Month: October 2017

In defence of deterministic password managers

Posted on by Noel

[Update 30 January 2019 – I made an Ionic mobile app that does just this. 🙂 Read all about it!]

If there’s one thing two decades on the internet has taught me, it’s that techies enjoy binary battles between opposing and equivalent technologies.

iOS vs Android. Vi vs Emacs. Tabs vs spaces. Didactic and fundamentalist exposition is kind of the norm when it comes to these discussions.

One topic I had not expected to see alongside these traditional battlegrounds is the nature of the tool one uses to manage distinct passwords across web sites. Until now.

Continue reading →

Multi-threaded quicksort! In PHP!

Posted on by Noel

Yeah! In PHP!

Why would you do this?

Well, I went to a PHP meetup presenting some common implementations and comparing them to the speedy native PHP implementation of sort() and related functions.

I figured that while efficient sorting isn’t the most common use case for PHP – and in a web context you often don’t want to let each user spin up numerous threads – for command line cases this approach should be able to provide a real performance boost.

In particular, the already-PHP-favoured quicksort algorithm works with a divide and conquer approach that should be perfectly suited to divvying up work between threads.

Continue reading →