Author: Dag-Erling Smørgrav

Shiny!

Brakes are generally considered a good thing to have on a car.

Just short of three hours of work—closer to two if you subtract the time spent before (changing clothes, laying out the tools and parts) and after (cleaning my tools and putting them away, tidying the workshop, washing, changing clothes).

I don’t have a micrometer, so I didn’t measure the pads and disks I replaced, but judging by eye, the outboard pads were fine, but the inboard pads were close to or at the legal limit, and the disks were well below it.

Skilled programming

From the VxWorks Kernel Programmer’s Guide:

Prior to VxWorks 6.0, the operating system provided a single memory space with no segregation of the operating system from user applications. All tasks ran in supervisor mode. Although this model afforded performance and flexibility when developing applications, only skilled programming could ensure that kernel facilities and applications coexisted in the same memory space without interfering with one another.

…whereas now, I guess, any idiot and his dog can write a well-behaved VxWorks application…

Haystack

This is actually old news; Haystack was shut down permanently about two weeks ago, shortly after I read about it. However, this has been nagging me ever since, so I’ll write it down anyway, just to get it out of my head.

The thing that struck me the most about the articles I read about Haystack is that, although some people have questioned the strength of its crypto, no-one pointed out what seems obvious to me:

Haystack cannot possibly work, for reasons which have little to do with cryptography. Continue reading “Haystack”