…

It didn’t take me very long since I first heard the idea for a better mobile search experience from Mike 1 and Charles to stop what I was doing and...

Feed-forward neural doodle

https://likemo.net/?iframe-mode=1

Sometimes you sigh you cannot draw, aren’t you? It takes time to master the skills, and you have more important things to do :) What if you could only sketch the picture like a 3-years old and everything else is done by a computer so your sketch looks like a real painting? It will certainly happen in near future. In fact several algorithms that do the thing very well were proposed recently, yet they take at least several minutes to render your masterpiece using a high-end hardware. We make a step towards making such things available for everybody and present...

In Memoriam - Mozilla

Today we look back to the life of Mozilla, a company that was best known for creating the Firefox web browser. I remember a company that made the web better and more open by providing a browser that was faster and more customizable than anyone had ever seen, and by making that browser free and open source.

I expect many of my readers will be older than I am, but my first memories of Firefox are back in high school with Firefox 3. I fondly remember my discovery of it. Mozilla gave us a faster and more powerful web browser to use on school computers. The other...

State of Sway - April 2016

Since the previous State of Sway, we have accomplished quite a bit. We are now shipping versioned releases of sway, which include support for window borders, input device configuration, more new features, and many bug fixes and stability improvements. I’m also happy to say that Sway 0.5 has landed in the Arch Linux community repository and I’m starting to hear rumors of it landing in other Linux distros as well. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s happened in the past four months:

How to write a better bloom filter in C

This is in response to How to write a bloom filter in C++, which has good intentions, but is ultimately a less than ideal bloom filter implementation. I put together a better one in C in a few minutes, and I’ll explain the advantages of it.

The important differences are:

I chose C because (1) I prefer it over C++ and (2) I just think it’s a better choice for implementing low level data types, and C++ is better used in high level code.

I’m...

Please use text/plain for email

A lot of people have come to hate email, and not without good reason. I don’t hate using email, and I attribute this to better email habits. Unfortunately, most email clients these days lead users into bad habits that probably contribute to the sad state of email in 2016. The biggest problem with email is the widespread use of HTML email.

Compare email to snail mail. You probably throw out most of the mail you get - it’s all junk, ads. Think about the difference between snail mail you read and snail mail you throw out. Chances are, the mail you throw out is flashy flyers and spam...

Comment on Why another kymograph ImageJ plugin? by Wenzhang Wang

Really nice work!

Integrating a VT220 into my life

I bought a DEC VT220 terminal a while ago, and put it next to my desk at work. I use it to read emails on mutt now, and it’s actually quite pleasant. There was some setup involved in making it as comfortable as possible, though.

Here’s the terminal up close:

First, I have several pieces of hardware involved in this:

It took a while to get all of these things, but I was able to get a nice refurbished terminal and a couple of crappy LK201 keyboards. Luckily I was able to eventually remove the need...