The dark evenings may have just got longer, but who cares when there's an entire Internet to play with:
Happy invoicing!
- Homebrew Cray-1A - "I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1... Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you?" Chris Fenton has some excellent ideas for using up all that free time of yours
- This Must Be Heaven - "Once upon a time, a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander contracted a bad case of bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. While immobile in his hospital bed, he experienced visions of such intense beauty that they changed everything—not just for him, but for all of us, and for science as a whole. According to Newsweek, Alexander’s experience proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that an eternity of perfect splendor awaits us beyond the grave—complete with the usual angels, clouds, and departed relatives, but also butterflies and beautiful girls in peasant dress." Sam Harris proceeds to tear said neurosurgeon a new one. (Here's Alexander's original article for your delectation.)
- How a Google Headhunter’s E-Mail Unraveled a Massive Net Security Hole - "It was a strange e-mail, coming from a job recruiter at Google, asking Zachary Harris if he was interested in a position as a site-reliability engineer... Then he noticed something strange. Google was using a weak cryptographic key to certify to recipients that its correspondence came from a legitimate Google corporate domain. Anyone who cracked the key could use it to impersonate an e-mail sender from Google, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page." So he did just that. It turns out many other high-profile companies have the same problem.
- General Failure - "Looking back on the troubled wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many observers are content to lay blame on the Bush administration. But inept leadership by American generals was also responsible for the failure of those wars. A culture of mediocrity has taken hold within the Army’s leadership rank—if it is not uprooted, the country’s next war is unlikely to unfold any better than the last two." Scathing analysis of poor leadership in the modern American army.
- The little ssh that (sometimes) couldn't - "This is a technical article chronicling one of the most interesting bug hunts I’ve had the pleasure of chasing down." Mina Naguib on a fascinating bit of detective work involving machines on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Somewhere between them, a single bit is being flipped - but where? (Trigger Warning: Includes hex dumps.)
- Le blog de Jean-Paul Sartre - "An angry crow mocked me this morning. I couldn’t finish my croissant, and fled the café in despair." Amusing little piece by Bill Barol.
- A dozen USB chargers in the lab: Apple is very good, but not quite the best - "When you buy a USB charger, how do you know if you're getting a safe, high-quality charger for your money? You can't tell from the outside if a charger provides silky-smooth power or if it is a dangerous charger that emits noisy power that cause touchscreen malfunctions and could self-destruct. In this article, I carefully measure the performance of a dozen different chargers, rate their performance in multiple categories, and determine the winners and losers." The graphs of the output of cheapo counterfeit chargers are horrifying.
- Flowchart: How Do I Publish A Book - A useful guide from Writer's Digest
- Uroboros Programming With 11 Programming Languages - "A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output", says Wikipedia. This is an extension of that idea: "The Ruby code generates Python code, which generates Perl code, which generates Lua code, which generates OCaml code, which generates Haskell code, which generates C code, which generates Java code, which generates Brain**** code, which generates Whitespace code, which generates Unlambda code, which generates the original Ruby code again." The original blog post is in Japanese but lists details of the versions used and the commands required to run each step
- The First Men On The Moon: The Apollo Lunar Landings - "This project is an online interactive featuring the Eagle lunar landing. The presentation includes original Apollo 11 spaceflight video footage, communication audio, mission control room conversations, text transcripts, and telemetry data, all synchronized into an integrated audio-visual experience." You'll need a reasonably modern browser: it worked for me in Safari 5.1 (Mac) and IE9, so you should also be OK with recent versions of Firefox, Chrome and Opera.
Happy invoicing!
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