Perez climbed the ladder from the aircraft carrier to the cockpit of the small jet. He slid into the pilot seat.
“Come on up,” he called to Eli.
Eli wobbled on his short legs across the deck to the ladder and climbed. His metal feet clanked against the ladder. His bronze gears whirred and clicked with effort. The big bronze head like an oversized bowling ball sat atop a stumpy frame and peered over the fuselage. He made it to the top and cantilevered over the rim, thumping into the secondary seat behind Perez.
“Ready?” Perez asked.
“Ready.” Eli’s voice was raspy, metallic, and jovial. Perez smiled at his flight buddy. He waited for the ladder to collapse and punched the cockpit button. The canopy lowered and sealed around them. He went through his checklist. Window lock, check. Fuel, check. Instruments, check. Lights, check. Engines on, check.
The traffic cameras arrayed on signals and lamp posts throughout Boston’s western districts have recorded Kelly’s driving habits for months. They have seen the blue Camry, plate DG4833, swerve between lanes, weave down busy streets, and occasionally run a red light or skip a stop sign. They categorized her into the “on the edge, but not too bad” bucket. Kelly is a twenty-five year-old college grad working at a med-tech startup in Boston. Her reckless speed in the sedan could have faded away with years of practice, it has not. So it’s time to find a solution.
Have a directory that you would like to you would like to securely share with someone else? This post describes how to encrypt a directory and protect the file with a password for transfer using tar and gpg.
We will set out to prove the equation (a - b)* = a* - b* where * means complex conjugate.
As a refresher, a complex conjugate of a complex number is the number which is the same but for a negated imaginary component. For example, the complex conjugate of 4 + 3i is 4 - 3i.
We will do this by exploring through programming. First, we will tell python what a complex number is by creating a class to store the real and imaginary components and teach it how to manipulate the numbers in such ways as addition and subtraction by using methods on the complex number class.
Django uses a secret key for many of its security features. This secret key should not be checked into version control. There are many ways to factor out the secret key; here’s the one I use.
The secret key entry is stored by default in settings.py:
# Make this unique, and don't share it with anybody.
SECRET_KEY = 'y2k94mib_ve%c9hth=9grurdontuse1(t&his;jy-xkcd'
Most of Oln sat in the observatory chairs and watched the vid-screens. Dull rain thudded against concrete below. Mounted security cameras by the door pumped the images up to the observatory where the rain fell again, noiselessly, before his eyes. While three of his subscribers’ attentive eyes scanned the screens, another was dozing on the sofa, and a fifth was out getting coffee for the rest. Oln, as a five-some, was pretty bulky by modern standards, but he felt fine. The Links had been gaining in strength lately. The folks over at LiveConnected Labs had been optimizing away the bandwidth caps that had been limiting people to only three or four subscribers. Oln enjoyed a hefty security-overseer’s salary and, like the rest of the American middle-class, spent almost all of it on the newest Link hardware. He had even managed to get his employer, a slowly rising politician with too much money, to open up a credit line exclusively for his Link maintenance, under the premise that the faster Oln could think, the better he would be as a defense from the nefarious.