Learning in an online world

Since I started at Dynamic Controls about two years ago, engineers have done free online courses in machine learning, artificial intelligence, cryptography and digital electronics. These services are just starting to build momentum, have a go at many computer science topics at coursera.org or udacity.com, for something completely different learn a language while transcribing the web at duolingo.com.

The business also promotes internal classes, from topics related to each department like Finance 101 to classes run by enthusiasts in a particular domain like the Chinese language or Programming in Python.

I'm about to embark on teaching the "Introduction to Programming" course for the third time. It is so rewarding to see many of my previous students use Python to automate some repetitive part of their job. Everyone has been happy using Python 3 as their first programming language.

We live in a wonderful world with a rich culture of free learning and education.

Driveby contribution to Python Cryptography

While at PyConAU 2016 I attended the Monday sprints and spent some time looking at a proposed feature I hoped would soon be part of cryptography. As most readers of this blog will know, cryptography is a very respected project within the Python ecosystem and it was an interesting experience to see how such a prominent open source project handles contributions and reviews.

The feature in question is the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange algorithm used in many cryptography applications. Diffie-Helman Key Exchange is a way of generating a shared secret between two parties where the secret can't be determined by an eavesdropper observing the communication. DHE is extremely common - it is one of the primary methods used to provide "perfect forward secrecy" every time you initiate a TLS connection to an HTTPS website. Mathematically it is extremely elegant and the inventors were the recipients of the 2015 Turing award.

I wanted to write about this particular contribution because man…

My setup for downloading & streaming movies and tv

I recently signed up for Netflix and am retiring my headless home media pc. This blog will have to serve as its obituary. The box spent about half of its life running FreeNAS, and half running Archlinux. I’ll briefly talk about my experience with FreeNAS, the migration, and then I’ll get to the robust setup I ended up with.

The machine itself cost around $1000 in 2014. Powered by an AMD A4-7300 3.8GHz cpu with 8GB of memory. A SilverStone DS380 case is both functional, quiet and looks great. The hard drives have been updated over the last two years until it had a full compliment of 6 WD Green 4TiB drives - all spinning bits of metal though.

Initially I had the BSD based FreeNAS operating system installed. I had a single hard drive in its own ZFS pool for TV and Movies, and a second ZFS pool comprised of 5 hard drives for documents and photos.

FreeNAS is straight forward to use and setup, provided you only want to do things supported out of the box or by plugins. Each plugin is install…

Markdown Editor Component for Angular2

Thought I'd share a component I've been hacking on for angular2: a syntax highlighted markdown editor with rendered preview.

The code including a basic example is available on github. Because Angular2 hasn't yet been released this is really just me kicking the tyres.

This component relies on two libraries:

- marked for rendering markdown as html
- and ace editor for editing markdown
Basic Usage Example Add to your html template:
<markdown-editor (save)="updatedText($event)" [initial-text]="markdownContent"></markdown-editor> Remember to include the Markdowndirective in your @Component annotation:
@Component({ selector:'about', directives: [CORE_DIRECTIVES, Markdown] }) Another Example You can also control the component with external ui:
<button (click)="md.editMode = true">Custom Edit Button</button><markdown-editor [initial-text]="myMarkdownText" [show-edit-but…

Bits of py

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