Viewing profile — brendn

The Concorde was an engineering marvel, but it was more than just increasingly cheap transatlantic fares that did it in. Noise regulations prevented it from flying over the Contine…

By my understanding, yes and yes. The third-party service caches the public key (with timestamp) and the browser caches the signed certificate (with timestamp). The timestamp gives…

A friend of the author of QLB here, and I brought up the idea of a visual interpreter to parse the square kufic calligraphy. My understanding (limited as it is by my almost complet…

That's exactly what's happening in some places in Vermont. (I know, not the first place you think of when you hear 'solar.') People can buy shares of a solar co-op and get credited…

Turing should be pardoned as a human victim of an unjust law, and his genius should have nothing to do with it. That said, there are more important fights for equality that affect …

I'll have to try it out. Thanks!

I would love to see a LUA scripting framework built into this. I built an iOS app with an embedded web server, and dealing with dynamic text generation in Objective-C is a pain.

I used Mongoose [1] to do exactly that for devices that share a local network (auto-discovery and everything). So yes, it's definitely possible :) [1] http://code.google.com/p/mong…

ConEd shut of power to the Financial District at approximately 7PM, but there were a number of explosions at substations including the one at 14th Street. There are over 1 million …

Most of Manhattan is without power. While some people may think it's badass to hack through the storm oblivious, the situation out here is pretty intense. I would encourage some le…

I've heard (but can't find a link ATM) that it's not uncommon for people in developing countries have multiple phones or multiple SIM cards and will call on one or the other depend…

I'm curious about that issue, too. Here's a brainstorm: - An independent Identity Provider (IdP) uses some means of identification for the user (two-factor, iris scan, whatever) - …

I'd like to second this sentiment. Instead of tearing down someone's significant effort to build something cool, the community should constructively communicate their issues with t…

Could you enlighten us? I've read about fiber optic gyros, but I assume they haven't gotten small enough to fit in a mobile device. (Since they require kilometers of fiber.) I real…

Yeah, I kind of glossed over the vacuum aspect of the attitude indicator because I don't understand all its intricacies. The video pretty much confirms my understanding of how the …

OK. I'm no expert on this myself, but for someone who claims to have just figured out how an attitude indicator works, the author certainly doesn't explain it very well. I was left…

It was totally a lobbying effort to get the legislation passed. First by the tobacco industry because of fires started by smokers falling asleep with lit cigarettes, then by the ch…

At first I thought it said "mind control drone" and reached for the tin foil.

Being stabbed to death would be a less painful and drawn-out alternative to being sued for the thief's medical bills.

No, both authentication factors are required, so either losing your phone or forgetting your password would be sufficient to lock you out. However, the Google authenticator PAM plu…

This is a repost of a backers-only email from Kickstarter. It wasn't meant to be published as a gist.

Tornado relies on its own HTTP server, but its modules for everything from templating to authentication are loosely coupled, so you can take them or leave them. To your point, I'd …

The article itself says, "While this HOWTO tries to give an overview of Python in the web, it cannot always be as up to date as desired. Web development in Python is rapidly moving…