Thought Bricks

Many things are beautiful or impressive but impractical. A beautiful thing that I’ve been casually following is the Ashahi Linux project to bring Linux to the Apple M1 platform. Progress is being made but there are some stumbling blocks with the graphics drivers. The skills and dedication of the people involved are impressive. The idea of creating a virtual machine to intercept the calls to the subsystems and mimic them without looking at the source is brilliant.

Firefox, my browser of choice, just released a new version. I’ve been running it and it seems nice. There are some nice new cookie management features and more HTTPS coverage in private windows. All good and claimed to be 10-20% faster (I haven’t noticed). Although I don’t run Firefox on Windows, the new Windows SSO feature seems very useful. The real problem is the decreasing market share. Despite some lackluster marketing efforts, Firefox is losing users at a pretty good clip.

Edward Snowden says in a blogpost that “an out-of-control Insecurity Industry” is responsible for turning your iPhone into a “potentially lethal threat”. He has a point. The company he cites in the post, NSO Group, produced software that enabled Saudi Arabia to murder Jamal Khashoggi. NSO Group claims on their website that: NSO creates technology that helps government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.

We’ve lot a few good bike shops in Roanoke over the past few years. It’s a tough business and the pandemic didn’t help. One of them (Starlight) stopped selling bikes for a very good reason: the owner found a better business. Two of them found new homes with bigger stores in the area. I’d bought bikes or various services from each of them and it was nice to have the variety of stores each with their own feel and focus.

I noticed that Neovim recently had a new release. I’ve been a happy Vim user for quite some time and I’ve been meaning to check out Neovim to see what it might offer me. The big item in the release is the inclusion of Lua as a first-class scripting engine. That doesn’t mean a whole lot to me as I’ve not used Lua but it seems like a solid evolution for creating plugins.

The White House released a statement on improving cybersecurity for critical infrastructure control systems. That’ll really show those Russians we mean business! It’s better than nothing and the goals are laudable, but until some real regulations are established to enforce application of standards, the “sector-specific critical infrastructure performance goals” will continue to be unmet. Some stiff penalties for failing to meet the standards could make a difference. More importantly than the penalites which corporations often treat as a cost of doing business, it might engender a change in attitude much like the safety cultures now present in most manufacturing environments.

As part of my ongoing evolution of my server create scripting, I’m adding YouCompleteMe to the mix. Code completion is a really nice thing to have and YCM does it very well. This is a more complicated plugin to install as it depends on a language server so it can work asynchronously and must be compiled when installed. The first thing is to ensure that the prerequisites are installed: rob@ub01:~$ sudo apt-get install cmake llvm After that, edit the .

Over time, I’ve improved on my server create script by allowing for the inclusion of some configuration files that I find useful. To do this, I created a new Github repo for my dotfiles based on some inspiration by Mastering Vim. I’ve been using Vim for quite some time, but this book had some good ideas to make my usage even better. Among them, the idea of creating a Github repo for dotfiles.

China has started to ban cryptocurrency and now it looks like the EU is following suit. The Chinese seem to be preparing the ground for the Digital Yuan and want to get rid of competition while the EU is targeting money laundering in their efforts. Although there are plenty of other ways to launder money, cryptocurrency is very useful for ransomware. Making it harder to use cryptocurrency anonymously might help make ransomware less lucrative (or at least more difficult to turn into hard currency).

I was pretty excited to order a couple of State Bicycle 6061 Black Label All-Road bicycles from a LBS in April. At the time, they said it would be the end of June for delivery. That seemed OK to me. I’ve got plenty of other bikes and that leaves plenty of time for summer riding. Then the date slipped to July…then to late August. It’s a First World sort of problem, but still annoying.