Good Reads, April 2014

Heartbleed

This month was really all about Heartbleed. A lot was written, but I'll highlight the 3 URLs worth reading.

Heartbleed The site that broke the news to us all.

What Heartbleed Can Teach The OSS Community About Marketing A problem with security is that it is difficult to explain. Here's a case study of doing it right.

Please Put OpenSSL Out of Its Misery There was a big call for improving OpenSSL. Poul-Henning Kamp gives a blunt analysis. On a personal note... I think it's a shame OpenBSD's replacement can't be called OpenOpenSSL (literally... the license forbids forks from doing that). Ha ha, only serious.

And non-Heartbleed stuff too...

Better Bash Scripting in 15 Minutes Some excellent tips. I write a LOT of bash scripts and I didn't know many of these. At the end he concludes with a useful list of "signs you should not be using a bash script".

Welcome Shane Madden to StackExchange! I don't usually link to my own writing, but I make an exception for this one. I have a new coworker at StackExchange and here is our blog post about his arrival.

Don't Settle for Eventual Consistency Some interesting refinements on E.C.

A Primer on Provenance I predict the concept of "Provenance" will be the hot hot hot topic in 2015. Read this now so you are ahead of the curve.

Rate-limiting State If you use ISC BIND, you probably know Paul Vixie. If you run any DNS server you probably want to read his new article about DDoS attack mitigation.

Queue Portrait: Hilary Mason (video) Data scientist Hilary Mason talks about her work at bit.ly and other places. "The exciting thing about big data is not that it's big."

Some things I learned this month:

• When less is displaying a file, you can type -S and it will start acting as if you had given that option at the command line.
• In Mac OS X, you can type open -R foo and it will display file foo in the finder pre-selected (as if you had single-clicked it). You can now easily drag it to a GUI-based app.
• MailChimp is pretty awesome. I'm thinking of doing a monthly mailing about my book projects. If you'd like to join, give me your contact bits.
• In VIM, gqip reformats the current paragraph. I had been using !}fmt

ACMQueue on Reddit.

I'm on the editorial board for ACM Queue Magazine. You should check out our Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/ACMQueue/

Thanks for reading this month's "Good Reads". I'll be teaching classes and speaking at LOPSA-East on May 2-3 in New Brunswick, NJ. I got an acceptance email for a talk proposal at VelocityConf NYC on Sept 15-17 (more about that soon). I'll also be speaking at SpiceWorld Austin Sept 23-24. Hope to see you soon!