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.

Each year, I write a description of my current set of tools. It’s time for the 2019 edition.

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.

This page documents the pieces I need to put together in order to get it working on Windows with all of the different SSH interfaces I use: PuTTY, WinSCP, OpenSSH for Windows, and Git. I do this through the Pageant agent.

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.

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:

I completely disagree with the assertion that double-blinding is “a really easy solution” to conflicts of interest. It’s particularly ridiculous given that you are active in the FAT* and FATML community, which (to the best of my knowledge) fundamentally rejects the idea that bias can simply be removed by blindness to race/gender/etc.

To which Suresh responded: