I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain. Time to die.

—Roy Batty, the Tears in Rain monologue

According to Blade Runner, the replicant Roy Batty’s incept date is January 8th, 2016. The Sydney Morning Herald has an article.

In honor of which, we watched Blade Runner tonight.

My LastPass browser plugin just upgraded itself to v4.0. For several years, I’ve been using LastPass to manage all of my passwords. I have literally hundreds of passwords. I can’t even remember half the sites, much less the usernames. With LastPass, I can maintain a strong, distinct password for each site, which is robustly encrypted and backed up in the cloud, and I get good browser in­te­gra­tion and adequate Android in­te­gra­tion. We also use LastPass at work for our individual use and to share cre­den­tials.

There are still a handful of passwords that I have to remember and type, including the master password for my LastPass account, laptop passwords, and GPG passphras­es.

I’ve long used …continue.

The Rosetti siblings, Christina, Dante (Gabriel), Maria, and William, are haunted by the vampire who was once their uncle, John Polidori. The vampires pos­ses­sive­ly love certain humans and grant those humans great powers of creativity. Christina both loves her uncle and yearns to be free of him. The other humans who receive the attentions of the vampires likewise feel both a forbidden attraction and a horrified repulsion at their own potential damnation.

Tim Powers is known for his “secret histories”, wherein he takes historical events …continue.

The canonical for-loop in C and C++ is written thus, counting up i = 0, i = 1, …, i = N-1:

for (int i=0; i < N; i++) {
    // loop body
}

(In C, you have to declare int i before the for-loop.)

Let’s unpack that for-loop into an equivalent while-loop:

int i = 0;
while (i < N) {
    // loop body
    i = i + 1
}

In other words, we initialize i to zero. Then, before every execution of either loop, we check i < N. If i is still within bounds, we execute the loop body. Then we postin­cre­ment …continue.

[Pre­vi­ous­ly published at the now defunct MetaBrite Dev Blog.]

RFC 1738 allows passwords in URLs, in the form <scheme>://<username>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<url-path>. Although passwords are deprecated by RFC 3986 and other newer RFCs, it’s oc­ca­sion­al­ly useful. Several important packages in the Python world allow such URLs, including SQLAlchemy ('post­gresql://scott:tiger@localhost:5432/my­data­base') and Celery ('amqp://guest:guest@localhost:5672//'). It’s also useful to be able to log such URLs without exposing the password.

Python 2 has urlparse.urlparse (known as urllib.parse.urlparse in Python 3 and six.moves.url­lib_­parse.urlparse in the Six com­pat­i­bil­i­ty library) to split a URL into six components, scheme, netloc, path, parameters, query, and fragment. The netloc cor­re­sponds to <user>:<password>@<host>:<port>.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, neither Python 2 nor 3’s urlparse properly handle the userinfo (username + optional password in the netloc), as they …continue.

New MetaBrite Dev Blog post, Ob­fus­cat­ing Passwords in URLs in Python.

The ac­com­pa­ny­ing photo shows most of the books that I’ve read between late September 2015 and January 2nd:

• Five Rebus novels by Ian Rankin (unreviewed)
• Nine Wallander novels by Henning Mankell (un­re­viewed; The Fifth Woman was an e-book)
• The Seacoast of Bohemia by Nicolas Freeling
• The Vault by Peter Lovesey
• A German Requiem by Philip Kerr
• Star Fall
• The Ax
• The first seven books of The Saxon Tales by Bernard Cornwell
• Des­ti­na­tion: Morgue
• The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician’s Land
• The Red Road
• Some other ebooks, including some technical books

Glasgow DI Alex Morrow is trying to put a dangerous criminal back in prison, but she can’t explain how his prints were found at the scene of a recent murder when he was already in custody. Fifteen years ago, when Rose Wilson was a sexually abused 14 year old, she was re­spon­si­ble for two deaths in one night, but only did time for one culpable homicide. Now the lawyer who saved her is dead and coverups are unraveling.

In other hands, this tale …continue.

Emma and I have a bargain. If one of us cooks a nice dinner, the other cleans up. While I can and do cook, Emma does most of the cooking. Therefore, I do most of the cleaning.

I always thank Emma during dinner for the meal, and Emma invariably thanks me for cleaning when I’m washing pots and pans. I—a lifelong smar­tass—usu­al­ly respond, "Thank you for making a mess."

So far, she’s taken this with good grace—prob­a­bly better than I deserve. In truth, the cleanup is usually far quicker than the cooking.

[Sequel to The Magician King]

At the beginning of The Magician’s Land, Quentin Coldwater is in exile from Fillory. After a brief sojourn of teaching at Brakebills, where he researches an enormously complex spell he found in the Nei­ther­lands, he is fired and Plum, a student, is expelled. A mysterious summons draws them into a magical heist, which goes awry. Meanwhile, Fillory is dying and Eliot, Janet, Josh, and Poppy are trying to save it.

Quentin has matured over the trilogy, emo­tion­al­ly and as a magician, rising to the daunting challenges "He was …continue.