Software Folklore ― Andreas Zwinkau

A deep dive into DNS is not a “tutorial” on DNS but good material on getting to know some interesting details about DNS.

• dns
• networking

A (Relatively Easy To Understand) Primer on Elliptic Curve Cryptography gives a great overview of how elliptic curves and how they are used in cryptography. I will probably never understand the details, but this gives me enough information to build a reasonable mental model

• crypto

From time to time, my Azure CLI is stuck in the phase urllib3.connectionpool: Starting new HTTPS connection (1): login.microsoftonline.com:443 traced with the --debugflag. Disabling IPv6 solves the issue.

• azure

For several years I’m searching for a nice note-taking solution for my personal use. I feel like my requirements are pretty low with:

• Multi-Device sync
• Markdown Bailout
• Web and Android Support
• Good UX, simple to use

Yet, I haven’t found one to this day. Now I’ve found Supernotes and giving it a try. In fact, this part of my blog is now driven by Supernotes Cards. On a daily basis a GitHub Actions workflow is running a script which is fetching all note cards with #random and #blog tags and storing them in the Git repository driving this blog. Let’s see how it evolves over time.

• GNOME now has default shortcuts for switching between applications. Therefore, the Toggle in the “Dash to Dock” extension to disable shortcuts does not work. To disable them, use the command:

  for i in {1..9}; do gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-$i "[]"; done
  

• Project Valhalla seems to be finally tangible to reach. Brian Goetz did a few talks on Devoxx Belgium and the JVM Language Summit. I’m pretty impressed by the little complexity “leaked” to the developer.

• Today, by watching this video, I learned about the Polish notation and Reverse Polish notation which are pretty important concepts for the invention of our current computing model using stacks. With the polish notations we can formulate a mathematical/logical expression without the need for parentheses by placing operators in front (or behind) the operands.
• Google published a paper about mercurial cores. Basically, as a Hyperscaler they observe their CPUs are miscalculating operations sometimes due to e.g. manufactoring issues. This issue occurs so often (a few cores per thousand machines) and is even increasing by pushing the hardware further to the physical limits, that its not a negligable problem.

• One skill, I would really like to develop and improve in is listeing to people. How To Be A Good Listener gives great advice to that.
• I’ve built this random page on top of Hugo with Markdown files that contain just lists, a list layout and some CSS. However, I could have also used shortcodes like I do for details. This might be a future improvement. Let’s see first where we’re going.
• All continents on earth have female, latin names: Europa, Africa, America, Asia, Australia, Antarctica
• The highest inflation ever recorded took place in Hungary in 1945/46 with a maximum monthly rate of 41.9 quadrillion percent. The stability of the Hungarian economy could only be achieved with the introduction of a new currency. Thus, on August 1, 1946, the forint was introduced, which was exchanged at 400 quadrillions (a 4 with 29 zeros; written out 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pengő.