Published on Saturday, December 28, 2019 and tagged with games. Updated on Tuesday, January 21, 2020.
When I first saw the Jedi: Fallen Order banners showing up in Origin, I was intrigued. Something struck me that this could be a really good game. Possibly good like Knights of the Old Republic, one of my favorite games.
That's a high bar. Fallen Order is not KOTOR; is it as good? I don't know, and I don't know if the question even makes sense.
But I had a great deal of fun playing it, and also appreciate what it did with video games as a creative media. It's a good game, in my opinion, and shows what can be done with Star Wars as a video game environment.
Some time ago, I got a YubiKey 4. I use it to secure access to a number of web services I use, but also to authenticate myself over SSH. Among its features, it supports being an an OpenPGP smartcard, which means — with some fiddling — it can be used for SSH authentication, so my SSH private key does not actually live on my physical computers.
Published on Sunday, July 7, 2019 and tagged with books. Updated on Tuesday, January 21, 2020.
We're going to try something new here. Writing about books. And maybe other creative works. I'd like to put some more content on my blog, and books seem like a good source of that.
This isn't a formal review, or an essay submitted for academic consideration. It's just some of my thoughts about the work, why it's meaningful to me, what I think it says to the world, that sort of thing. It's opinionated and full of spoilers — if you would prefer to avoid them, the close-tab button is up there somewhere.
So with that, let's get started. Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (comprising Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation) was probably, until last year, my favorite trilogy.
Published on Thursday, March 28, 2019 and tagged with research and publishing. Updated on Tuesday, January 21, 2020.
Many computer science research communities are considering various changes to their reviewing processes to reduce bias, reduce barriers to participation, or accomplish other goals.
This week, Suresh Venkatasubramanian wrote about proposed changes in SODA to allow PC members to submit to the conference. There was a bunch of interesting discussion in the comments; this exchange in particular jumped out. Thomas Steinke said:
