crypto reading list

Following the blockchain craze ,a friend asked me for a reading list. Below is what I know but haven't read completely (except the last one) . They should be enough to get you to a good place.
 a) The Code Book by Simon Singh
 b) Handbook of Applied Cryptography : http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
 c) Security Engineering by Ross Anderson
 d) Designing an authentication system in four acts [ Article] http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/dialogue.html
 e) Alice & Bob Dinner after speech : https://urbigenous.net/library/alicebob.html Last one is hilarious

a little respect, for I am Costanza, lord of the idiots !!!

reddit writing prompt entry

The old man paused, smiled and picked up his cup. I don't remember how I got to talking to him at the library's cafeteria, but there I was, wolfing down the sandwich on which I'd put ketchup. One buys sandwiches at the library for the same reason we look at our cellphones even when we know there's nothing there. Then we put ketchup on it and wolf it down, or unlock the thing and play with a couple of buttons and then put it back in our pockets again . It's a pretense. "I don't get that type of music", he said. "Never got past the first track of any record ever... " Ah yes, we both had been standing at the bargains shelf, looking at $1 CDs, and I had picked up a Jazz one. It had a black & white photo of a man in a checked jacket holding a saxophone on the cover looking .. well ,looking blank. But I too had never gotten past the first track of any jazz record myself. And here was Bob saying the exact same thing. "Coincidence !", I said to myself, as I filled it in my trip report. The console blinked and the detailed-incident-report indicator flashed on. I flipped the device to voice mode and started narrating the incident in detail - where I'd landed, what I looked like, when it was , how I met the man in the library named Bob , and what his thoughts about music were. My next case was an investigation. A senior agent had died recently, somewhere in Ardennes, in 1941. This was surprising, because the agency has all sorts of protocol and regulations & permissions in place just to avoid this specific type of event. Contaminating a timeline by choosing it to be your final resting place is strictly frowned upon. Influencing is allowed , interference is not. Time is a place you can visit but not stay - Agency motto. I had been in a future time at that time, sneaking some hashes into certain bankchain thus short-circuiting the spiralling growth of a certain family-run business . The agency believed in redistribution whenever possible, and interference in events before they were extensively manifest. Actual interference needed approvals. Influencing by nipping in the bud was supervisor-sanctioned. I remember a couple of us had visited his graveyard, in the middle of a war, to see if we could make some sense of the act. We found a minimal grave with the most basic headstone . The epitaph, also carved crudely and in a hurry, read " God split himself into myriad parts so that he could have friends ", which was decidedly weird for that age. Scans revealed skeletal remains which matched our agents', and spectral scans confirmed it. A Timeline Archive Search Report flagged the epitaph to be the contaminant. Nobody'd've noticed anything odd about the grave or its contents at this time or place, but someone could find the epitaph anachronistic,said The TASR. It said it shouldn't exist until 1973. - to be completed

toymatic

http://toymatic.herokuapp.com has been launched. This has been a long effort, crawling slowly from page to page, stumbling past each half-baked python module and its pathetic documentation, past half-assed requirements and vision and google drive sheets and images and whatnot.

Past the limbo of framework-choosing and deciding on flask - and to think I rejected this because it used annotations, and that was too Spring-y, and it took me one dropwizard application and a rewrite and a spring boot almost-complete attempt and numerous abortive Spring-non-Boot attempts -which was very similar to standing next to a smouldering garbage dumb and inhaling burning plastic - until I became numb to the @ in flask.

After that came the minefield of login-logouts , which has been a superior grade of fcuk-you all along - even in Boot where adding the auth package to the pom kills all your end points behind an auth wall with a randomly generated password, and I haven't been able to figure it out eva - in Flask the battle with the multiple options has been a consistent problem ,with every extension doing a half-assed job and fitting in like a square peg in a round hole -( Flask-security how do I Bootstrap style your lame forms ?)

Now that we have 24X7 heroku and google analytics, I realized I forgot the other big thing - SEO.
So googling and downloading and printing stuff.  Maybe I 'll read it some time. Notice how so much of life revolves around google ? It is the Mega prosumer !!! And oh, reddit/r/seo has neat articles, unlike google's search results, so my conclusion in the last sentence was baloney.
Update :
I have moved toymatic to rails. devise solves  the login-logout problem. spent some time styling the user forms etc so that the page looks halfway decent. All pages are still not working - I think it might be better to start with the REST/CRUD combine and style that .To go the other way, the cart functionality needs to be added , then the checkout and mailer, then the add-inventory page - this one doesn't need styling, but it does need 'authentication_needed' .

My heroes are gone

- Terry Pratchett
- Raymond Smullyan
- Alvin Toffler

And I seem to have internalized being continually disturbed by people around me. I now stop doing whatever I do automatically every few seconds. I have internalized the self sabotage. Abyss in me

too smart

"High IQ will kill your startup "  is a blog post I rescued from the void via wayback machine.
Scott Adams also mentioned on this theme, in his blog - smart people have an ironclad set of rationalizations that are impossible to break for the majority of people.
Signal Vs Noise & epistemology is the only way to go ?

two excerpts

From the Zero MQ book :

As such a vital part of our future, WiFi has a big problem that’s not often discussed, but that anyone betting on it needs to be aware of. The phone companies of the world have built themselves nice, profitable mobile phone cartels in nearly every country with a functioning government, based on convincing governments that without monopoly rights to airwaves and ideas, the world would fall apart. Technically, we call this “regu‐ latory capture” and “patents,” but in fact it’s just a form of blackmail and corruption. If you, the state, give me, a business, the right to overcharge, tax the market, and ban all real competitors, I’ll give you 5%. Not enough? How about 10%? OK, 15% plus snacks. If you refuse, we pull service. But WiFi snuck past this, borrowing unlicensed airspace and riding on the back of the open and unpatented and remarkably innovative Internet Protocol stack. So today, we have the curious situation where it costs me several euros a minute to call from Seoul to Brussels if I use the state-backed infrastructure that we’ve subsidized over decades, but nothing at all if I can find an unregulated WiFi access point. Oh, and I can do video, send files and photos, and download entire home movies all for the same amazing price point of precisely zero point zero zero (in any currency you like). God help me if I try to send just one photo to my home using the service for which I actually pay. That would cost me more than the camera I took it on. This is the price we pay for having tolerated the “trust us, we’re the experts” patent system for so long.

From Pirsig's book :

There are two techniques I use to prevent the out-of- sequence-reassembly setback. I use them mainly when I’m getting into a complex assembly I don’t know anything about.
It should be inserted here parenthetically that there’s a school of mechanical thought which says I shouldn’t be getting into a complex assembly I don’t know anything about. I should have training or leave the job to a specialist. That’s a self-serving school of mechanical eliteness I’d like to see wiped out. That was a "specialist" who broke the fins on this machine. I’ve edited manuals written to train specialists for IBM, and what they know when they’re done isn’t that great. You’re at a disadvantage the first time around and it may cost you a little more because of parts you accidentally damage, and it will almost undoubtedly take a lot more time, but the next time around you’re way ahead of the specialist. You, with gumption, have learned the assembly the hard way and you’ve a whole set of good feelings about it that he’s unlikely to have. 

#autonomy

zeromq and the brain

From the introduction of the zeromq book . Fixing the World How to explain ØMQ? Some of us start by saying all the wonderful things it does. It’s sockets on steroids. It’s like mailboxes with routing. It’s fast! Others try to share their moment of enlightenment, that zap-pow-kaboom satori paradigm-shift moment when it all became obvious. Things just become simpler. Complexity goes away. It opens the mind. Others try to explain by comparison. It’s smaller, simpler, but still looks familiar. Personally, I like to remember why we made ØMQ at all, because that’s most likely where you, the reader, still are today. Programming is a science dressed up as art, because most of us don’t understand the physics of software and it’s rarely, if ever, taught. The physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages, and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, and throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people. Specifically, it’s about our limitations when it comes to complexity and our desire to work together to solve large problems in pieces. This is the science of programming: make building blocks that people can understand and use easily, and people will work together to solve the very largest problems. We live in a connected world, and modern software has to navigate this world. So, the building blocks for tomorrow’s very largest solutions are connected and massively parallel. It’s not enough for code to be “strong and silent” any more. Code has to talk to code. Code has to be chatty, sociable, and well-connected. Code has to run like the human brain; trillions of individual neurons firing off messages to each other, a massively parallel network with no central control, no single point of failure, yet able to solve immensely difficult problems. And it’s no accident that the future of code looks like the human brain, because the endpoints of every network are, at some level, human brains.