Miguel Amigot mamigot

OAUTH2

The Problem

I’m a web app that wants to allow other web apps access to my users’ information, but I want to ensure that the user says it’s ok.

The Solution

I can’t trust the other web apps, so I must interact with my users directly. I’ll let them know that the other app is trying to get their info, and ask whether they want to grant that permission. Oauth defines a way to initiate that permission verification from the other app’s site so that the user experience is smooth. If the user grants permission, I issue an AuthToken to the other app which it can use to make requests for that user's info.

Note on encryption

Oauth2 has nothing to do with encryption -- it relies upon SSL to keep things (like the client app’s shared_secret) secure.

Converting a Word Document to Markdown in Two Moves

The Problem

A lot of important government documents are created and saved in Microsoft Word (*.docx). But Microsoft Word is a proprietary format, and it's not really useful for presenting documents on the web. So, I wanted to find a way to convert a .docx file into markdown.

The Solution

As it turns out, there are several open-source tools that allow for conversion between file types. Pandoc is one of them, and it's powerful. In fact, pandoc's website says "If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife." But, although pandoc can convert from markdown into .docx, it doesn't work in the other direction.

	*.axf
	*.htm
	*.Inp
	*.map
	*.tra
	*.dep
	*.__i
	*.crf
	*.d
	*.o

	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD