In the afternoon I finished The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. What a great read; I loved it.
The book reminded me a little of some of the works of the late Tanith Lee. I don't mean that the story is similar to any of her books, but that it gave me the same feeling of wonder.
So, if you like The Fifth Season I recommend you to check out The Birthgrave Trilogy, consisting of
Or, the Wars of Vis trilogy consisting of
In the afternoon I fixed a few issues as reported
by Pylint online for the
tumblelog.py program. The slightly updated version, 1.0.3, is
available on GitHub.
In the evening I started in The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin, the sequel to The Fifth Season. I am looking forward to reading it because the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy was fantastic.
In the afternoon my mother and I walked into the town centre to have a coffee. On the way back I took photos of some plants for sale, including succulents planted in a metal bowl.
In the evening I read The Ultimate Guide To Indentation in Emacs (Tabs and Spaces). I am interested in this because I am working on a project that uses hard tabs in JavaScript but spaces in Perl source. And since the default tab width is 8 in my Emacs set up this makes for very wide lines in the former case.
What I currently use is changing Emacs's idea of the <TAB> character's length by evaluating the following Emacs Lisp code:
(setq-default tab-width 4)
But I am going to study the suggested configuration in the article mentioned above and most likely add it to my Emacs configuration.
On the way back from physiotherapy I took a few photos of a Scotch rose flowering. I am getting physiotherapy for my knee because I broke my knee cap during a bad fall back in November 2018.
In the evening I made a minor adjustment to both the Perl and Python
version of tumblelog, the program that creates this website. I had
noticed that when hovering over a week number in the archive section
of this blog that the week number and year where shown, separated by a
-; which is the title of the link.
Since there is a --label-format option which is already used to
create a label showing the week and year in a user configurable way, I
used this format to render a better title. For example for the 20th
week of 2019 instead of '20-2019' it now displays 'week 20, 2019' on
hovering for the default value of --label-format.
You can get the latest version of tumblelog via my GitHub repository.
Today, my friend Simon visited me. We had a nice, long chat, as we hadn't seen each other for about 15 years while I was living in Mexico.
He gave me a book as a present: Man, Interrupted: Welcome to the Bizarre World of OCD, Where Once More is Never Enough by James Bailey.
Many people started switching their Python versions from 2 to 3 as a result of Python EOL. Unfortunately, most Python 3 I find still looks like Python 2, but with parentheses (even I am guilty of that in my code examples in previous posts – Introduction to web scraping with Python). Below, I show some examples of exciting features you can only use in Python 3 in the hopes that it will make solving your problems with Python easier.
This article, Things you’re probably not using in Python 3 – but should, just reminded me that I probably should look into adding type hinting to the Python version of tumblelog.
Everyone should switch to (in order of preference):
- BLAKE2b / BLAKE2s
- SHA-512/256
- SHA3-256
- SHA-384
- Any other SHA2-family hash function as a last resort
...unless they're storing passwords! In which case, they should switch to (in order of preference):
- Argon2id with memory >= 32MiB, >= 2 rounds, and >= 2 parallelism
- scrypt / yescrypt with memory >= 32 MiB, >= 4 rounds, and >= 1 parellelism
- bcrypt (for PHP devs, password_hash() and password_verify() does the trick)
- PBKDF2-SHA512 with 85,000 iterations as a last resort
But SHA1 should no longer be used anymore. No excuses.
― Scott Arciszewski, Chief Development Officer at Paragon Initiative Enterprises.
Source: SHA-1 collision attacks are now actually practical and a looming danger.
How does Docker actually work? It’s a simple question that has a surprisingly complex answer. You’ve probably heard the terms “daemon” and “runtime” thrown around, but never really understood what they meant and how they fit together.
In the evening I read How does Docker work? by Cameron Lonsdale, a (very) technical walk-through of how Docker works.
My experience is that top level domains like
.icu,.win,.trade, etc. are a source of spam. Because I don't expect actual email from those domains I decided to blacklist those domains as well as several countries in Postfix.
Read my latest blog post: Blacklisting domains with Postfix.