Bill Cheswick's Blog

ebooks and iTeX

Thu Jan 24 21:38:00 EST 2013

Well, I've been taking a break from iTeX (new update now in iTunes) to spend some hookey time reading old Heinlein. I haven't read Glory Road in 40 years, and I am quite a different person now. I think I am going to have to go through them all.

Superfocus glasses review and update

Sat Dec 22 11:56:00 EST 2012

--Apple-Mailö9CB3C6B-33DF-42EB-BC58-0559F14C6776 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Type: text/plain; charset-ascii

CAs that Apple pre-approves

Thu Dec 13 19:48:00 EST 2012

I have been working on getting the cheswick.com CA to work harder for me, and am dropping it into place. Of course, I added it to my iPad's list of trusted CAs (which will "change my iPad!") So I wondered how long Apple's list of CAs is.

Residential Data Feeds, Inc.

Thu Dec 6 19:18:00 EST 2012

Our home intercom has been connected to a computer for about fifteen years. The auxiliary input of the intercom is connected to the audio output of the server. We almost never use the other intercom inputs.

Theoretical attacks

Tue Nov 27 11:14:00 EST 2012

At a recent conference I expressed concern about data leaking from one virtual machine to another running on the same host, or to the host system and its owners. There have been a number of papers exploring this possibility, including most recently some fine work using the shared hardware cache to obtain keys from another guest OS. [Zhang2012]

Linux ifconfig stupidity

Wed Nov 21 12:35:00 EST 2012

Okay, what is wrong with this?

resolveconf me fait mal

Wed Nov 21 12:29:00 EST 2012

Linux complaints

A job in Washington?

Sat Nov 17 13:40:00 EST 2012

As many of you know, I am between jobs, looking to work with bright people on interesting problems. It's going fine, and the ideas and opportunities come at a steady pace.

Java prescience?

Tue Sep 11 10:37:00 EDT 2012

In the mid-1990s, one of my stump speeches was about that newfangled language, Java. In these speeches, and in a related Scientific American article (November 1995, p 34, right near a photo of Sandra Bullock), I called Java a "virus implementation language".

Epic Battle with gs(1)

Thu May 31 11:34:00 EDT 2012

It appears to take three wise men and a virgin to define your own PAPERSIZE for gs (ghostscript). There is an easy definition in the default system initialization file for all the paper sizes they could think of, but only the -T parameter for the call, and it doesn't seem to work.

Stock Review

Tue May 1 11:25:00 EDT 2012

Since it is far and away my largest income source, I guess us unemployed should review the portfolio and prospects.

Glasseses: Superfocals and Empower adjustable focus glasses

Tue May 1 09:32:00 EDT 2012

A friend asked about the Empower brand of adjustable eyeglasses. I have been wearing Superfocus eyeglasses (originally "Trufocals"), and here is my response.

old dog, newish languages

Thu Dec 15 15:56:00 EST 2011

Well, I've spent the last couple of days starting to come up to speed on python. I've looked it over before, and it is okay in general, and quite good in a number of ways.

Stock picking results

Wed Jan 19 21:11:00 EST 2011

I am a stock picker. I learned at my daddy's knee, and have spent a life looking for the best growth stocks. This doesn't require constant vigilance, but I do have to sit and review things from time to time. Today, the SRC Orange and Blue books arrived, so I sat and scanned.

IPv6: Time to Return to the End-to-end principle?

Thu Jun 17 13:31:00 EDT 2010

With the advent of increasing IPv6 deployment, there are a significant number of experts who think it is time to return to the end-to-end principle for the Internet. Mr. Cheswick, tear down that firewall! Security belongs in the host, not the network, and we are losing significant opportunities for network innovation when we don't allow all machines to talk to each other.

Acceleration measured on a region jet at takeoff

Sun Apr 18 16:21:00 EDT 2010

With an iPhone on my leg (in airplane mode, of course) I recorded the takeoff roll and ascent to about 1,000 feet in a fully-loaded regional jet. The raw data was acquired every tenth of a second, and the graph shows a five point moving=20 average of the relative changes (in g-s) of the X, Y, Z, and norm of these values. You can clearly see the takeoff roll starting (at about .3g) and the rotation and ascent. Watch this space for measurements of turbulence, light to moderate.

Bookstores and the iPad

Tue Apr 6 20:28:00 EDT 2010

I walked around a fairly large bookstore here in Toronto today, and realized that the experience had changed. I have my new iPad back in the hotel room, loaded with iBooks and the Kindle app, with a couple new, unread books loaded up.

Richard Clarke wants ISP DPI for national defense

Sun Mar 7 10:47:00 EST 2010

Richard Clarke was on a panel at RSA this week. The discussions was centered around improving our nation's cyber defense. He insisted that what we needed was ISP DPI on the major Internet backbones. I don't see how this could work.

Earthquake in Bernardsville!

Sun Feb 21 09:12:00 EST 2010

We just had a quake, at 8:59. There was a distinct faint boom (P-wave) and an "interesting" shake about a second later. The shake was a single boom that shook the house, not enough to dislodge anything, but I did check the furnace while figuring this all out.

Slip of the tongue

Thu Feb 18 18:09:00 EST 2010

My daughter sent a pointer to day to this site:

Pipe dreams

Sat Jun 27 15:10:00 EDT 2009

I've been thinking about pipes recently, the kind Doug McIlroy invented with Ken and Dennis back at the dawn of Unix. Pipes demanded some interesting programming approaches: do one job only, and do it well; a text-level API for programs that are easy to explain, debug, save; have the kernel support lightweight processes, not the monsters of VMS and the Microsoft descendants, etc.

Am I a programmer: rethinking Dykstra and BASIC

Sat Jun 27 10:09:00 EDT 2009

David Brin presented a number of interesting thoughts in his closing presentation at this year's Usenix ATC. In particular, he mentioned that the BASIC language is not easily available any more. Yes, you can click on a few things to install it, but each click frustrates the interest of a percentage of novice programmers.

Cool audio hack

Fri Jun 19 10:41:00 EDT 2009

The coolest idea I have seen at this ATC was shown in a poster session given by Stephen Tarzia from Northwestern. He and others are generating ultrasound from a PC and picking up the echoes to determine user presence and attention. Neilsen for PCs.

Not Famous

Thu Jun 18 11:40:00 EDT 2009

"Hello, I'm ."

Usenix ATC

Thu Jun 18 11:39:00 EDT 2009

The Usenix Annual Technical Conference (ATC) used to be awesome, a word I don't use casually. My first was in Portland in 1985, and it had a series of talks, people, and great ideas I still ponder and use. We had two of these conferences every year, and it featured much of what was new in Unix, file systems, practical operating systems experiments, etc.