farktronix's comments

farktronix | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: Note Kitchen – Learn piano chords and scales

This is great, but it doesn't recognize key names in lowercase. The first thing I typed was the example, but I didn't capitalize the 'C' and nothing appeared for 'cm7b5'

farktronix | 12 years ago | on: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits

It's curious that he didn't sign his new key with his old key. Does anyone have a good explanation for why he wouldn't want to do that?

farktronix | 14 years ago | on: Poll: What database does your company use?

Agreed. SQLite also has a great copyright notice in its headers:

  ** The author disclaims copyright to this source code.  In place of
  ** a legal notice, here is a blessing:
  **
  **    May you do good and not evil.
  **    May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
  **    May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

(http://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact?name=a8571665d43ff18f89a4...)

farktronix | 15 years ago | on: Color

That bugged me too. Turns out you can swipe to delete the photo in one of the views. The photo still shows up in some other views so I'm not entirely sure it did anything.

farktronix | 15 years ago | on: IPv4 is depleted: Final five blocks allocated to registries

No, really- 18 quintillion is a huge number.

92 billion years is a long time to imagine. Let's say we won't have a use for these addresses after the sun dies in approximately 5 billion years, so we're going to try to use them all up by giving every person 1,000 /64 blocks.

Wolfram Alpha gives the surface area of earth as 5e18 square centimeters. 2^64 is approximately 1.8e19. With a single /64 block you could put two nanobots in every square centimeter on earth. That's not really practical over the oceans, but whatever.

With 1000 /64 blocks, you could cover the earth with nanobots that take up only 0.05mm^2 of space each.

Pixels on the average computer display take up 0.055mm^2.

You could address a display that covered the surface of the entire earth with just 1000 /64 blocks, and you could make one of these display for every person born until our sun dies.

It's an astoundingly huge number.

farktronix | 15 years ago | on: IPv4 is depleted: Final five blocks allocated to registries

18 quintillion is much much bigger than you think.

The peak estimated birth rate on Earth was 173 million in the 1990s. If 200 million people were born every year and we gave every person a /64 block, we could allocate addresses for the next 92 billion years. The sun will be long dead by the time we use up that address space.

farktronix | 15 years ago | on: "Save a tree" with the WWF's new unprintable "green" PDF format

I downloaded the app and tried it out. They're saving files as regular PDFs with a .wwf extension. This causes the files to open in their app, but if you rename the file to .pdf you can open it in other PDF viewing apps just fine. They set a password on the PDF to restrict re-saving or printing.

Dumping the strings on their binary turns up genRandStringLength:, so I'm guessing they're generating a string of random characters and setting that as the password on the PDF.

They're just shipping a modified version of Skim (http://skim-app.sourceforge.net) embedded inside their own app to do the PDF viewing.