I’ve been thinking about writing an essay about the beauty & weirdness of cryptographic hash functions. The way any digitized data, however huge, can be named by a short fixed-size binary string. The way there are in theory an infinite number of hash collisions, but in practice zero. I was talking to myself about it, this morning, and two quotes appeared, which I write down here to remember:

“Hashing is my favorite computer-science concept.”

and

“SHA is the … MORE

Mercurial’s having a contest to design a new logo. I hadn’t been paying attention, but today I was reminded of Mercury’s symbolic connection to alchemy and the occult, and decided to design something incorporating John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, a symbol he designed based on the astrological symbol for Mercury.… MORE

I just ran across Invisible Games, a website of short and enigmatic fictions. One of them, The Loneliness Engine, reminds me of my own short-n-enigmatic We [Had Black Boxes]. No spooky synchronicity or anything, but they seem to belong together somehow … which itself fits in with the themes of both stories. Neat.

…Just like many times before, I’m wishing there were a third way between threads and callback-based asynchrony. I’d like to be able to keep each operation’s flow of control simple, as with threads, but at the same time limit the interactions between operations to keep the overall flow of control from turning into race-condition spaghetti.… MORE

Paul Graham: “Arc only supports Ascii. … But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn’t like Arc anyway.” That last bit [emphasis mine] sort of flummoxed me. Is he saying that LISP only appeals to native English speakers?… MORE

It seems to me that RDF ought to be a good way to represent cryptographic certificates, since it describes arbitrary types of relationships between entities (e.g. FOAF), and allows them to be composed in complex ways. Does anyone know of schemas or libraries for such a thing, or something related?… MORE

I used to think it was the Big Time if I got a link from Daring Fireball, but now someone just pointed out to me that the Fake Steve Jobs has taken note of my post.

So … what does it mean for my post to be criticized by a fictional construct that embodies a parody of the CEO of the very same ex-employer my post criticizes? Especially when, more specifically, that fictional construct’s humor is … MORE

I’ve been on my own for three weeks now, and I’m definitely enjoying it. I know that one of the general issues with self-employment is whether one can stay motivated without the external structure imposed by The Man. Fortunately I seem to have no problem with this — I’ve been coding at top speed. Mostly I work in the detached office, which is now clean and cozy, but sometimes I hang out on the couch … MORE

Here’s a career update, for those of you who care: I’ve left Apple, and I’m now working on my own, from home, as an indie software developer. I have plans for at least two kick-ass Mac apps, I’ll probably contribute to a few open source projects, and I may dabble in some web stuff.

(At least, that’s the plan for now! Everything is subject to change without prior notice. This document contains forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ.)

This is kind of a big change for me. I’ve been continuously employed for 19 years, 16 of those at Apple. I clearly like being part of a team, part of a company, and specifically part of Apple. But there comes a time when a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
… MORE