Bookmarks - October 2018


Protecting GitHub repos, some good crypto blogs, programming languages for graphic designers and more …

Protecting GitHub Repositories

Article by Mozilla on how they set up their GitHub Repositories to prevent malicious modification.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/09/11/protecting-mozillas-github-repositories-from-malicious-modification/

How to Read a Mathematics textbook

Article by David Maclver on his approach to reading a math textbook. The main idea is this: rather than attempting to read the textbook cover to cover, instead jump in to the sections that you are most interested/motivated to learn. A good textbook will have sufficient back references so that the reader is able to review any prerequisite sections.

https://www.drmaciver.com/2016/05/how-to-read-a-mathematics-textbook/

A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering

Crypto blog by Matthew Green, cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University. His article “Why I’m done with Chrome” became popular after he criticized how Google Chrome would automatically pass through Google User credentials (from the user signed into the browser) to any Google website, thus logging you in automatically. It wasn’t possible to disable this feature, and in light of the negative reception Google subsequently reverted the feature. His list of crypto resources is worth looking through.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/

Bristol Crypto

Bristol University Crypto blog.

https://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/

Sublime Merge

The authors of Sublime Text have created their own git client. There is a free version and it’s well worth trying out.

https://www.sublimemerge.com/

Processing

Processing is a programming language for artists. Check out the examples page for inspiration of what you can create with this language.

https://processing.org/ https://processing.org/examples/

Mesh

Mesh is a plugin for the processing language to create voronoi cells, Delaunay diagrams, and convex hulls.

http://leebyron.com/mesh/

An Introduction to Probabilistic Programming

The idea is to create a programming language in which random variables are fundamental types. This paper discusses how one might do this and some example programs written in this style. There is a similar trend in mathematics in which random variables should be considered fundamental concepts (as opposed to something more classical like set theory).

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.10756.pdf

Also check out this library for writing probabilistic programs in C#:

https://github.com/joashc/csharp-probability-monad

Source code pro font

This font is nice, although I’m going to stick with firacode at the moment.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Source+Code+Pro

Subdocuments in Microsoft Word

I recently found out that Microsoft Word supports sub documents. This means, for example, you could have individual documents for each chapter of your work, and then have a single master document that references all of them.

Amazon Simple Email Service

Use an Amazon mail server for routing messages. The claim is better deliverability, which is difficult to ensure when setting up your own mailserver.

https://aws.amazon.com/ses/

AWS Lightsail

Cheap VPS!

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

MATLAB Online

MATLAB environment in your web browser!

https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-online.html

Set up Private DNS with Cloudflare on Android Pie

https://blog.cloudflare.com/enable-private-dns-with-1-1-1-1-on-android-9-pie/