Tools: Valgrind with Memcheck

A recent thread on social media reminded me that some of the development tools I take for granted are not widely known. Veteran game developer Martin Linklater (@Fizzychicken@mastodon.gamedev.place) asked about profiling on Linux, which prompted me to mention my favourite Valgrind, which prompted a question about its use. I offered to write up a quick tutorial on it. But thinking about it a little more, quick, introductory tutorials to the tools we use makes for a useful addition to this section of the blog.

Resource Access

Previously, I’ve been writing about how to perform task delegation with a distributed authorization scheme. While that article managed to outline the principle well enough, it left a few things not yet covered. The summary was that if we find a generic scheme for treating a resource as a series of changes, then we can encrypt and authenticate each change separately, leading to a kind of distributed authorship of resources – which is what we really want in a distributed system.

Distributed Authorization in Task Delegation

In my previous post, I was discussing how distributed authorization might be facilitated. Today, I want to discuss what effects such authorization tokens can have if we relay them, effectively achieving delegation. Figure: “The first runner in a relay - kindergarten Sports Festival.” by MIKI Yoshihito. (#mikiyoshihito) is licensed under CC BY 2.0 Distributing authorization has the immediate effect that it (mostly) eliminates authorization servers. In practice, there always needs to be a machine to issue such tokens, of course – but it does not have to be consulted for every imaginable action someone takes.

Distributed Authorization

Whenever I don’t write much here, I feel like I’m not producing anything of value. Just to make myself feel better, I want to start with a quick update on what’s been happening. I was awarded a grant by the Internet Society Foundation for research into next generation internet technologies. This, for me, has a few major effects. First, it means I could hire some help in doing this R&D work with me.