Viewing profile — ZephyrP

Although I'm late to the pile-on and all the good takes have grown old and gotten replies, I cannot let this grave insult against my people go unanswered. Elixir, if anything, real…

A long-forgotten machine on a DoD network sounds like the kind of host that could serve for idle scanning or any other technique using a forged source address and a predictable dum…

It's certainly not an "elitist initiation ordeal" to ask a potential crewmate to sketch a library function they've selected, what abstraction or ideas it implicitly contains, and w…

Change keeps coming, even when the wire format of a protocol has ossified. I've spent years in security and router performance at Cisco, wrote a respectable fraction of the flagshi…

In the mid-2000s, I attended evangelical 'kids night'. Held each Friday at the dead-center of an unincorporated community in rural Colorado. The "cool" youth pastor who was respons…

The pandemic killed a fantastic meetup called "Papers We Love" here in San Diego. I miss the many great people (and papers) I met through PWL, and would be thrilled to see somethin…

I traveled through a town in California known for it's apple orchards. There, I ate a 'Hawkeye' apple, which was said to be an ancestor of the 'Red Delicious'. The 'Hawkeye' isn't …

of course, but an LFSR is going to be faster (provided you have a reasonable number of rounds in your Feistel cipher), have some situationally desirable statistical properties and …

Feistel ciphers are a good technique for doing just this but it's also worth noting that if all you are looking for is "produce a pseudorandom permutation of 1..N without actually …

I wouldn't call it "commonly used" but it's popular enough to be used in a number of Cisco products (and elsewhere, I'm sure).

In general, not really, but the most common string comparison instruction in x86_64 leaves the last character of one of the strings being compared with the other one just being a p…

This isn't to refute your overarching point, but even the oldest of stories, the 'Epic of Gilgamesh', begins with the titular character accused of not "leaving maidens to their war…

Do you see this is an expression of secular "neo-Persian" nationalism, or as part of a reaction to Iran's religious conservatives who'd read literal truth in the Quran's story of a…

Very neat. Do you implement option parsing in "magic getopt" or can you (somehow?) handle setting up the option string arguments used by the more familiar variants in getopt(3)?

Having a slew of physical theories with profound existential ramifications to choose from, why do you think the "many-worlds interpretation" is particularly connected to seculariza…

I worked as a framer with my dad for around 4 years in the mid 2000s. We framed small residential homes in southern Colorado and although we would always carry a hammer on our belt…

I got the same result as you, but in my mind the expression "twice as likely to purchase" could just as easily have meant P(C) = 2 * P(D) / 1 + P(D) (yielding 0.35824) rather than …