Charlton's Blog

What This Is

This section contains a number of subheadings where I can archive and organize the various things I’m studying/working on from a month-to-month basis. It’s essentially a long list of tersely formatted status updates that I collect and maintain along with some commentary.

Reading…

Books:

• Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0 - Dave Thomas & Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt. (9781937785499) (in p.)

• Agile Application Security, 1st Edition - Laura Bell, Michael Brunton-Spall, Rich Smith, Jim Bird. (9781491938843) (in p.)

• Threat Modeling - Izar Tarandach, Matthew J. Coles. (9781492056522) (in p.)

Online:

• Wikipedia - Community Memory - Did you know that the first BBS was set up at a record store in San Francisco?

Community Memory terminal at Leopold's Records, Berkeley, CA, 1973. Image credit Wikipedia.

• Keithzg’s blog - I love randomly bumping into people’s blogs. Keith makes chiptunes and blogs whatever he’s currently watching/reading/thinking about.

• Chris Heilmann’s - The Web Starts on Page Four - Another blogger’s lamentations about the web being “overrun by corporations”. In my view, the death of the “open web” is greatly exaggerated (you just have to know where to look).

• chown.me - Getting My Own ASN - Ever wonder what it’s like to get your own ASN, and advertise a few of your own IPv6 /48 blocks?

• Jevons Paradox - “In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.”

• Dan Luu - Cocktail Party Ideas - Too often in software development, we oversimplify the complexity of design and engineering challenges faced by professionals outside of our own domain. This could partly be due to arrogance, or a dunning-kruger effect born of one’s superficial understanding of a given field. The author makes a case for the necessity of humility and intellectual rigor in our perspectives and thought processes.

• Matthew Garett - More Doorbell Adventures (2, 3) - Excellent series of writeups on reverse-engineering/hacking an embedded doorbell to integrate it with custom IoT setups. Notably great tips on prodding U-Boot, dumping NAND, and running binaries from device firmware on qemu-user with strace to observe their behavior.

Writing…

I recently adopted Standard Notes to keep all of my writing safe & organized as I work through drafts. I have some cool posts incoming, so keep an eye out.

Founding…

Squeak Records: a small, independent record label/media company based in St. Petersburg, Florida. We are currently enjoying a fast, debt-free bootstrapping process. Stay tuned! 🐭

Squeak’s first artists are called Big Huge Giant, who are very close friends of mine and extraordinarily talented musicians. Sometime in February, we’ll have the honor of launching their project as part of the label’s inaugural live show.

Listening…

• See last.fm.

Watching…

Shows:

• Texhnolyze - The next logical step after Lain and Ergo Proxy. It’s pretty intense.

• xxxHOLiC - Per a friend’s recommendation.

Videos:

• Folding Ideas - An Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings - The backstory of the original LoTR animated film is… colorful. Learn all about it here.

• Bryan Cantrill from Joyent on Manta: internet-facing object storage facility that features compute - Come for the discussion on volume management/object storage/virtualization architectures, stay for the history, ZFS war stories, and showdowns between Donald Knuth & Doug McIlroy.

• Bryan Cantrill - The Container Revolution: Reflections After the First Decade - Did you know that containers are much older than Docker? Sun pioneered the concept with zones, though the concept dates back even further (even from chroot). Explore the history of containerization contrasted with the accumulated cruft of hardware virtualization in this talk.

• Bryan Cantrill on ARC: A Self-Tuning, Low Overhead Replacement Cache - Very cool breakdown/analysis of a cache design whitepaper.

• BumpTop - Very cool project from roughly a decade ago. I’m a firm believer in the power of direct manipulation, and am hopeful that after 10 years the industry is finally ready to integrate some of these concepts into our everyday interfaces.

• Disinformation - Short cDc documentary. From the description, “The subjects of this documentary are either dangerous terrorists, computer security activists, or simply out-of-control adolescents. Your opinion may vary, depending on your stock holdings, after you watch for yourself as the members of The Cult of the Dead Cow demonstrate the ease with which their software program, ‘Back Orifice 2000’ can seize control of a Windows computer connected to the internet.”

Hacking…

• I have been absolutely floored by Tailscale and am a recent convert to the service. More details to follow soon.

• Still doing a ton of work on the blog template/theme, mostly to improve navigaton & discoverability. Check out the commit log for details.

  • Blog posts have a list of related content at the bottom now, and the home page has links to recently updated pages.

  • I also made a ton of improvements to how images are displayed/styled.

• @nabgbot is live again, though without some of the original functionality. The bot is hosted courtesy of my membership at sdf.org.

  • Parts of Twitter’s streaming API were deprecated, so the bot can’t listen for @mentions (and I don’t have the heart to rearchitect it for API v2).

Playing…

• Drums (my main instrument) - Working on shuffles!
• Bass Guitar