View from the Norval Foundation
Cape Town ⛰️☁️
Untitled Evening Walk
Kumpula, Helsinki
Winter Mist (-11°C)
Photographed from the Mustikkamaa island in Helsinki
Picking the worst year to pitch for Euruko
Happier times
In 2019 I travelled to Rotterdam to attend Euruko 2019 with the intent to pitch Helsinki as the next Euruko host city. While I had a great time at Euruko 2019, in retrospect 2019 turned out to be the worst year to win the privilege of being the next host city.
After bringing home the Euruko gong we quickly got to work planning where and when to host Euruko 2020. In the end, we chose the beautiful Savoy Theatre as the venue and August 2020 as the date.
Software developers describing their work in 1973
Clips from the Finnish TV program “Computing as a profession”, shown in “School Television” in 1973.
Et tu, Signal?
Signal is a still a great piece of software. Just do one thing and do it well, be the trusted de facto platform for private messaging that empowers dissidents, journalists and grandma all to communicate freely with the same guarantees of privacy. Don’t become a dodgy money transmitter business. This is not the way.
Like many others, I was disappointed to hear that Signal is going down the cryptocurrency rabbit-hole.
This blog post from Stephen Diehl covers the problems with this move pretty well.
Hacking my Pedometer++ data
I’ve been using the Pedometer++ app since 2015 to track my daily steps and overall I’m very pleased with how it work and looks but a little while ago I noticed an issue: the number of floors I’ve supposedly climbed is wildly off in the app.
Have I Been Pwned support for RubyGems.org
Have I Been Pwned is a service that lets you check if your accounts have been included in data breaches. You can enter your email address to subscribe to notifications if (or when) your personal details are compromised.
HIBP also offers an API that lets site operators check their users’ passwords haven’t been previously compromised. It does this using a clever k-Anonymity model which allows this check to happen without revealing the user’s chosen password to HIBP or any other third party. You can read up on the precise method in the HIBP API documentation.
My pull request to add Have I Been Pwned support to RubyGems.org was recently (well, a month ago) merged and deployed to production.
Air quality dashboard
There’s been some interesting research into the effects of increased levels of CO₂ on human cognition. Namely that elevated levels of carbon dioxide essentially make us dumber. Studies have found that concentrations above 1000ppm can have a significant negative impact.
What’s more, CO₂ tends to build up in conference rooms as a meeting goes on, meaning CO₂ levels will be at their highest near the end of the meeting when decisions are often being made. Poor air quality might actually be making us do stupid things (archive).
To combat this at work, we’ve installed air quality sensors in the meeting rooms at our office. These are relatively affordable, off-the-shelf Netatmo air quality monitors. They monitor temperature, humidity, CO₂, and noise levels.
The state of package signing in the wild
Recently I started looking into the current state of package signing on RubyGems and considering what it might look like in the future.
To this end, I also ended up looking into how package signing is handled by Rust, Python, and Node.js.
The tl;dr is that nobody does package signing and that it’s a really hard problem to solve.