Random Neurons Firing
Thoughts about Software, Networking, and Life
Category: Software
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A small team of well-known developers from the OpenBSD team is working on a fork of OpenSSL, to be named LibreSSL. This group is going through the OpenSSL source code base and removing old/ancient distributions, reformatting the code to KNF (Kernel Normal Format), removing dead code, fixing bugs and improving the package documentation. They’re aided…
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I created an InterMapper probe that detects whether a web server is vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug. You can read about it on my Blueberry Hill Software blog at: http://blueberryhillsoftware.com/heartbleed-probe-for-intermapper/
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My MacBook Pro (10.9.2) was running slowly. I saw frequent spinning beach balls, systemstats was consuming 100% of the CPU on a regular basis, Apple Mail was grinding away indexing files, etc. The forums at discussions.apple.com contain all kinds of dicey recommendations about rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100 followed by “Works for me!” and “Didn’t work for…
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I’ve been looking for a way to sort out Angular, Backbone, Bower, Grunt, Node, NPM, Yeoman and all the other buzzwords that get thrown around for writing a Single Page App for the web. There are many Youtube videos around: these videos stand out as excellent resources. Intro to Angular.js in 50 Examples (Part 1) The evolution…
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What a great weekend! What interesting ideas came from the H@ckfest! My team, the inforMED project, presented an idea for helping first responders (EMTs, ED triage) to get relevant data on their cell phone/tablet when they first encounter a patient. If the patient has one, the EMT would scan the token (RFID, QR code, NFC,…
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I was accepted to the Joslin Diabetes team at the MIT Healthcare Grand H@ckfest this weekend at MIT Media Lab. It’s an all-weekend opportunity to work with a team on projects related to solving the problem of diabetes. Should be a blast!
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Today was a two-fer: I found two interesting techniques for working with Python. I needed to test a web server, and wanted to send concurrent HTTP get requests. (The problem was that the web server was failing sporadically when hit by a browser, even though individual requests for pages always worked.) I found two libraries…
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I was a member of the team that won the “Most Likely to Succeed” award at the MedStart Hackathon at Tufts Medical School (http://tuftsmedstart.com/) Our four-member team (Bryan Bordeaux, Michelle Qi, Elaine Wu, and I) produced a tool that helps a primary care physician by listing recommended screenings for patients. This was a great event.…
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I just finished Google’s “Digital Analytics Fundamentals” course at https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course. I did OK, too 🙂 The course talks about using Google Analytics to show the performance of your website. The course was a series of short (4-10 minute) videos, with a set of questions after each to let you think about what they just said. In…
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Mac OS X 10.9 came out on Tuesday, and I decided to take the plunge and move my 2.3 GHz MacBook Pro to Mavericks. The price (free) is right and there are big claims for its decreased power demands. You can read John Siracusa’s opus describing all the new features over at the OS X 10.9…