I've been blogging for about 20 years. Exactly what I write about has changed over that time (of course), but in recent times I've been writing about my PhD (applying purely-functional programming to distributed stream processing); cultural stuff I like, books, music, in particular Nintendo Switch games recently; free software stuff, particularly around Linux and Debian (I'm a Debian developer); note-taking and personal productivity; reading and archiving old media (minidiscs, ZIP drives, stacks of DVD-Rs, floppy disks); my fledgling adventures in 3D printing; retrocomputing and restoring my old Commodore Amiga; various classic Doom hacking projects I've worked on; running and maintaining a DIY free software NAS; computing history and preservation…
I wouldn't normally post in a thread like this but a friend put me up to it. Any feedback appreciated.
> but the fact that a two records can't share field names
That is awkward sometimes yes. Record fields are functions, and you can't have two functions with the same name in the same namespace.
You can, however, use namespaces to import two separate modules with conflicting names. It does mean you have to define the two different records in two different modules.
If, you want different records to have common fields because they are conceptually related, you probably want to use type classes.
> If, you want different records to have common fields because they are conceptually related, you probably want to use type classes.
I'm not a fan of ad-hoc typeclasses. I know that various approaches in modern Haskell advocate for them, but I think that ad-hoc typeclasses are a smell for overuse of typeclasses when plain-old data types should suffice.
I am a very big proponent of demanding that typeclasses have associated laws. Otherwise you can descend into the same hierarchy mess that plagues statically-typed class-based languages. And sometimes you just want to have different fields be named the same thing without an underlying profound relationship between the two.
> I started running a vanity domain name around 2000, for email and Web, and have a few thoughts based on that...
>
> Hosting chronology something like: home Linux box on ADSL, 2 different shared hosters, 1U in a colo facility, back to earlier shared hoster.
Much the same sort-of chronology and hosting story for me…
> For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`.
I'm curious to pick your brains on that. I've gone the other way: I ended up standardising on a .net but I kinda wish I had the .org instead, my rationale is, .org is a closer match to what my site is: if I squint I can consider it to be an "organisation" of one, but I can't convince myself that it or I'm a network. I originally picked the .net because I thought it scanned better with my choice of domain.
I don't think I have any strong feelings on TLDs today. Especially when there's so many new TLDs, appropriations of the county code TLDs, and so many non-techies. I'm guessing many techies no longer know what the original TLDs meant, back before rules/conventions were relaxed, pre-ICANN. Either .net or .org original meanings, "of one", could work.
As an aside, I'm still slightly uncomfortable with the real-name domain name. I did it because I had some idea that this was a facet/presence of my real identity, which already had a name, and there's the idea of standing behind one's name. The discomfort is because my upbringing tried to teach me a flavor of traditional values, like not being boastful, not advertising your deeds, etc., yet the real-name domain name means I'm plastering my name all over, like some politician. Maybe why I went with it despite discomfort is that I'd gotten used to discomfort -- trying to reconcile upbringing (humble is good), with personality (still learning), with conventions in industry&academia (promoting name is accepted/required). I don't worry about it, and I do need some kind of identifier in this space, but I don't know whether I'll ever fully like the domain name.
Me too. I have a simple static site/blog with mostly textual content going back to around 1999 and I'm lucky to have a reasonably unique firstname/lastname combo (ish); my blog currently is top on Google and Bing.
I'm trying to determine whether iOS apps could sniff my clipboard, and i haven't proven that they can't; it doesn't seem to be a specific permission that needs to be assigned or can be denied. And thus using 1Password on my iPhone to copy and paste passwords seems to have a bit of a risk to it.
Thanks. I didn't know that, but I don't install FB because of some other stuff I heard they did (like monitor the mic). Likewise messenger. I do access FB, but only from within Firefox, which I use soley for that purpose.
iOS Apps can read your clipboard (But only if the app is open i.e. not in the background, which was possible in earlier iOS versions). I would welcome it if they introduced a permission for clipboard handling.
Personally, I use Workflow to clear my clipboard after pasting a password.
But can apps sniff in what website or app you are using the password? Either for iOS or Android, if the password are just random strings unique for each site and they can't determine that then the attack vector diminishes.
A while back you could query the apps currently active on iOS and there was a big scandal that Twitter was doing it, being reported by the media as a secret vulnerability, which was bullshit since that "vulnerability" was fairly well known already and in use by ad platforms. And at a previous company we used it for more than a year I think, before being in the news. I don't know what happened after that, Apple must have closed that loophole and Android requires a specific permission. But there are always vulnerabilities that developers can exploit and you can't trust the OS on this one.
Plus it really doesn't matter, because when it comes to security, there's also the issue of the mono-culture and user technical stupidity. We know that many people use Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc, most of them reusing passwords across services. And logging the user's copy/pasted texts gives you such a specific dictionary that the probability of getting hacked approaches 1 fast.
