Microsoft font gives away forgery in bankruptcy case - One more reason to not use Calibri.
This Is Every Generically Cool Restaurant’s Playlist.
All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization.
Huawei is probably the only player who can manufacture and deploy 5G at scale - but can we trust it?
Video shows the staggering scale and extent of wealth inequality:
Forget cryptographically-secure connections. All the cool kids use dead-drops.
How pick-up artists morphed into the the alt-right.
People are starting to get pissed at Facebook, finally:
Artificial intelligence for sniffing out biased judges.
Think of an island full of bunnies. That is Peacebunny Island.
Man, 2019 just broke in and took over everything. New school year is open and I’m teaching fewer classes, but I am just slammed by side projects for the College. So here are just a few points:
I have to rebuild the UP College of Law website into something more modern, and slot in content for the new LLM Program.
Did I mention that UP will have an LLM Program? That is going to happen this year.
Other computery-stuff in the College - the OLA Case Management System, modernizing the old DOS-based transcript system.
We have a DOS-based system for the grades of some alumni. The database is still humming along, source code and documentation long gone. Staff learn to operate it based on oral history and incantations. It’s fine - but we are running out of hardware environments that can still run it.
So even if we back it up, if we can’t run the execution environment to access it, that data is as good as gone forever. It was built with a proprietary system and the company that made the tools to build it is long gone. This is not computer programming. This is computer archaeology.
I have built or revised a website for every employer I’ve had since leaving my web programming job. Why did I bother getting out of my programming job (where I built websites), go to law school, pass the bar, only to build more websites?
Because this is what it takes to bring the practice, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Today it’s just a website with pretty pictures. Then we put in a reference database. Then maybe some machine learning on all those texts.
Why I’m off Facebook (and will most likely never go back again) - A list of Facebook’s scandals for 2018.
The Puritan ban on Christmas - because of all that alcohol and debauchery.
“Bird Box” really is about the horrors of social media (so don’t look).
Don’t expect the Fed to buy into cryptocurrencies anytime soon.
An over-engineered (but very cool) trap against package thieves
This Christmas, treated myself to an upgrade of the NAS from a WD MyCloud to a Synology DS218j, with two hard disk bays and built in RAID-type redundancy. Things I’m enjoying so far:
I can swap in new drives to increase capacity in the future.
The drive has a full OS I can access through a web top UI, with apps that can automate downloads and backups
A media server I can access from VLC and my browser - it transparently downloads media information.
I've always tried to keep my programming skills current, and my development toolchain updated - even through law school. Just in case this legal practice thing crashes and burns. Almost ten years into my career and things still have a sense of being tentative.
Lately it feels like the whole enterprise is losing coherence as the rule of law is distorted by force. When logic is trumped by power, I find myself retreating into code. The last time something happened, I was a law student and the strained readings like La Bugal B’laan were flying from the Supreme Court’s docket. I coped by mapping codal provisions into a entity-process diagram. I also learned Git and Ruby (mostly for Rails).
JavaScript would be my primary development language, because it is pretty much everywhere in the development stack these days, so the rest of my toolset will be JavaScript-centric:
Node.js - for application logic at the server side of things.
jQuery - for document object manipulation.
Electron - for cross platform desktop application development (pretty much the same thing as browser-side development, thanks to this framework).
React - for doing clever UI stuff.
I’m still going to be using other languages, since I might start teaching machine learning next year. I’ve been weaning myself off Ruby and transitioning to Python for sometime now - the latter has a lot of machine learning libraries that can be useful for my research. Although instruction would likely use R or Octave.
Visual Studio Code
My go-to editor (from Emacs and then Sublime) is Microsoft Visual Studio Code For a while, I was fiddling with Atom - but when Microsoft bought GitHub, I figured which way the merge will go (Code is based on Atom technology anyway). Thanks to an educational discount, I have an Azure Devops account I can use for requirements, testing, and bug tracking. I also use the LaTeX extension so I can draft well-formatted academic papers in the same environment where I code.
Not really an optimal way to burp a baby.
Tales from a crypto-currency cruise:
“John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.”
Workers are just ghosting their employers now, apparently.
SMS based 2-factor authentication hacked at scale.
My top five songs this year, according to Spotify:
Professional management for pet influencers.
From the Yokohama City Library - classic catalogs of Hirayama Fireworks.
A lot of our computer security problems can be traced to the way the default system languages handle memory. Next time I need systems programming, I’m going with Rust.
Exorcisms (and therefore maybe demon possessions) - are on the rise. Maybe I’m prepping for the wrong kind of apocalyptic future?
The little things that make Terrace House so damn fascinating:
Hublot blockchain watch - for an irrefutable, irreversible, immutable statement of time. This is getting out of hand.
Pinecoin - “Tokenized Maine Pine Cones - A pine cone with an ERC-20 token for Proof-of-Authenticity”
Continuous random elections - I remember covering this in Prof. Hilbay’s constitutional design elective
“Men Are More Likely to Act Unethically on Their Own Behalf, Women on Someone Else’s”
Don’t Want to Fall for Fake News? Don’t Be Lazy
Big Bird is retiring.
The Onion guide to blockchain technology.
The rise and fall of Ethereum.
I, for one, welcome our Headless Chicken Monster overlords.
Harriet the singing donkey