Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/25
Often I need to generate passwords or uuids (on some systems called guids). I usually try to do that in a relatively platform agnostic way as I use MacOS, Windows and Linux in various mixes for many reasons (for instance that I have had developed quite hefty RSI in the early 1990s of the and the best keyboard/pointing-device combination for is the MacBook built in keyboard/touchpad combination so basically MacBooks are my window to all other operating systems).
Generating randomly with a good random number generator them makes sense as for most usage, it is important that both passwords and uuids are hard to guess which means having an entropy that is as high as possible.
A cool thing about OpenSSL is that:
- most of not all systems have it installed (it was no coincidence I published Installing OpenSSL on Windows a few days ago)
- it has a very good pseudo-random number generator and as of [Wayback/Archive] OpenSSL version 1.1.1 first released in 2018 has solved the problem around [Wayback/Archive] Random fork-safety – OpenSSLWiki, see [Wayback/Archive] Our Review of the OpenSSL 1.1.1 Random Number Generation Update – OSTIF.org.
- it supports various useful output formats
hex (hexadecimal) and base64 (next to the default of octet – or by today’s naming convention byte – output)
The easiest to generate are passwords. Yes I know that password managers can do this too, but there are some systems I cannot use them on or sync between them (don’t you love the corporate world) so my aim is to use a random password generator in a platform agnostic way which usage is easy to remember. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, base64, bash, bash, Batch-Files, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Encoding, Event, HEX encoding, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, OpenSSL, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/24
LLM eat a lot of energy and are their hallucination are bad: [Wayback/Archive] LLM-generated passwords ‘fundamentally weak,’ experts say • The Register
Your AI-generated password isn’t random, it just looks that way
…
AI security company Irregular looked at Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and found all three GenAI tools put forward seemingly strong passwords that were, in fact, easily guessable.
…
Basically they are almost as good as the 2007 XKCD “four” number generator, the 2013 XKCD “I’m So Random” or the 2001 Dilbert “nine” number generator further below (don’t read the latter if you dislike Scott Adams)
Is it a coincidence or are these two using two small squared numbers?
Anyway: avoid LLM whenever possible, as most often they do more bad than good.
And for passwords, better use the blog post that was already scheduled for tomorrow: Generating random strings for passwords and uuids/guids on both Windows and Linux using base64 and hex encoding, plus: “Hive Systems: Are Your Passwords in the Green?”
Via [Wayback/Archive] Eloy.: “LLMs are centrist randomness: not useful for anything that requires truth but neither for password generation” – HSNL Social
Below this post, there are some great responses as well.
Comics
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Internet, InternetArchive, LLM, Pingback, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Stackoverflow, WayBack machine | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/12
From quite a while back but still very relevant today, especially when debugging problems (most people would post them in the order integers, floats, but Julia did it in the opposite way):
- [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “had a great discussion of how floating point arithmetic can betray you on Mastodon yesterday, there are tons of good examples in the replies”
[Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans: “today I’m thinking about how floating point numbers can be treacherous — what are specific examples of when they’ve betrayed you?so far I have:…” – Mastodon
- [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “examples of problems with integers”
Usually I tend to explain integer versus floating point math as lossless versus lossy data compression (for instance WavPack and FLAC versus MP3 compression of PCM audio data, or BMP versus JPEG compression of 2D digital image data).
Either way: floating point and integer problems cause real harm. One interesting comment illustrating that was [Wayback/Archive] Ian Kirker on Twitter: “@b0rk I didn’t see this one in the list, which sticks in my memory: science.org – Fatal Error: How Patriot Overlooked a Scud”
[No wayback/Archive] Fatal Error: How Patriot Overlooked a Scud | Science
If you like listening instead of reading, then [Wayback/Archive] 452: Numbers on Computers Are Weird — Embedded is a great podcast episode where Julia gets interviewed by Christopher White, and Elecia White which I found via [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “was on the @embeddedfm podcast this week talking about our upcoming “How Integers and Floats Work” zine, plus some meta discussion about making zines”
Either way, be sure to read the other replies to b0rk’s posts too as many interesting tidbits did not make it in her underlying blog posts:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/06
Everytime when installing a pfSense router from scratch, I seem to re-learn a few of the below quirks. So it was finally time to document them (:
Quite a few of my pfSense configurations are just doing routing between various networks, should not provide DHCP leases and do not always need or have a WAN connected (i.e. they are LAN-only).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, Cyberchef, Development, DHCP, Encoding, Event, Hardware, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, MikroTik, Network-and-equipment, pfSense, Power User, routers, Software Development, SSH, TCP, TLS, UDP | Tagged: 8846 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/25
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, GitHub, Hardware, Network-and-equipment, pfSense, Power User, routers, Software Development, Source Code Management, Tailscale | Tagged: 11281, 73 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/16
[Wayback/Archive] version control – How can I see the changes in a Git commit? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] laktak, [Wayback/Archive] Nevik Rehnel, [Wayback/Archive] Juuso Ohtonen and [Wayback/Archive] User c z – Stack Overflow)
This looks like a valid question, but in reality it is not.
The thing is: in git, think of a commit not as a diff but as a snapshot*.
A diff is the difference between two commits.
Since most commits have just a single parent, so that’s why many people call a commit a diff. But that’s not true, especially not for merge commits that have at least two parents.
Anyway, the question, answer and comment from the link above already give some insight (note COMMIT everywhere below has to be replaced with the commit hash):
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/11
Despite UML (Unified Modelling Language) not having a specific diagram mode for computer networks, PlantUML does support a computer network diagram mode.
Here are some links that got me going to design a site to site VPN situation that I will document in more detail later on this blog.
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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Diagram, Event, PlantUML, Software Development, UML | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/04
I used [Wayback/Archive] How could i get a permanent link for raw file? · community · Discussion #22537 · GitHub to go
The reason I needed it is that for quite a while now, GitHub has started to display PDF files as preview, and modified the download behaviour to get a blob: link instead of the actual raw file download location.
On the to do list:
- figure out the same for raw files in gists
- figure out the same for GitLab
- convert these into Bookmarklets (fiddle with the bold parts in the above URLs)
Thanks [Wayback/Archive] Lotaristo (Czeslaw Meyer) and [Wayback/Archive] byrneh (Hugh Byrne)
--jeroen
Posted in Bookmarklet, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, gist, git, GitHub, GitLab, Hosting, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Source Code Management | Tagged: 22537 | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 