A friend is teaching a class on data analysis. She is building a simple and rough data set for the class to examine, and to spur discussion. You can contribute in half a minute! Here's how:
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There's a lot of news recently about some downright orwellian surveillance executed across the globe by my own government with the assistance of major American corporations. The scope is huge, and the implications are depressing. It's scary and frustrating for anyone who …
Occasionally, someone asks me whether we should encourage use of the
--ask-cert-level option when certifying OpenPGP keys with gpg. I see
no good reason to use this option, and i think we should discourage
people from trying to use it. I don't think there is a satisfactory
answer to the …
Most OpenPGP User IDs look like this:
Jane Q. Public <jane@example.org>
This is clean, clear, and unambiguous.
However, some tools (gpg, enigmail among others) ask the user to
provide a "Comment:" field when they are choosing a new User ID (e.g.
when making a new key). These …
Today i saw a billboard on the side of a bus. It was from a cable TV channel, bragging about how well-connected their viewers are (presumably on the internet, social media, blogs, etc).
It shows a smiling, attractive man, with text next to him saying something like "I told 9000 …
I feel like i've done a lot of blogging recently about failing to do things with proprietary software. That's annoying.
This post is about something i made successfully with free software (and
some non-software crafting): I made a Woolly Mammoth for my
nephew!
I documented the pattern (with pictures!) that …
i have a colleague who is forced by work situations to use Windows. Somehow, I'm the idiot\^W\^W\^W\^W\^Wfriendly guy who gets tapped to fix it when things break.
Well, this time, the power supply broke. As in, dead, no lights, no fan, no nothing. No problem …
Better debugging tools can help us understand what's going on with MIME
messages. A python scrap i wrote a couple years ago named
printmimestructure has been very useful to me, so i thought i'd share
it.
It reads a message from stdin, and prints a visualisation of its structure, like …
I was upset to learn about Aaron Swartz's death last week. I continue to be upset about his loss, and about our loss. He didn't just show promise of great things to come in the future -- he had already done more work for the public good than many of …
A friend wrote me a simple question today. My response turned out to be longer than i expected, but i hope it's useful (and maybe other people will have better suggestions) so i thought i'd share it here too:
Angela Starita wrote:
I'd like to save my work in a …