Category Archives: IT

A Beginner’s Guide to Encryption: What It Is and How to Set it Up

A Beginner's Guide to Encryption: What It Is and How to Set it Up

Whitson Gordon

You’ve probably heard the word “encryption” a million times before, but if you still aren’t exactly sure what it is, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a basic introduction to encryption, when you should use it, and how to set it up.

What Is Encryption?

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Automation between theory and reality

'Automating' comes from the roots 'auto-' meaning 'self-', and 'mating', meaning 'screwing'.

6 Life Habits That Programming Could Teach You Today

Everything important that you need to know about living a successful life, you can get from a computer program. Don’t believe me? Read on.

When I first started programming as a young kid, it only amounted to copying foreign-looking words and symbols out of a computer magazine so that my brother and I could get our old Franklin 64 with a dual floppy drive to play a cute little digital tune at us. Back then, there weren’t many life lessons to discern out of that cryptic text.

A number of years later, in high school Pascal class, things started to look different. Learning about IF statements and FOR loops started to spark philosophical synapse connections the likes of which Walt Whitman and Robert Frost would have been proud of. Okay, I exaggerate a bit, but still the insights were pretty cool.

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Religions and OSes metaphor of the day

Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
By Charlie Stross

Yesterday, after writing my way past the notional halfway point (both of the current novel manuscript, and of the trilogy it’s the middle volume of), I went and over-indulged in food and drink with friends.

Over the beer, the conversation turned—for no sane reason—to computer operating systems. There being some non-technical folks at the table, I then had to cough up a metaphor to contextualize the relationship between Mac OS X and UNIX, thuswise:

There is one true religion in operating systems, and it is UNIX. Or maybe it’s not the one true faith: there’s an earlier, older, more arcane religion with far fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX sprang as a stripped-down rules-deficient heresy in the early days of the epoch. Either way, if MULTICS is Judaism (and the metaphor is questionable at this point, for unlike MULTICS, Judaism is still alive), then UNIX is Christianity. Read more »

The Problem with Time & Timezones