I like to write. This page has links to my writing and
presentations.
I gave a lecture
on packet loss and TCP at SeaGL 2018. There is a
page on github from Finchd.
I gave this presentation at LinuxFest Northwest 2017. There is the video. The slides are on google drive . I gave the lecture again (rev A) at SeaGL 2019. The slides are google drive. The big change in rev A was I added more information about WiFi. As of November 20th, the video has not been posted.
These lectures were the germ of an open source project I am currently
working on, the Network
Boot Monitor and Design Tool (nbmdt). The advantages of nbmdt
over other monitoring tools such as nagios, big brother, zabbix,
cacti etc. are:
Theoretical
and Applied Encryption is a presentation I wrote while I was at
Google. I also gave the presentation at LinuxFest 2014 in Bellingham
and at SeaGL 2014
(presentation on youtube). It explains how public key
encryption works, how symmetric encryption is used with current protocols
for speed, and describes the openssl commands needed for key and
certificate management. Then, I did another version,
how
to give the NSA the finger using openssl which goes into some other
things that you can do with openssl to stick it to the government.
Theoretical and Applied encryption has really too much detail and too
much math for ordinary people, so I wrote something simpler for a friend
of mine: How to send encrypted
E-mail over a non-encrypted channel
Python
Decorators is a presentation I wrote for Geek
Girls Carrots and presented at the Puget Sound Python user's group
(PuPy, pronounced "Puppy") October 15th 2014. It's not very good,
and I should re-write it.
As part of the AWS class, I had to do a final project. I had to
give a presentation
on the final project. The project was late and over
budget. I wanted to put in a dashboard to monitor the operation of
the project (that was a failing of the Obama administration Affordable
Care Act website - no dashboard), but that part was a victim of late and
over budget. Despite being late and over budget, I did pass the
class, because I was able to demonstrate mastery of the AWS components.
Recently updated for 2018! https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vTJBxkFUAiJmwBhLK7ObxMxWI5DA1jW3WFWX9u_iGRQ7mu6DheVV1jXUo_aPRNaMcE46rG-4Le-HEKc/pub?start=true&loop=false&delayms=3000 .
I originally wrote this
presentation for internal training at F5 networks. I revised it a
little and in April, 2013, I gave it to the Seattle Area Gnu/Linux users
group. As a result of these presentations, virtually nothing has happened
to increase the rate of utilization of IPv6. As I said last year, maybe
next year.
I am certified by Hurricane
Electric as an IPv6 professional.
I gave
this presentation on tcpdump and wireshark at the Cascadia IT/2015
conference. However, the slides here don't really capture the
presentation because I had a laptop on which I was demonstrating various
things at the same time.
This
is a presentation of some Natural Language Processing (NLP) software
I am working on for Skyset,
- a Quintuple
Approach for Improving Instructions.
Creations is
a sermon I gave in 1998 comparing and contrasting the creation stories in
the book of Genesis with the big bang theory and the theory of
evolution. In the sermon, I used the principle that everything is a
wave and everything is a particle at the same time, depending on how you
look, to prove that both creation stories and the scientific theories
could both be true at the same time. This harmonizes a culture war
that has been going on since the
Scope's trial of 1925.
Comparing and
Contrasting Quantum mysticism and Jewish mysticism is a presentation
I gave to celebrate my 40th birthday (You're not supposed to study
Quabalah or Kabala until you are 40). Quantum Mechanics and Jewish
mysticism are very similar in many ways. However, I have decided
that I don't like Jewish mysticism. I am too much of an
engineer. That's okay: Albert Einstein didn't think much of Quantum
Mechanics, and many of the advances of Quantum Mechanical thinking are the
results of answers to objections that he raised.
A management audit of
the torah portion Noach (Noah) is an extension of Frederick Brook's
The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks does a management audit
of the tower of Babel, and why it failed, and how we can apply that lesson
to our own time. In my sermon, I look at the same portion and
discuss the story of Noah and the ark. Why did the ark work, and why
did the tower of Babel fail?
I am teaching myself how to do data science in python using pandas and matplotlib.
My first project was comparing COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths against counties in Washington state voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden in the 2020 election. My hypothesis is that the people who voted against Joe Biden did so against their own self-interest.
I am writing a science fiction novel, The
Woman who was Unstuck in Time. I can believe in time travel,
faster than light travel, telepathy, a machine that interfaces directly
with the brain to create memories, and violation of the law of
conservation of momentum. But the guy getting the girl at the end of
the book and live happily ever after? No way. So my
protagonist is a woman, she's smart and powerful, and she gets happily
married in the middle of the book. This book is unfinished as of
29-October-2014.
finao/index.html">Failure is
not an Option: How to build Reliable Computer Systems from unreliable
parts using Open Source software. This book is obsoleted by
the rise of cloud computing. I would never recommend that somebody
build their own data center any more. It is cheaper and more
reliable to use a commercial cloud provider such as Google Compute Engine
or Amazon Web Services than it is to build your own data center. I
might re-write it some day to be relevant to the cloud.
dpkt.html">My documentation on dpkt.
dpkt is a very powerful package for decomposing packets that have been captured using something like tcpdump or wireshark. The advantage that dpkt has over other systems is that it was designed to be used programmatically.
I walked into a programming night session for PuPPy (The Puget sound Python User's Group), and found a list of things somebody felt we should know, and was important enough to spend some time writing on the white board.