borg.org

Category: Tech

  • Firewalls are a Bad Idea, Always Have Been

    I have always argued that using firewalls to protect computer networks is a mistake. The argument for firewalls is they are an extra layer of protection. My counter argument is firewalls end up being the only protection. Computers started out insecure—the fact they worked at all was frankly a miracle, how much do you want? […]

  • Two Wristwatches

    I realized that there is a very specific group of people out there (Hello!) who wear two wristwatches. The Venn diagram makes it a pretty exclusive group.

  • Running on a New Server

    After many years (and a lot of dormant time) I moved my blog over to a new (and much cheaper) server. I was a little sad to delete the old VM. Some good news: Comments finally work again.

  • Async Rust: Why is it so Fast?

    Everyone knows that a web server, for example, will be able to serve up a lot more traffic if it is written using Rust async code rather than straight OS threads. Lots of people have the numbers to prove it. But I have wondered why, and none of the explanations I have read have explained […]

  • Using emacs as a Rust IDE

    Turns out I don’t like Helix very much. The problem? My fingers know emacs. I hate emacs, but it is what my fingers know. So I decided to figure out how to get emacs to be a Rust IDE. This was made a little tricky because I had attempted to do so a few years […]

  • Helix, Terminal-based Rust IDE

    I was skimming through the latest 2023 Rust Survey, and I noticed the 5th most popular “editor or IDE setup” is Helix. (Just ahead of emacs, even!) What the heck is Helix? Helix seems to be: Rust IDE, seems to do other languages, too, but I’m interested in Rust. Heavily inspired by vim, Written in […]

  • Python is a Great Prototyping Language…but One Should Never Ship a Prototype

    I really like how Python lets me start to get things working before everything is working. I can fire up an interactive debugger and immediately start playing with some library I Googled up and think I might need, quickly get it doing stuff, plug it in to other code and quickly get the whole doing […]

  • Kent's Super-Simple, Excellent Password Advice

    This excellent advice is simple, in fact its excellence depends upon being simple. Complicated is the enemy of security. If you follow this advice you will be among a very rare elite in how secure your passwords will be. Four parts: 1. Write down your passwords. On real paper, with a real pen or pencil, […]

  • Snowden, the Movie

    I went to one of the first Boston matinees of the movie Snowden today. It was all very familiar territory: it could have been boring or–as with any subject I know a lot about–it could have been excruciating in its errors. It was neither. It held my attention, it did not disappoint. But was it […]

  • Touchscreen Password Idea

    Passwords are a problem, and lots of people say they are doomed, but I have seen no good alternatives, so I sometimes think about making them better. Touchscreens are important yet really hard to enter good passwords. Also, I would like to do more of a “key exchange” when entering my password. I use different […]