The Night Shift

For years, I had to get up really early to beat the traffic (which is increasingly stupid in Montréal) and find a parking spot near ETS (where I work). Suffice to have one circulation cone misplaced (or a dick using two parking spaces) and you have to pay for parking.

However, working schedules can really mess you up, and I decided recently to let go of it and just get at work later.

Lost+Found: 須藤元気 (Genki Sudo) WORLD ORDER in New York

A Tiger in the House

Expecting security by obscurity to protect you is quite naïve, maybe a bit stupid, certainly negligent. Still, we still see accounts bob with initial password bob which are quite amenable to low-intensity attacks. Even worse is when you give away so much information about accounts that it becomes easy to home in on usernames and passwords.

Un peu de caviar, s’il vous plaît

There are times when you must hide information from a document without changing its appearance and layout. I’m not talking about plain censorship, I meant like when you have to submit a paper to a journal or a conference anonymously while required to follow stringent layout guidelines. It may suffice to set a background of the same colors as the text, but if it does the thing in print, it doesn’t work so well with PDF where you can still select the text (and I did a blog entry using this behavior a while ago).

There’s a censor package for but it doesn’t play well with whole paragraphs, and it messes out the layout if you select more than just a word or two. This week’s entry proposes a simple macro to do nice (but not weapon-grade) “censoring”.

1%

Making a difference isn’t easy. Like everybody else, we are taken by our daily tasks and obligations and we end up having little or no spare time, and, anyway, we rarely know how to make a difference with the means we can afford.

Making a donation (other than getting rid of the clothes or furniture we can’t stand anymore—and that nobody wants anyway) isn’t easy because we are never sure we can actually afford to give money away and that we are never sure that the money goes were it should and that it’s used as it should.