Notices by André E. Veltstra (aeveltstra@mastodon.social)

My boss asked me for some work account's password once. "I don't know," I said, "I don't know any of my passwords. I use a password manager and passwords that exceed 32 characters if possible."

My boss thought that was silly. Today, breaking a SHA-256-encoded hash for a 12-character password takes less than an hour.

Services that limit password length give away hints about their shoddy password hashing practices. Do not trust them.

@gcupc @kensanata Yes, I quite dislike web sites that require Javascript for displaying HTML, especially when they refuse to inform their visitors up-front. Do make it clear that your site is broken, folks. You chose to break it: that makes it your responsibility to inform us.

When I started developing software, every tool was well-documented. And I had just received my degree, so all my knowledge was fresh. 

As I progressed I happened upon tools with badly or undocumented features. I spent months using trial-and-error testing, with debug output at every step. It worked, but it didn't make me happy. 

Programming tools should not be a puzzle to make us you feel victorious when solved. Let's limit that challenge to making our program meet the customer's requirements.

"No one should have to travel in fear"

Andreas Gal, former CTO of Mozilla, US Citizen, got detained last December entering a US airport from a European business trip, and treated quite badly.
https://medium.com/@andreasgal/no-one-should-have-to-travel-in-fear-b2bff4c460e5

I'm used to my #programming #languages to be able to handle #polymorphism in #function signatures. So when I started learning #rust (#rustlang), I was surprised to learn that its function definitions don't seem to allow for that.

This morning I learned that Rust can handle #closures. Guess what?

Rust closures are polymorphic.

Thank you, Rust language architects!

I like how #synthesizers matured.

Take a #music style like dubstep. Many of the sounds are produced by synths. And they stopped pretending to sound like other #instruments.

A bass drop technically can be mimicked by a slide trombone, a slide guitar, or a bowed double-bass, but the sound heard does not mimic any of those. This synth has its own #unique sound.

And I love that.

If your mobile app takes long to load, you should inform the user that you're done loading. #DraconiusGO does that. Very helpful. #PokemonGO does not. Very annoying. #Usability #UX #software #games