Modern digital currency mostly seem to revolve around a construct called a blockchain, which – by design – is a (mostly![1]) append-only distributed database that is intended to keeps all the transactions for all time. Blockchains use strong cryptographic methods to ensure its integrity and fidelity, and is typically decentralized, meaning that the entire chain is distributed in close-to-real-time fashion over the Internet to all computers that are using […]
I wrote this while I was at my company Elemental, and was meant for engineers to implement, so despite some of the very specific language for implementation purposes it was never meant to be dogmatic. I love the idea of calculating value based on… not much. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I can say that when run on systems (just before Elemental spontaneously combusted) it produced some really cool […]
Well, not really. Actually I.tar.gz. In the gzip’d tar there are 3 files; little IPMI/BMC configuration file sucker, a suggested set of security recommendations that could be checked, and an even smaller program to parse the first program’s output. Because… well, no good reason, actually, one is in python3 and the other in python2. I guess I’m testing your readiness. The programs are pretty heavily commented, especially ipmifreely.py, so […]
It’s a mess. The NYT wrote a fairly scathing review of the new Tesla roadster, and Tesla fires back (summary here). Both sides have – or feel that they have – a lot at stake here. It would appear that there’s simply no way of telling who is telling the truth, since the system that generates the Tesla data is proprietary and who in the hell knows how it […]
So I got a CD in the mail with the WA state voter information; it has 3.66M active records (and something close to 5M total; they say something like 6.8M live in WA) on it, and is available for $7 from the WA secretary of state. There are 9 daniel farmers; nothing remarkable, but I’m in there, of course: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/vrdb_order.aspx They gave a few other interesting files on the […]