Once again, here’s the weekly list of events for events for Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds. Every week, on GlobalNerdy.com and on the mailing list, I scour the announcements for events that are interesting to or useful for those of you who are building the future here in “The Other Bay Area, on The Other West Coast”.
This list covers events from Monday, August 24 through Sunday, August 30, 2020.
I’ve opted to list only those events that I can confirm are happening online. I’m not yet listing in-person events, as we’re still in the middle of a pandemic in one of the hardest-hit states in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. We’re also just about to see the mandated return of students to schools, which will likely exacerbate the situation.
Events — especially virtual, online ones — can pop up at the last minute. I add them to the list as I find out about them. Come back and check this article from time to time, as you might find a new listing that wasn’t there before!
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The class portion of UC Baseline — the cybersecurity training program offered by The Undercroft, Tampa Bay’s security guild — ended yesterday with the final day of Python 101, which marks the end of classes. Every weekday for the past five weeks, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., I’ve been in a classroom (masked and socially distanced, of course), studying and furiously taking notes in the following classes:
There are still two more days in the program. Today is the “Get a Job” career fair. The Undercroft have gathered a series of recruiters, security companies, and agencies to talk to us, including:
Whyday is named after the engimatic programmer/artist who operated under the name “Why the Lucky Stiff” (or _why for short), and his story is told in this video:
My favorite quote from _why, which he Tweeted before he took down his Twitter account:
when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.
In the spirit of _why, let’s all use this day to start a creative project or try something new!
When it came time to set the passcode to unlock the phone, I found out that the longest device unlock passcode that even the most recent version of Android will accept is 16 characters.That was the case five years ago, and it’s still the case today.
Android’s “Choose Lock Password” screen is part of AOSP (Android Open Source Project), which means that its source code is easy to find online. It’s ChooseLockPassword.java, and the limitation is a constant defined in a class named ChooseLockPasswordFragment, which defines the portion of the screen where you enter a new passcode.
Here are the lines from that class that define passcode requirements and limitations:
private int mPasswordMinLength = LockPatternUtils.MIN_LOCK_PASSWORD_SIZE;
private int mPasswordMaxLength = 16;
private int mPasswordMinLetters = 0;
private int mPasswordMinUpperCase = 0;
private int mPasswordMinLowerCase = 0;
private int mPasswordMinSymbols = 0;
private int mPasswordMinNumeric = 0;
private int mPasswordMinNonLetter = 0;
Note the values assigned to these variables. It turns out that there are only two constraints on Android passcodes that are currently in effect:
The minimum length, stored in mPasswordMinLength, which is set to the value stored in the constant LockPatternUtils.MIN_LOCK_PASSWORD_SIZE. This is currently set to 6.
The maximum length, stored in mPasswordMaxLength, which is set to 16.
As you might have inferred from the other variable names, there may eventually be other constraints on passcodes — namely, minimums for the number of letters, uppercase letters, lowercase letters, symbol characters, numeric characters, and non-letter characters — but they’re currently not in effect.
Why 16 characters?
16 is a power of 2, and to borrow a line from Snow Crash, powers of 2 are numbers that a programmer would recognize “more readily than his own mother’s date of birth”. This might lead you to believe that 16 characters would be some kind of technical limit or requirement, but…
…Android (and in fact, every current non-homemade operating system) doesn’t store things like passcodes and passwords as-is. Instead, it stores the hashes of those passcodes and passwords. The magic of hash functions is that no matter how short or long the text you feed into them, their output is always the same fixed size (and a relatively compact size, too).
For example, consider SHA-256, from the SHA-2 family of hash functions:
No matter the length of the input text, the output of the SHA-256 function is always the same length: 64 characters, each one a hexadecimal digit.
Under the 16-character limit, the password will always be shorter than the hash that actually gets stored! There’s also the fact that in a time when storage is measured in gigabytes, we could store a hash that was thousands of characters long and not even notice.
My guess is that the Android passcode size limit of 16 characters is purely arbitrary. Perhaps they thought that 16-character passwords like the ones below were the longest that anyone would want to memorize:
Based on usability factors, there is a point after which a password is just too long, but it’s not 16 characters. I think that iOS’ 37-character limit is more suitable.
For the past four weeks, I’ve been spending over eight hours a day in a classroom in Ybor City, as a student in the inaugural cohort of UC Baseline, the cybersecurity training program offered by Tampa Bay’s security guild, The Undercroft.
We’ve taken the following courses under the tutelage of these instructors:
Take on some harder Python programming assignments, or
Both (I suspect that this will be the case).
The Python 101 course will run from Monday to Wednesday. After that comes…
…the virtual job fair. The Undercroft will set up online interviews between UC Baseline students/Undercroft guild members and representatives from Tampa Bay security and security-adjacent companies looking to hire. I see some resume editing and LinkedIn profile polishing in my near future.
While sorting out the image archives of this blog over the weekend, I noticed this photo:
In case you don’t recognize it, it’s a picture an underappreciated classic of programming literature known as why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby, a book written by the enigmatic programmer and artist who went by the nom de plume of why the lucky stiff.
That’s when it hit me:
Is Whyday still a thing?
And if not, can we make it a thing (or at least capture its spirit) again?
why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby
During the the ’aughts, Ruby exploded from obscure programming language whose best documentation was in Japanese and became the darling tool of startups everywhere. A good chunk of that popularity came from Ruby’s killer app, Rails.
However, at least some of wave of Ruby programmers that appeared at the time has to be credited to _why. Yes, that’s the commonly-accepted short from of his name, and no, the underscore is not a typo. If Rails’ preternaturally handsome creator David Heinemeier Hansson made Ruby cool, _why, with his “skinnier, edgier Jack Black” appearance and style, made Ruby fun.
While there were a number of books on Ruby at that time, why’s Ruby tutorial, why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby stood out. First, there’s that title. But that was only the beginning.
The book’s first page looked like this:
It featured whimsical recurring characters, such as the cartoon foxes whose catchphrase was “Chunky bacon!”…
…not-quite-sane science adventurers, who, when not dynamiting retirement homes, will teach you the basics of classes and branching…
The “Dr. Cham” chapter features code like this:
def dr_chams_timeline( year )
case year
when 1894
"Born."
when 1895..1913
"Childhood in Lousville, Winston Co., Mississippi."
when 1914..1919
"Worked at a pecan nursery; punched a Quaker."
when 1920..1928
"Sailed in the Brotherhood of River Wisdomming, which journeyed \
the Mississippi River and engaged in thoughtful self-improvement, \
where he finished 140 credit hours from their Oarniversity."
when 1929
"Returned to Louisville to pen a novel about time-travelling pheasant hunters."
when 1930..1933
"Took up a respectable career insuring pecan nurseries. Financially stable, he \
spent time in Brazil and New Mexico, buying up rare paper-shell pecan trees. Just \
as his notoriety came to a crescendo: gosh, he tried to buried himself alive."
when 1934
"Went back to writing his novel. Changed the hunters to insurance tycoons and the \
pheasants to Quakers."
when 1935..1940
"Took Arthur Cone, the Headmaster of the Brotherhood of River Wisdomming, as a \
houseguest. Together for five years, engineering and inventing."
when 1941
"And this is where things got interesting."
end
end
And let’s not forget the elf with a pet ham and the cat:
For new programmers, it was an approachable book that didn’t try to bury you with jargon. For experienced developers, it provided a refreshing take on programming concepts. If you were looking for a Ruby reference, you were reading the wrong book. But whether you’d been a programmer for 20 minutes or 20 years, it was a fascinating, engrossing read that made you think about programming differently.
If that wasn’t enough, the book came with its own soundtrack. In addition to being a programmer and illustrator, _why was also a musician with a tendency towards the “indie rock”-style, and he wrote a song for each chapter.
In addition to the poignant guide, _why also wrote a fair bit of code, some of which became de facto or even de jure Ruby standards:
Hpricot, an HTML parser that became the Ruby de facto standard for a while. The current de facto standard parser, Aaron Patterson’s Nokogiri, was designed to use Hpricot’s syntax.
Markaby — short for “markup as Ruby — which was a DSL to generate valid HTML using Ruby blocks and methods instead of tags.
Camping, a Markaby-based microframework inspired by Rails. Its code amount to less than 4 kilobytes.
Hobix, a YAML-based weblog application written in Ruby.
MouseHole, a personal web proxy that can rewrite the web à laGreasemonkey
Syck, a YAML library for C, Ruby, and several other languages. For a time, Syck was a part of Ruby’s standard libraries. It’s still available as a gem.
unHoly, which converted Ruby bytecode to Python bytecode, which made it possible to run your Ruby applications on the Google Application Engine.
bloopsaphone, a crossplatform chiptune-like synth, based on PortAudio with a Ruby frontend.
Of his creations, my favorites were the ones that were part of his mission to solve what he called “The Little Coder’s Predicament,” which is that in spite of the fact that we had better computers, software, and networks in the 2000s, the barrier to entry for programming — especially for kids — had become much higher:
In the 1980s, you could look up from your Commodore 64, hours after purchasing it, with a glossy feeling of empowerment, achieved by the pattern of notes spewing from the speaker grille in an endless loop. You were part of the movement to help machines sing! You were a programmer! The Atari 800 people had BASIC. They know what I’m talking about. And the TI-994A guys don’t need to say a word, because the TI could say it for them!
The old machines don’t compare to the desktops of today, or to the consoles of today. But, sadly, current versions of Windows have no immediately accessible programming languages. And what’s a kid going to do with Visual Basic? Build a modal dialog? Forget coding for XBox. Requires registration in the XBox Developer Program. Otherwise, you gotta crack the sucker open. GameCube? GameBoy? Playstation 2?
His solution to the Predicament was to first write Shoes, a simple toolkit for Ruby that use web page concepts to build desktop GUI apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux:
Shoes formed the basis of Hackety Hack, an IDE combined with a tutorials system that was a lot of fun to use. Here’s a screenshot of Hackery Hack in action, being used to write a “Hello, World!” program:
Since _why was developing this tool for children, he went straight to the subject matter experts: 25 children and their parents, whom he consulted and used as testers as he worked on the project.
I was at RailsConf 2006, where _why gave a multimedia extravaganza of an evening keynote presentation. It was something I’d never seen before or since at a keynote: Part programming lecture, part video show, part concert complete with his band, the Thirsty Cups. You either left this performance either scratching your head or wanting to take programming to strange new heights.
After the show, I had a chance to hang out in an unexpected gathering of people that included both _why and Martin Fowler, which was an amusing, enlightening, and amazing experience.
_why’s disappearance
As you were reading this article, you may have noticed that I have only referred to its subject as “why the lucky stiff” or “_why”.
You may have wondered — quite fittingly — why?
There’s no definitive answer, but there are some hints.
Like a lot of creatives, the person behind the “why the lucky stiff” persona is an intensely private person. _why could be the out-there guy performing songs about how Ruby’s error handling just sounded so much more capable and effective with its rescue statement versus other languages’ try and catch (“try to catch me, I’m falling!” he’d joke), but the person lurking behind the mask wanted privacy during his downtime.
_why made it a point to reveal as little about himself as possible, and most of us were happy to indulge him. Most people were happy to simply know and address him as “why”, and in the community, it was a point of etiquette to not try and dig too deeply.
Of course, even in those pre-GamerGate, pre-“shitposting”, pre-chan-ruining-lots-of-the-net times, _why’s secrecy didn’t sit well with some people, who for some reason, just had to know the name of the person behind the _why identity was. So in 2009, they dug deep, and eventually found his name (as well as his wife’s) and publicized it.
_why may have also been a victim of Open Source Success, when a little project that you worked on in order to scratch a creative itch becomes so popular that many other projects depend on it. Suddenly, your project is no longer just a little thing you worked on, but a big thing that people expect you to maintain and upgrade. I’m reminded of a line from Byrne Hobart’s article, Working in Public and the Economics of Free, and it’s simultaneously hilarious and sad:
Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.
As a result of the factors listed above, plus some others probably known to no one else but _why, the internet presence of Why the Lucky Stiff vanished on August 19, 2009. His sites, blogs, social media, and code repositories all vanished. I wrote about it the day after it happened.
Luckily for us, all of his work — well, the work that he’d released to the public, anyway — was open source, and with the effort of some dedicated Ruby and Rails developers, his projects were saved. Some people even took them over and expanded on them. Other projects became the basis of newer, improved projects.
On August 19, 2009, Why the Lucky Stiff withdrew from the online community. We in the Ruby community wish him well, but we really miss him.
Why gave us a lot of cool software and other things, but what he really gave to the Ruby community was a spirit of freedom, whimsy, and creativity. When Why took the stage at the first RailsConf, in 2006, he strapped on his guitar, walked to the microphone, and yelled “Put your best practices away!”
Discipline, care, and responsibility are important; we owe our customers, employers, team members, and families to take our work seriously. At the same time, though, we need to play. If we don’t occasionally break out of the mold of our “best practices,” we can easily miss many wonderful ideas, some of which can bear rich fruit (just as Camping and Hpricot led to Sinatra and Nokogiri).
On Whyday, we’re encouraged to borrow a page from _why’s book and creative, instructive, collaborative, and crazy. The site suggested doing things such as:
See how far you can push some weird corner of Ruby (or some other language).
Choose a tight constraint (for example, 4 kilobytes of source code) and see what you can do with it.
Try that wild idea you’ve been sitting on because it’s too crazy.
You can work to maintain some of the software Why left us (although Why is more about creating beautiful new things than polishing old things).
On the other hand, Why is passionate about teaching programming to children. So improvements to Hackety Hack would be welcome.
Or take direct action along those lines, and teach Ruby to a child.
The Whyday site lives on, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone make a fuss about Whyday.
I thought that given that we’re in the middle of a pandemic and that we’re all spending more time at home (at least I hope we are), there’s no better time that now to bring back the spirit of Whyday.
This Whyday, I plan to celebrate by starting some kind of creative project. (Actually, I plan to start a couple.) If you can, you should start one, too!
Recommended reading and viewing
Got eighteen and a half minutes? Then you’ll want to watch this documentary on Why the Lucky Stiff and how he inspired the Ruby developer community:
Hello, Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds! Welcome to the weekly list of online-only events for techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds based in an around the Tampa Bay area.
Keep an eye on this post; I update it when I hear about new events, it’s always changing. Stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!
Do you have an upcoming event that you’d like to see on this list?
If you know of an upcoming event that you think should appear on this list, please let me know!
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