Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Musing on computing, math, electronics, de-Googling and the small web, from an old warhorse of the IT industry.
Latest Posts
Benford's law or the first digit rule states that in many data sets, the first digit of each value tends to be small. This is not at all obvious, but it has significant implications.
How an oddity in the way UTF-8 encoding works can cause all sorts of problems for unwary developers, including security weaknesses.
"Juice-jacking" is the alleged practice of getting unauthorized access to the contents of a cellphone by subverting public USB charging points. It doesn't happen, and probably never has; so why has there been a recent increase in scare...
There's been a recent scare that Unicode reading direction characters could be used to conceal malicious code in open-source projects. This is undoubtedly true, but that fact doesn't make it significantly harder to ensure the security of...
How to use Microsoft's Macro80 and Link80 utilities on CP/M, to build a program consisting of multiple assembly-language files.
It's still possible to write "text adventure" games for CP/M and other small, vintage computers. Here is one approach, using Linux as the development platform.
A detailed description of a method for performing this common numerical conversion, with C source code.
How to construct a custom networked storage (NAS) unit based on a Raspberry Pi and two mirrored USB hard drives -- and why you might want to.
You've created a custom Linux installation for the Raspberry Pi. How do you turn that into a bootable SD card image that can be distributed?
In this age of instant, world-wide communications, does it matter if a hundred year-old radio culture fades away?
We've all gotten so used to graphical desktops that we're losing sight of how much can be accomplished on Linux using only a console. This is a shame, because efficient console-only operation is possible on a computer that would...
A specific application of the Pico7219 library that I described in an earlier article.
Kotlin is a Java-compatible programming language that has increased in popularity very quickly over the last few years. This article provides the briefest of overviews, for experienced Java developers who might be considering using Kotlin.
This article describes the concepts of finite fields, from the ground up, to a level at which it is possible to understand modern encryption algorithms. I assume only a high-school understanding of math.
My purpose in this article is not to explain that homeopathy doesn't work -- for all I know it might -- but that widespread acceptance of homeopathy is damaging to the scientific enterprise, and ultimately to society. I will also make...