David Lyness's Blog

David Lyness's Blog

  • LinkedIn

  • 22 Jul 2022

    Non-goals

    The act of enumerating, discussing, and broadcasting the non-goals of a project is almost as important as the goal-setting process itself.


  • 1 Jun 2014

    Combinatorics of parentheses and binary operators

    Combining parentheses and binary operators to calculate arithmetic properties, and reasoning about their recurrence relations and generic closed forms.


  • 3 Dec 2013

    Effective and ineffective Wi-Fi security

    Which methods to secure a Wi-Fi network actually work, and which are just bumps on the road to an attacker gaining full access to your private network?


  • 31 Jul 2013

    Matching on boolean values using switch statements

    A different way to think about switch statements, using a boolean value to evaluate against each case’s logical expression for comparison.


  • 20 May 2013

    Generating random data, part 2

    Given various sources of random data on a Unix system, which are the most efficient while also producing sufficiently random data?


  • 6 May 2013

    Generating random data, part 1

    Why are computers so bad at behaving unpredictably, and how can we generate random data effectively?


  • 14 Mar 2013

    Emerging trends in application delivery

    A look back at how application delivery has evolved, and how we can expect it to change in the coming years.


  • 13 Feb 2013

    The functional and performance differences of sed, awk and other Unix parsing utilities

    What is the difference between the Unix utilities sed, awk and grep?


  • 20 Nov 2012

    Search and replace using regular expression callbacks

    How can you have more programmatic control of replacements in regex expressions?


  • 19 Apr 2012

    Proper password policies

    A discussion of various password policies that are often enforced, their relative effectiveness and, in some cases, their harmfulness.

Older posts»