Ann Arbor iPhone X Wallpaper

Using Alvaro Carto plus some Photoshop, I recently made some nice Ann Arbor-themed wallpaper for my iPhone X. There are two parts: a blurred version for your home screen, and an unblurred version for your lock screen. It looks like this: New #annarbor-themed iPhone wallpaper. (Thanks to https://t.co/ …

Dashcam & Crash Report from March 2017 AAPD Diag Crash

A while ago, in spring 2017, I filed FOIA requests with U-M and the AAPD to retrieve a crash report and two dashcam videos of the March 16, 2017 incident in which an AAPD vehicle collided with a light post on the Diag while pursuing a suspect. The crash report …

Deploying Let’s Encrypt with Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04

This post will (tersely) walk through the steps required to deploy Let’s Encrypt for TLS, including automatic renewals, on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS1 server running Nginx. This will allow Let’s Encrypt to fetch and renew your certificates transparently, without interfering with whatever application you may be reverse-proxying …

Takeaways from Vox’s post on malicious ads

You can pry my adblocker out of my cold, dead hands.

Reading List: Meltdown and Spectre

* Project Zero: Reading privileged memory with a side-channel * Meltdown Attack and Spectre Attack * Paper: Meltdown (PDF) * Paper: Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution (PDF) * ARM Whitepaper: Cache Speculation Side-channels (PDF) * Negative Result: Reading Kernel Memory From User Mode Mitigations * Paper: KASLR is Dead: Long Live KASLR (PDF) * Google: Retpoline: a software …

What Ali Ramlawi Gets Wrong About Development and Quality of Life

Ali Ramlawi is running as an independent for City Council this year, in Ward 5, against Chip Smith. I happened upon Ali’s Ann Arbor Votes profile today, and I found some of his stated positions very problematic.1 He says that opponents to the project are often inaccurately labeled …

API Design Reading List

A friend recently asked if I had any recommended reading on designing APIs in general. I found some time today to dig through my Pinboard, and these are the relevant links I found. Many/most of them are language- or technology-specific, but I think it's useful to read …

Recommended Equifax Breach Resources

I’ve re-typed the same advice and links a few times now for various friends, so in the interest of saving time here‘s a blog post. Quick takeaways: * Equifax's tool for checking whether you were affected has been notoriously flaky. If you’ve ever participated in the …

Failing Actors Reading Series

Brief thoughts on lessons we can learn from Erlang when designing reliable actors in Swift.

Quick ADS-B monitoring on OS X

A quick write-up of a minimal ADS-B monitoring setup, with a standard RTL-SDR receiver and a MacBook.

ALPRs in Ann Arbor

A brief overview of Ann Arbor’s current use of ALPRs.

DRYing up duplicate code into helper functions

We often assume it’s clear what it means to DRY up duplicated code. But it’s worth examining what DRY really means, and why it’s important.

Monitoring aircraft via ADS-B on OS X

I recently set up an ADS-B monitoring rig on a Mac Mini at home. This post documents the process I went through to allow monitoring aircraft and feeding information to several flight tracking websites.

Statically-Typechecked Duck Types in Swift

I present a hypothetical new Swift language feature which would allow something like duck typing in many use cases. This feature would be particularly useful in tests, where currently no good mocking/stubbing solution exists. The solution I propose achieves flexibility while maintaining the safety …

Choosing a Version Number for a CocoaPod with Updated Dependencies

Semantic Versioning generally provides a clear rule for incrementing a library’s version number, but it fails to cover one common case which arises with CocoaPods: how are updates to a pod’s dependencies considered?