Posts by Quinn Slack

Discovered HPaste, a great Scala DSL for HBase

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I recently came across HPaste, a Scala DSL for HBase. Once you’ve declared an schema like below, you can run HBase operations and MapReduce jobs on your data much more easily than with the standard HBase Java library. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 [...]

From Quora: Will Linux incorporate tcpcrypt?

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Someone on Quora just asked: “Will Linux incorporate tcpcrypt?”. I posted a response over there: I have been working on and off with tcpcrypt for about a year. I believe that if someone puts in the time to polish the Linux kernel implementation, it’d be a likely candidate for inclusion. Andrea Bittau (the lead tcpcrypt [...]

What I’ve finished reading, Jan-May 2011

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The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better by Tyler Cowen Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne [...]

Reading “Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives” by David Eagleman

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Just started reading Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman. I heard about the book from an interesting New Yorker profile of him. I’ll update this post when (or if) I finish reading the book. Update (May 31): Just finished reading it. Very thought-provoking. My favorite was the one where people wait in [...]

Python 3.3 patch for TLS-SRP support

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I just posted a patch for Python 3.3 to add TLS-SRP support (Issue #11943). This patch adds support for TLS-SRP (RFC 5054) to Python ssl.SSLSocket, _ssl.c, http, and urllib. TLS-SRP lets a client and server establish a mutually authenticated SSL channel using only a username and password (a certificate may also be used to supplement [...]

Updated Steffen Schulz’s NSS patch for TLS-SRP support

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I updated Steffen Schulz’s NSS patch for TLS-SRP support and posted it to Bugzilla #405155. NSS (Network Security Services) is a Mozilla library that provides SSL and crypto routines to Firefox, Chrome, and lots of other apps. I modified Steffen Schulz’s patch to: use the same format for the SRP passwd and group param file [...]

TLS-SRP in Chrome announcement

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I just posted an in-progress patch that adds TLS-SRP support to Chrome over at the Chromium code review site. I also posted a Chromium-discuss message announcing my progress. To install it yourself, see the TLS-SRP in Chrome wiki page.