Roy Fielding is not a fan of using TLS everywhere ( viaAristotle Pagaltzis , amongothers). He argues, as far as I can understand, that TLS mostlyprovides confidentiality (and a certain amount of integrity), notprivacy; if I have it right, his view of 'privacy' seems to be'privacy even from the site operator'.

My view on all of this is that I'm a pragmatist. Right now thereare real, non-theoretical intermediaries between me and a lot of

Like many people, I use a (Unix) desktop environment that supports what gets called 'virtual screens' or 'virtual desktops'( my window manager actually hasboth). One common approach for using them is to dedicate particularvirtual screens to particular programs or groups of programs basedon your purpose ( this goes especially well with full screen apps ). You mighthave one virtual screen more or less devoted to your mail client,one to your editor or IDE, one to status monitoring of your systems,and

As is becoming traditional, I'll start with the tweets:

@jaqx0r :People complaining about "if err != nil" density in #golang don'tcheck errors in other languages. Discuss.

@thatcks :In exception-based languages, you often get to aggregate a bunch ofsimilar/same error handling together in one code bit.

As usual on Twitter, this is drastically crunched down to fit into140 characters and thus not necessarily all that clear. To make itclear

This is one of those times when I'm just going to quote someone,but hey, it's Guido van Rossum ( via ):

However this talk of "wasting our time with Python 2" needs to stop,and if you think that making Python 2 less attractive will encouragepeople to migrate to Python 3, think again. [...]

What he said, with all the emphasis you can imagine.

If the Python developers really think that, it's rather sad. Ofcourse

Lately there have been a raft of security bugs of the form 'thestandard open source library for dealing with file format X can bemade to do bad things if it opens a specially crafted file in thatformat'. Some of the time that is 'run arbitrary code'. A bunch ofthese bugs have been found with the new fuzzer afl ; see its 'bug-o-rama' trophy case.

At one level, that these bugs exist in many libraries for handlingvarious file formats is not too

Let's start with my tweet :

Modern languages like Rust and Haskell often give me the feeling thatI am not smart enough and determined enough to program in them.

In the geeky programmer circles of the Internet that I fish forinformation in, Rust is very much thelatest hot thing. It's generally presented as a better C/C++ thatis (or should be) just as fast while being far more memory safe.All of this sounds very nice; who wouldn't want a

In my entry on why I was interested in moving to ext4 , I said:

As time goes by, more and more software is likely to assume sub-secondfile timestamps basically by default (because the authors have neverrun it on a system without them) and not work quite right in variousways. I can fight a slow battle against what is effectively a newstandard of sub-second file timestamps, [...]

Some people might bristle at the idea that we will drift into aworld

Suppose that you want to create a simple web application environment,something that can compete with CGI programs and PHP to attractpeople who have modest needs and just want to throw somethingprogrammable up on their website. What does it need to have? Asit happens I have some views on this, formed from my long run ofusing and abusing CGI programs (although I haven't done PHP).

In my opinion, anything that wants to displace CGI or PHP in people'saffections needs to be as simple

Every so often, people who are suggesting that you spend money onsomething will use the formulation of 'what is your data worth?'or 'your data should be worth ...' (often 'at least this much'follows in some variation). Let's ignore the FUD issues involved and talk only about another problem with this: itputs the cart before the horse by assuming that the data comes firstand then the money arrives afterwards. Given data, you are calledon to spend as