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1 TLS and the identity layer

This came up in my mine again this week. If I had a zillion bucks, I could do something like Francisco Corella's idea to extend TLS. The elegance of this solution comes from the extension of the transport layer to facilitate an identity layer. The main issue I see here is that several implementations of TLS would need to adopt it. But with a zillion bucks, I would not have to worry about how much time. The task seems feasible. Some use cases or possible applications remind me of the open banking topic.

1.1 Tasks

1.1.1 medical clearance

2 Society

Another topic came up this week several times among topics of conversation I either listened or participated in. Right now most of human societies have no real long term plan, or even if they do, they still use deception or politics instead of engineering.

Take the state of the pandemic in the United States. At this moment, the goal is to get as many folks vaccinated by Independence Day. While the US has some great velocity for the vaccinations, it still seems up in the air whether or not the population will reach herd immunity. So in the less desirable case, a mingling population will end up prolonging the pandemic. Also, note that Canada lags behind in vaccinations. Even with the border closed to recreational traffic, it's a huge border, where in some places one could just cross the street, let along walk down the sidewalk. And this only represents two countries in just one of the continents.

In the last year we've had other things that have called out the failed planning and responsibility of governments. And by we I mean Earthlings, I'm not just talking about American'ts. Some of if we've done to ourselves or each other. I don't want to see what happens when something bigger happens to us rather than because of us, such as The Big One happens off the coast of Cascadia. We need to disarm, rebuild, repair, and get ready.

Put a good engineer in charge, someone with a stem background, not a reality game show host and not a hollywouldn't celebrity.

3 Developer brain dump for the week

3.1 LibreOffice spell checker

I ran into a weirdness this week where my spell checker died in LibreOffice. Because of how I learned to read as a kid, ever since finishing my undergrad I have used non en-US whenever possible. So I had to:

apt install hunspell-en-gb

3.2 C development

I went down a rabbit hole this week looking at a C package manager called clib. It reminds me of poetry/cargo/npm and has a much easier learning curve than guix. At the moment, it only has so many packages that it officially supports, but just the fact it exists and has such a huge set of string libraries (always my first metric) makes me happy. It would be really cool if every project in awesome-c could be packaged for both guix and clib… that actually seems like a worthwhile effort.

Anyway, just to throw it out there, I typically look for these in a package manager in terms of support and existing packages:

Or in prose: I basically want configurability, a way to mess with the OS as little as possible, a way to write tests for the code, and a way to both fix and lint the code. Debuggers come next, but if one writes the code well enough, the tests can usually engineer away the need for a debugger. And then finally, specific to C, a higher level string library.

4 See also