Anticryptography

Quite Ok image format

Dec 5, 2021 File-format Images Anticryptography Encoding

QOI There is a new image format in town. It is about on par with PNG for compression, and only encodes RGB and RGBA. What is interesting about it is how simple it is, and as a result of that simplicity how fast it is. So fast that it has achieved essentially O(n) which is the optimal performance scale for an image. …

Apple flavored fraud

Dec 5, 2021 Scams Apple unintended-consequences

Cover photo from Wikipedia Privacy or fraud tool? Apple and Google have been moving the state of the art forward in privacy enhancements for phones. Most of these have revolved around providing the user a finer grain of control over permissions. Does App A need access to the camera, or does App B need the microphone, …

Doubling down on view source

Dec 5, 2021 Technology Conventional-Wisdom Inappropriate-use

View source, next chapter A few weeks ago I wrote about a travesty of technology where officials in Missouri shifted the blame for making a mistake to a reporter for finding it. To sum it up, People in their organization made a series of mistakes that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people in education having …

Paper less, the right way.

Nov 14, 2021 Stopping-bad-practices Best-practices

Go paperless! You have probably had every business you interact with ask you to go paperless. The reasons are sound. Reduce waste from the printing and mailing. It can also declutter the house as you don’t have to file a small stack of paper each month. The problem is that it isn’t going paperless so much …

View source

Nov 12, 2021 Technology Conventional-Wisdom Inappropriate-use

View Source I’ve been using browsers for almost 30 years and I can’t remember a time that there hasn’t been some sort of “View Source” option being present as I right click on a page. Of course there were some ham fisted attempts to hide it with JavaScript. I’ve even seen pages pull …

ML winter

Nov 11, 2021 Machine-learning Artificial-Intelligence

Is the next winter in computer science coming? You may hear the term “AI winter” dropped here and there. For those that are older, we can remember when the hype of AI had peaked before and the period of nothing right after it. AI has been a concept for many decades in computer science. Originally is was …

A modest word

Nov 7, 2021 Archiving Encoding Storage

Cover image from Wikipedia. Word sizes We have a range of word sizes with computers. If you have used a wide range of machines you may have even seen bytes with more or less than 8 bits. We have standardized on 8 bits in a byte in the last 40 decades. Characters can be 8, 16, 32 or a variable number of bytes depending …

Bits for life

Oct 17, 2021 Archiving Storage

How long can a bit live? This question is both nonsensical and serious at the same time. The base concept of a bit says it doesn’t have a life time so much as it encodes a hint at the probability distribution. In real life though we use those bits to encode almost everything today. Looking around my house I can …

Spam

Oct 8, 2021 Spam Marketing Attention

Just because I decide to do business with you once doesn’t mean I want to hear from you every day. I know marketing specialist insist just the opposite, but they are on the verge of mass alienating a large swath of customers and destroying tools we communicate with. Spam Let’s quickly run through the …

8-bit nostalgia

Sep 5, 2021 Nostalgia 8-bit Futile

8-bit: Back in the 70s and 80s we had a lot of fun with 8-bit machines. You could buy them for the cost of a used car and run them at home using your television as the screen. There were of course variations on this theme for years, but most people of my generation first experienced computers in this way from a limited …