Graham King

The memory remains: Permanent memory with systemd and a Rust allocator

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 21:54:00 -0400

A Rust object that survives program restart thanks to Rust allocators, systemd’s file descriptor store, and syscall memfd_create.

Linux: What can you epoll?

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700

On Linux what can you turn into a file descriptor and then monitor with epoll?

Underrust: Multiple Return Values

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700

How does Rust return values, and does it make any difference to us programmers?

Overthinking Leetcode's Two Sum with SIMD

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700

When is the linear scan Two Sum solution faster than a map? What if we use AVX-512 instructions?

Underrust: What is the cost of sync::Once?

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

In Rust, what is the performance cost of using sync::Once after the initial setup?

Underrust: Does it matter what type (u8, u32, ...) I use?

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

In Rust, how does using a different primitive type (u8, i32, u64, …) change the generated assembly?

The Underrust: Rust's assembly output

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0700

Assembly: In all the world of the programmer, there is no more important output.

A very small Rust binary indeed

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 09:00:32 -0700

Can we make a Rust program that’s as small as it’s assembler equivalent?

A random number you already have: The stack address

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 16:19:39 -0700

Thanks to Address Space Layout Randomization you can use the address of a stack variable as a zero-cost random number.

Return Value Optimization in Rust

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 14:49:47 -0800

Rust avoids memory copies by optimizing return value placement.

Rust atomics on x86: How and why

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 15:18:06 -0800

On x86 it doesn’t really matter what sync::atomic::Ordering you choose.

Rust is also C

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 09:04:46 -0800

Safety is boring, let’s do pointer arithmetic.

epoll: The API that powers the modern internet

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 15:46:10 -0800

Linux’s epoll API solved the C10K problem, enabling fast and afforable Internet services.

Scripting Minecraft server with Python

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 16:22:11 -0800

Minecraft has an API. If you run your own server you can program it from Python.

Rust Performance 101 in 5 Minutes

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Is your Rust program CPU bound? Here are the very first things you can do on Linux.

CPU silently disappointed with your choice of instruction ordering

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 23:10:34 +0000

An adventure in CPU out-of-order instruction execution.

Traits: Rust's unifying concept

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Rust’s traits are a single concept that unifies interfaces, abstract classes, mix-ins, operator overloading, contraints on generics, and more.

A day in the life of a professional software engineer

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 23:05:31 +0000

Just a normal day reversing linked lists on the whiteboard.

Three things I wish I’d known learning Rust

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:04:14 +0000

It will take longer to learn than most languages, the standard library is small so you’ll need dependencies, and a lot of behavior is in traits.

Quote of the day: A stirring speech

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:14:31 +0000

… because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking.

The simplest CLI that could possibly work

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 18:12:06 +0000

In Go, what’s the simplest possible way to put all your ad-hoc tools in one place?

Collect and handle multiple errors in Go

Fri, 22 May 2020 17:33:53 +0000

In Go, how do you run several operations that might return an error, and return those errors at the end? Here’s how I do it.

A developer goes to a DevOps conference

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 17:54:30 +0000

Two days at PDX DevOpsDays, a gathering of system administrators who use version control, and write a lot of YAML.

Reading MediaRecorder’s webm/opus output

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 19:34:18 +0000

Javascript can now record, manipulate and play sound thanks to a whole range of audio-related API’s. One of the simpler and more useful parts of that is MediaRecorder which can record sound, typically from the user’s microphone.

const stream = await navigator.mediaDevices
    .getUserMedia({audio: true, video: false});  // Media Capture and Streams API
const mediaRecorder = new MediaRecorder(stream); // MediaStream Recording API
mediaRecorder.ondataavailable = (ev) => {        // ev is a BlobEvent
    // ev.data is a Blob. Send it to the server.
};
mediaRecorder.start(50);  // call ondataavailable every 50ms

MediaRecorder on Chrome produces output with mime type audio/webm;codecs=opus.

Let me guide you through the WebM / Matroska / EBML maze.

The WebM format is a container, which can contain many things. In our case it contains audio encoded with the Opus codec. We are only going to look at the container, not the encoded audio.

Javascript’s async/await and Promise in a few words

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 14:30:45 +0000

This is a very common pattern in Javascript:

Growing software, in two tweets

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 18:34:13 +0000

Gardening is my preferred metaphor for software. When I grow a new piece of software, there is a very predictable path I go through as I attempt to manage it’s complexity. It is, in fast-forward, the history of programming language design. That process is short enough to capture in about 400 characters, as two tweets.

Growing software, in two tweets:
1. Write `main`. Put your program in there.
2. `main` too big? Extract functions. Use global vars.
3. Too many functions? Group functions and their data (replacing global vars) into objects.
— grahamking (@grahamking)
March 12, 2018

4. Too many objects? Group objects into packages. Make some methods private.
5. Too many packages? Split out a new project, either library or network service.
6. Iterate from 2 when other functions grow too big.
— grahamking (@grahamking)
March 12, 2018

What Made Maddy Run

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 21:58:29 +0000

What Made Maddy Run by Kate Fagan, is a book about the importance of doing what you love, of really listening to the people close to you.

Learn Better – book notes

Mon, 22 May 2017 04:25:28 +0000

Learn Better, by Ulrich Bosner is an interesting, valuable book, that is too long.

systemd socket activation in Go

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 19:01:26 +0000

To start a server on a port below 1024 (i.

The Joy of systemd

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:51:04 +0000

Three years ago when I wrote The Joy of Upstart, that was the easiest way to turn your scripts into daemons.

How Ada Lovelace solved problems

Fri, 11 Dec 2015 05:02:00 +0000

Over 170 years ago, on Friday 21st July 1843, at 4 o’clock, Ada Lovelace was working on a mathematics problem, possibly on the first known computer program (it was written that summer).

Facebook’s code quality problem

Sat, 31 Oct 2015 23:15:51 +0000

tl;dr: It looks like Facebook is getting the textbook results of ignoring code quality.

Update: More examples, and insights from ex-employees in the reddit discussion

Facebook has a software quality problem. I’m going to try to convince you with three examples. This is important because it demonstrates the time-honored principle that quality matters. In demonstrates it, as Facebook engineers like to say, at scale. I don’t work at Facebook or any competitor, I’m just an observer.

Exhibit A: “iOS can’t handle our scale”

About a month ago a Facebook engineer gave this presentation: iOS at Facebook, which was followed by a discussion on reddit.

The Facebook iOS app has over 18,000 Objective-C classes, and in a single week 429 people contributing to it. That’s 429 people working, in some way, on the Facebook iOS app. Rather than take the obvious lesson that there are too many people working on this application, the presentation goes on to blame everything from git to Xcode for those 18,000 classes.

Decrypt your HTTPS traffic with mitmproxy

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:18:04 +0000

tl;dr Use the mitmproxy doc, return here if trouble.

OSCON 2015: Impressions

Wed, 26 Aug 2015 03:19:30 +0000

I attended OSCON for the first time this year in Portland.

GopherCon 2015: Favorite talks

Fri, 31 Jul 2015 03:58:43 +0000

GopherCon was in Denver again this year, and a lot of fun it was, mostly the meeting of wonderful people.

We are Equality

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 04:33:21 +0000

When the President of the United States of America wants to send an email, we don’t close email-space, and delay your email so his very important one can go through.

Building shared libraries in Go: Part 2

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 21:12:45 +0000

In part 1 we called a very simple Go shared library from Python.

Building shared libraries in Go: Part 1

Wed, 15 Jul 2015 02:22:07 +0000

Since 1.

How memory is allocated

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 15:38:57 +0000

tl;dr man 2 brk

Go: Slice search vs map lookup

Tue, 30 Jun 2015 06:09:24 +0000

tl;dr Use a map.

Software engineering practices

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 02:08:49 +0000

A selection of software engineering practices, from notes I took at an XTC meetup many years ago.

How I read job postings

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 23:40:02 +0000

In the interests of illustrating the complicated programmer psyche for the benefit of anyone involved in recruitment, here’s the two things I look at in a job advert:

Go: The price of interface{}

Tue, 26 May 2015 23:43:48 +0000

Go’s empty interface{} is the interface that everything implements.

Science fiction: Ancillary Sword

Wed, 13 May 2015 03:56:39 +0000

It was a gesture meant to comfort.

Quotes from veteran software engineers

Mon, 02 Mar 2015 06:53:15 +0000

The software industry is the most fashion-conscious industry I know of.

Raw sockets in Go: Link layer

Sat, 31 Jan 2015 20:55:57 +0000

Continuing our dive into the Internet Protocol Suite from Go (See part 1 Raw sockets in Go: IP layer), we are going to the link layer, so we can see the IP headers.

Continuous Delivery: my notes

Sun, 25 Jan 2015 04:44:31 +0000

Continuous Delivery, by Jez Humble and David Farley is about three big ideas to get your code into production more reliably: Make a deployment pipeline: commit -> unit test -> acceptance test -> … -> deploy -> release Automate everything.

Release It: Write software for production

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 05:12:08 +0000

We need to design software to run in production.

What a visit from Reddit looks like

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 04:58:30 +0000

My credit card generator was recently on the front page of reddit.

Learning assembler on Linux

Sat, 23 Aug 2014 03:49:14 +0000

For entertainment, I’m learning assembler on Linux.

Dump Go Abstract Syntax Tree

Sat, 28 Jun 2014 19:09:44 +0000

Go has good support for examining and modifying Go source code.

Sync, a Unix way

Sat, 24 May 2014 04:49:59 +0000

Ever since Dropbox, I’ve been searching for a self-hosted, secure (and now Condi-free) way of keeping my machines synchronised and backed up.

GopherCon 2014 favorite talks, notes

Sun, 04 May 2014 18:39:00 +0000

My favorite talks at GopherCon 2014:

Peter Bourgon: Best Practices for Production Environments Soundcloud were an early Go adopter, and this talk is their distilled learnings from two years of Go: Repo structure, config, logging, testing, deployment, and lots more. The one talk you need if you’re starting (or running) a significant Go project, and you want to do it right.
Petar Maymounkov: The Go Circuit: Towards Elastic Computation with No Failures Stick with this one. It starts off quite academic, but gets fascinating very fast. He models whole companies as a distributed system (based on CSP), then builds a language-agnostic cluster programming library where the API is a filesystem The Circuit. One of the highlights of the conference for me was building a filesystem with Petar in the hallway.
John Graham-Cumming: A Channel Compendium John is the author of those great in-depth Cloudflare blog posts. Solid talk about Go channels. nil channels always block, so you can ‘disable’ a select clause by setting a channel to nil. Closed channels never block. Heartbeat is just time.Tick, timeout is time.After. Go programs are small sequential pieces joined by channels.

Those are the three talks I enjoyed most. Here are my general notes on the conference and a few of the other talks.

Raw sockets in Go: IP layer

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 23:41:48 +0000

In the Internet protocol suite we usually work at the transport layer, with TCP or UDP.

Three best programming books

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 22:19:31 +0000

Here are my three favorite programming books, the ones I consider most important and would most recommend.

Go: How slices grow

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 04:49:00 +0000

In Go (golang) what happens to memory when you append to a slice?

My setup: Hardware

Sat, 07 Dec 2013 23:46:58 +0000

Here’s my current setup, and the hardware I got, in case you were curious.

Kinesis Advantage after four months

Sat, 07 Dec 2013 22:58:09 +0000

Update Nov 2021: It’s been eight years, I’m typing this on that original keyboard, it’s still my primary keyboard.

Realtime Conf 2013: Favorite talks

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 04:33:21 +0000

Realtime Conf 2013 just finished in Portland.

WordPress Black Hat SEO dissected

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 20:00:29 +0000

Last weekend a friend asked me why there were pharma links hidden in her GoDaddy hosted WordPress site, and that led me into the WordPress black hat SEO rabbit hole.

Quote: Look well to each step

Wed, 11 Sep 2013 02:08:05 +0000

From the epilogue of Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”:

What if everyone worked remotely?

Mon, 02 Sep 2013 15:49:44 +0000

What would happen if everyone had the freedom to work remotely?

How GPG works: Encrypt

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 21:02:43 +0000

Here’s what happens when you encrypt a message with GPG / GnuPG (and probably other OpenPGP implementations):

Online upgrades in Go

Sun, 21 Jul 2013 04:40:55 +0000

tl;dr Send your socket fd over a UNIX domain socket: syscall/passfd_test.

Quote of the day: Bruce Schneier

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 03:02:15 +0000

The lesson here is that it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics

SSH and OpenPGP keys

Thu, 30 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

OpenPGP / GnuPG From keyserver: gpg --recv-keys B3B929D2

Co-located teams are a business risk

Mon, 27 May 2013 22:53:22 +0000

Early in my career, I worked for a company run by two ex-military officers.

We are all polyglots

Thu, 02 May 2013 16:24:11 +0000

I used to know two programming languages at any one time; what I called a serious language and a what I called a scripting language.

Rust: What I learnt so far

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:58:13 +0000

Update 2021: DO NOT USE THIS BLOG POST TO LEARN RUST The language has changed tremendously.

PyCon 2013: My two favorite talks

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:41:59 +0000

PyCon is an annual gathering of Python programmers.

Chapter books for a three / four year old

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:32:12 +0000

Starting in summer 2012, when my son was 3.5, I started reading chapter books to him, a chapter or two a night. Before we started chapter books, it was always easy to find good books to read to them (from board books upwards). Now though, I struggled finding good chapter books for this age group.

I’ve collected a list of the ones we tried, in order, with notes if appropriate. I’m linking all the books to Amazon to be clear which book it was, but we got most from our local library.

Jason’s Quest – A lovely book to start with. A wonderful adventure, which never gets too frightening, or too hard to follow, and the good folks win in a good way.

Fantastic Mr. Fox – Might have been a little too frightening at the beginning, with the mean farmers trying to kill the fox. In retrospect I would have saved it till he was a few months older.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins

Google World

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 04:54:09 +0000

First thing in the morning, I check my gmail on my Google Nexus 7 tablet, or my Nexus 4 phone, whichever is nearest.

Keyword arguments in C

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 05:03:49 +0000

This is valid C nowadays:

How will you measure your life? – book notes

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 18:37:58 +0000

How Will You Measure Your Life?

Why I prefer Android to iOS

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 17:53:58 +0000

Our house has two iOS devices (an iPad and and iPod Touch), and two Android devices (Nexus 7 tablet, Samsung Galaxy phone).

Tools for Change, Social Change Conference 1995 notes

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 04:31:24 +0000

In these months of American politicians trying to influence you, I thought it interesting to look at ways of using the same tools for positive change.

David Suzuki on television

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 01:11:29 +0000

David Suzuki tells of making television science programs.

Resident and Virtual memory on Linux: A short example

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 05:29:42 +0000

Tools like top show processes using two kinds of memory:

What is WebRTC? Post on LincolnLoop’s blog

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:33:05 +0000

I blogged What is WebRTC over on Lincoln Loop’s blog:

John Cleese – Take micro creativity retreats

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 22:43:30 +0000

John Cleese gives a great talk on creativity (embedded below).

Does success at high school predict success in life?

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 05:39:23 +0000

Lives of Promise, by Karen Arnold, is a 14 year study of achievement and life choices.

Democracy at work

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 08:35:09 +0000

Most people reading this will be lucky enough to live in a democratic society.

What is SPDY? Post on Lincoln Loop’s blog

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 20:00:39 +0000

I blogged an introduction to and explanation of SPDY, the next-gen HTTP.

Optimize for motivation: Post on Lincoln Loop’s blog

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 16:15:05 +0000

Excited to have my first post on Lincoln Loop’s blog, about intrinsic motivation, flow, and why you don’t find cats in offices:

Go: Targeting a different architecture #golang

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 00:08:58 +0000

Problem: You’re on a i386 machine, and you need to build for amd64, or vice-versa.

Finally understanding Unicode and UTF-8

Thu, 31 May 2012 22:25:18 +0000

Unicode maps 32-bit (4 byte) integers, also called code points or runes, to characters.

Go @ Vancouver Polyglot Unconference

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:05:33 +0000

I attended Vancouver’s Polyglot Unconference, met some wonderful people, and got to present a session on Go (#golang).

Ward Cunningham quotes

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:14:24 +0000

There’s an excellent interview of Ward Cunningham at InfoQ (Nov 2011).

Code coverage in django with ‘coverage’ and ‘django-jenkins’

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:59:38 +0000

Getting unit test code coverage in python, and in django, is easy thanks to coverage:

In-memory key-value store in C, Go and Python

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 05:00:08 +0000

On paternity leave for my second child, I found myself writing an in-memory hashmap (a poor-man’s memcached), in Go, Python and C.

Go after four months #golang

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 02:56:34 +0000

Update Nov 2021: I spent almost a decade doing Go full time and I still love it.

Who we are. Why we do it.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:37:13 +0000

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.

Miami Vice: Off-duty

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:13:26 +0000

Someone once told me that interesting stories start like this:

In Go, is your terminal a console or a pipe? isatty golang

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:08:20 +0000

Is my terminal connected to the console, or to a pipe?

Proxy socket.io and nginx on the same port, over SSL

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:32:26 +0000

My current project has a realtime part, using socket.io on nodejs, and a web part using django on nginx / gunicorn. Here’s a setup to put them both on the same port, and make them both go over SSL. I’m assuming you’re on Ubuntu.

Disclaimer: I got this working last night, so no promises. You’ll certainly want to tweak haproxy’s config for performance. I also only tested it with socket.io’s web socket transport.

Overview

stunnel decrypts the ssl, so everything after that doesn’t know about it. It decrypts both web traffic (HTTPS to HTTP), and web socket traffic (WSS to WS).
haproxy sends web socket traffic to node and web traffic to nginx.
node runs socket.io, handling the web socket traffic.
nginx serves static content.
gunicorn runs python / django, and there’s a database out back somewhere, but that’s not relevant here.

Currently nginx doesn’t

Pretty command line / console output on Unix in Python and Go Lang

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 01:17:10 +0000

There are lots of easy ways to improve the output of your command line scripts, without going full curses, such as single-line output, using bold text and colors, and even measuring the screen width and height.

On why hackers don't work on large teams

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:05:10 +0000

We’ve know for over 35 years that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”.

Machiavelli on Occupy Wall Street

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:25:44 +0000

Reading Machiavelli’s The Prince, his advice seems just as relevant today.

Ad-blocking your iPad

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:01:54 +0000

Monitoring iPad network traffic, and blocking advert download.

Finding memory leaks in Python with objgraph

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:37:39 +0000

After a frustrating time trying to find a memory leak in my Python code with guppy / heappy hpy, I tried objgraph and, wow, it makes it so easy!

DjangoCon 2011: Psychology for your webapp

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:32:07 +0000

I got to do a 5min lightning talk at DjangoCon 2011 in Portland.

Hostage Negotiation 101

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:24:18 +0000

I recently finished Gary Noesner’s Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator, by the F.

Cleaning up old git branches

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 19:14:15 +0000

After a while working with git, you end up with lots of branches, especially if you use git-flow inspired feature branches.

Profiling Django for CPU bound apps

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:24:17 +0000

For most Django apps, indeed most webapps, the bottleneck is the database. The biggest gains usually come from reducing the number of queries used, and adding database indexes. django-debug-toolbar helps a lot here. After that, caching and de-normalization also help reduce database queries.

But what if your app is CPU bound? How do you find out where it’s spending it’s time? It’s easy with the runprofileserver from django-extensions – here’s how:

Unicode in Python 2: Decode in, encode out

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 23:24:40 +0000

In Python 2 you need to convert between encoded strings and unicode.

git: Resolving 'git gc' error: cannot lock ref

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 16:37:01 +0000

If you get an error like this from git::

The death of Sean Hoare, whistleblower

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 05:53:35 +0000

The News International phone hacking scandal is the case of a British tabloid’s staff hacking into several thousand people’s voicemail, over a period of at least six years.

They listened to voicemail of the 7/7 terrorist attack victims, politicians, a murdered schoolgirl (including erasing some messages, leading the family to think she lived), the British Royal Family, various celebrities, and other journalists.

Contributing to Django: quickstart

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 05:01:55 +0000

Instructions on how to setup a development environment to work on Django core, for example to review proposed patches, and prepare your own.

Kobo eReader Touch on Ubuntu Linux

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:22:36 +0000

Ten days ago, I received a Kobo eReader Touch for father’s day. It’s a lovely device. Here’s my impressions.

It’s a USB device.

Plug it in to your Ubuntu machine (or probably any modern Linux distro). It shows up as a USB storage device.
Drag and drop books in any supported format onto it.
Unplug, switch on, read books.

It’s that simple. If you had a solid-state MP3 player (before your phone played them), this will feel familiar.

Django class-based views are easy

Fri, 20 May 2011 15:49:02 +0000

Since version 1.

My experience with django-mptt

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:57:41 +0000

In the past few months, I’ve inherited two projects which used django-mptt, a toolkit for adding trees to Django models.

Improved Ubuntu notifications: gnome-stracciatella-session

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:34:33 +0000

If you are an active user of Ubuntu’s notifications, for example via lintswitch you may of noticed that they have two key problems, which are easily solved:

Elizabeth Yin: You don't need a programmer, you need a market survey

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 06:24:58 +0000

These days, for most internet businesses, the number one challenge is customer acquisition and marketing — not building a website.

Running a Tor relay / node / server on Ubuntu

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 06:29:04 +0000

Updated October 2013: Minor edits.

No managers, no meetings: Why working from home is so much more productive

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:09:08 +0000

Jason Fried at a TEDx event, 17minute video

The key concepts:

Ask people where they go to “get work done”, where they are at their most productive: They almost never say ‘the office’. Or if they do, it’s before or after hours.

Work is like sleep, it proceeds in cycles. You have to go through the light-sleep / light-work cycles to get to the meaty stuff. Every time you get woken up / interrupted, you start from scratch.

lintswitch: Automatically run pylint / jslint on your code

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 21:28:07 +0000

lintswitch is a small Bash script that connects:

GNU Screen basics quick reference

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 06:06:34 +0000

Update 2021 Prefer tmux.

Psychology for your webapp at BarCamp 2010

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 06:15:42 +0000

Update I also presented a 5 minute version at DjangoCon US 2011, as a lightning talk.

Quote: We want Freedom, not Ping-Pong tables

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:16:33 +0000

It’s too bad that companies are still hiding behind glitzy buildings with on-site amenities, flexibility programs and knitting clubs when what people really want are their lives back.

Question: Income Distribution

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:43:31 +0000

Perform the following thought experiment.

Research Papers Archive

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:51:31 +0000

This directory contains research papers and reports which I intend to read.

Quote of the day: Materialism

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 23:18:59 +0000

Materialism and the behaviors that go with it – desiring and buying brand-name clothes and luxury items – are symptoms of insecurity and a coping strategy used to alleviate feelings of self-doubt or bolster a poor self-image.

Behaviour Change Toolkit

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:13:38 +0000

As part of my work with Good Energy I have been learning why people behave the way they do, and what tools we have to help them change behavior.

Kathy Sierra: Give your users super-powers

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 06:15:21 +0000

Kathy Sierra at the Business Of Software conference last autumn.

A quote from Richard Stallman

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 21:06:53 +0000

I have done most of my work while anxious about whether I could do the job, and unsure that it would be enough to achieve the goal if I did.

Notes from O'Reilly's Website Optimization

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 03:59:46 +0000

These are my notes from O’Reilly’s Website Optimization.

You'd be happier without your television. Sell it on Craigslist.

Sun, 23 May 2010 00:29:48 +0000

A quote by Martin Seligman, from his book Authentic Happiness.

Scientific proof: You need to get rid of that TV

Thu, 13 May 2010 05:46:13 +0000

Two observations found in the literature on social psychology, which explain succinctly why, whatever you personally think about it, you would be mentally much better off without your TV.

Television and your brain maps

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:03:13 +0000

The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge is a fascinating book about brain plasticity, the ability of our brain to re-wire itself to cope with changing conditions.

Open up your WiFi

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:28:27 +0000

Update: You need to know how to ban MAC addresses on your router, as you will eventually have a neighbor swamp your network with bittorrent.

Setting up Monit on Ubuntu

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:18:23 +0000

Monit tells you if something goes wrong on your server, and tries to fix it.

Setting up Munin on Ubuntu

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:50:14 +0000

Munin is a system monitoring tool.

Restarting MySQL master-master replication

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:24:13 +0000

If your MySQL (5.

Treating the common cold

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:59:08 +0000

Will Vitamin C really prevent or cure your cold?

Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 07:12:43 +0000

My short notes on Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely.

Influence, by Robert Cialdini

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:42:09 +0000

As an Amazon reviews says, “arguably the best book ever on what is increasingly becoming the science of persuasion.

How we know what isn’t so, by Thomas Gilovich

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:27:59 +0000

By Thomas Gilovich, social psychologist and CSI Fellow, this well written book explains some of the reasoning and deduction errors we make when trying to understand the world, and ways to avoid making those errors.

Memcached: List all keys

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:50:30 +0000

In the general case, there is no way to list all the keys that a memcached instance is storing.

Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 presentation rule

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:41:22 +0000

Funny, practical, and well worth 1 minute 50 seconds of your life:

I'm on identi.ca and Twitter

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:08:35 +0000

I am sharing my thoughts, mainly about web technologies, on identi.

Social psychology in sales copy: Good copy writing

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:03:35 +0000

I recently received an advert for an investment fund in which, as the amateur social psychologist that I am, I noticed illustrated a couple of psychological principles.

Choosing a message queue for Python on Ubuntu on a VPS

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:05:13 +0000

Updated Sep 13, 2011 to include redis, remove stompserver, and update beanstalkd

Quote of the day – monkeys

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:09:11 +0000

In response to monkeys stealing his coffee beans, an Indian farmer observes: If you start shooting monkeys, you’ll spend the rest of your life shooting monkeys.

On cellphone use in cars

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:11:28 +0000

A very interesting article in the New-York Times on the research behind the risks of being distracted by a cellphone whilst driving:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/19distracted.html

Here’s some excerpts:

in a survey of 1,506 people last year by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, 81 percent of cellphone owners acknowledged that they talk on phones while driving, and 98 percent considered themselves safe drivers. But 45 percent said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone. That’s the Lake Wobegon effect, the tendency for overestimate their capabilities in relation to others.

Django dynamic forms and formsets

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:08:23 +0000

A couple of great posts which explain Django dynamic forms and advanced formset usage very clearly:

How and Why to extend Firefox in Javascript

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:29:22 +0000

I will be giving this talk on Friday 12th June, at Open Web Vancouver 2009.

Unix shared directory permissions: GUID and umask

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:11:26 +0000

I setup my Mercurial repository in the same way we used to do CVS, then SVN: A directory owned by a group, with the GUID bit, and all users who need to commit are in that group.

Legal 1 Usability 0

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:55:46 +0000

The cooking instructions for my Tandoori Chicken Breast microwave lunch, are to cook…

OpenTTD: Trains and signals for beginners – a tutorial

Thu, 21 May 2009 07:22:43 +0000

I have been playing Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, or OpenTTD on and off for a while, but I confess I only understood train signals very recently.

Quote of the day: Why racists have bad graphic design

Wed, 20 May 2009 16:34:19 +0000

Charlie Brooker on a television advert by the British National Party, England’s (very small) right-wing political party:

Speaking at Open Web Vancouver 2009 in June

Sun, 17 May 2009 21:30:59 +0000

I will be speaking at Open Web Vancouver on Thursday, June 11, 2009 and Friday, June 12, 2009.

Micro-Zooids: A story

Sun, 10 May 2009 22:23:13 +0000

When I was 16, I wrote a computer game, called Micro Zooides.

Turn on debug output in SVN

Thu, 07 May 2009 23:02:38 +0000

After a desktop and server upgrade, my subversion client stopped working.

Migrating from Picasa to GIMP

Wed, 06 May 2009 05:07:13 +0000

Update April 2012 Google has discontinued Picasa for Linux, so I’m going to try to do all my photo editing in GIMP. Here’s what I use most often:

Basic:

Colors / Auto / White-balance
Colors / Auto / Color enhance
Colors / Brightness-Contrast / Contrast up by 5 or 10

Warmify:

Tools / GEGL Operation / Color temperature / Raise desired by 0.5k or 1k.

Sharpen:

Filters / Enhance / Unsharp mask

Original post follows

I’ve been using Picasa to edit my pictures for a long time, and it’s an excellent program. Recently however I’ve started shooting RAW, and I’d like control, so I’ve started using GIMP. It’s more powerful and more complicated than Picasa, so to start myself off I went through all the features of Picasa and made notes on how to duplicate that operation in GIMP. Here are those notes.

Most of what Picasa does can be replicated with the Colors / Levels or Colors / Curves tool. It’s well worth spending a little time experimenting with both of those (the documentation is very good too).

Crop

In the Toolbox, click the Rectangle select tool In its options (beneath the tools), tick ‘Fixed: Aspect Ratio’ Enter 6:4 ratio (for 1.6 sensor, most DSLRs) Tick Highlight. Draw a rectangle on the image that you want to crop to. Image menu / Crop to Selection

What is the point of LinkedIn?

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:23:47 +0000

Update 23 Aug 2011: Finally closed my LinkedIn account. To their credit the ‘Close Account’ feature is straightforward.

Update 4 Feb 2011: Steve Pavlina, in his article about leaving Facebook writes:

I nuked my Linkedin account at the same time I left Facebook. Linkedin is supposed to be a business networking service, and I had about 350 contacts there, but I always found that service utterly useless, so it was a no-brainer to dump it. End update

I’m on LinkedIn, I’m connected to 48 people. I go there, I declare to the world that I know these people. And then what?

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. There’s:

a project to find uses for LinkedIn
a book on finding a point to LinkedIn
and the company itself had to blog about ten ways to use LinkedIn.

If it takes a blog post, a book, and a community project, to find a point to your web application, I think there may not be one.

Foxden – your life on one page

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:21:22 +0000

Update (Nov 2010): I have not worked on Foxden for over a year.

Quote of the day: Congressman Mike Honda

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 17:49:12 +0000

Congressman Mike Honda, D-San Jose, writing about opening government databases:

Eddit: Reddit without the Rrrr!

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:06:32 +0000

Eddit is a bookmarklet for Reddit, which gives you more signal and less of the noise that makes you go Rrrr! Here’s how it improves reddit:

Flex internals: Setting a button label

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:50:32 +0000

Most ActionScript / Flash applications have a main event loop, triggered by Event.ENTER_FRAME. This is where the animation moves along to the next frame, or the sprites of the game are re-drawn in their new places.

In the Flex framework, you are expected to call invalidateDisplayList on the framework to say you need an update, and actually do the update when the framework calls your updateDisplayList method. This is the invalidation / validation pattern.

I went searching in the Flex code to understand how this invalidation / validation step ties in with Flash’s event model. I ignored properties and sizing, and edited the code down to the bare essentials.

Here is what happens when you change the label of a button:

Choosing the best Flex book – Flex book reviews

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:05:29 +0000

UPDATE March 19th: Added First Steps in Flex, and Learning Flex 3.

Math Dodger: A Flash game

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:26:28 +0000

Los Angeles is under attack, by trigonometric functions! OMG! Trigo-what? If I wanted to do maths, I’d go to San Francisco!! You, like, totally gotta save L.A man. Enter your name, then move your tank.

Use the left and right arrow keys to rotate, the forward and back arrow keys to move.
The barrel of the tank is the little black line. That’s the front.

No, your tank can’t fire. Avoid the mathematical blobs. YEAH!
The longer you live, the more points you get. A score above 100 is, like, totally AWESOME! Good luck Bro.
Let me know in the comments how much you score.

Javascript objects: And what is this?

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 02:06:41 +0000

When writing object-oriented Javascript, there are two occasions when you need to be careful that this is set correctly: In inner functions and in callbacks.

Easy object-oriented Javascript the Python way

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:47:30 +0000

Javascript is not an opinionated language.

This is me

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:03:16 +0000

Have I told you that I have never owned a TV, and never watch it?

Linux on a potato

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:38:17 +0000

Offered with no further comment: Hackers successfully install Linux on a potato

On the American automobile industry

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 05:02:24 +0000

Joshua-Michéle Ross at O’Reilly Radar writes about the money the American taxpayer (government) is giving Genera Motors, Chrysler and Ford to save them from bankruptcy:

Dan Gardner on fear

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 05:35:17 +0000

In the prologue to The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner (published as ‘Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear’ in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada), which I have just started reading, as he talks about the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States:

Plebis.Net. Speak your mind.

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:34:37 +0000

I have just launched Plebis.

Internet Explorer not sending NTLM authentication

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:01:12 +0000

At work we setup a Twiki, and Internet Explorer refused to send the NTLM authentication, instead it showed a login popup.

Keithnote

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:31:11 +0000

Keithnote is a presentation generator. You provide information such as the title of your presentation, and it downloads relevant images from Flickr. These are stored locally so you can run your presentation whilst offline.

Keithnote is hosted at Google Code, here: Keithnote

MySQL quick reference

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:30:37 +0000

A concise reference / cheat-sheet / crib-sheet to MySQL’s commands.

Using Ekiga softphone on Ubuntu Linux on a Thinkpad

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:19:48 +0000

For many months now I have been making and receiving telephone calls from my computer. There are two advantages:

It is very cheap. Calls within the United States are about $1/hour!
It makes your phone number virtual, and configurable, which means for example that my phone number will forward to my cell phone if my computer is offline. It also means you don’t have to be in the same country as your phone number.

I am running Ubuntu Linux on a Thinkpad, but most of this should apply to Ekiga on all platforms, and the principles apply to all Softphones.

Passenger airlines will charge by volume and weight

Fri, 30 May 2008 23:38:43 +0000

Update: Five years after I wrote this, it is actually happening. Samoa Air boss defends charging passengers by weight on BBC News 2nd Apr 2013.

Update: Eight years after I wrote this, The Economist remarks In fact, on a purely economic basis, it makes sense to charge passengers by weight, since that is directly correlated with fuel usage, which goes a long way in determining flight costs in article 21st Oct 2016

When you send a parcel by air, the price depends on the volume and weight of that parcel. Volume, because you are buying a certain amount of space in the plane. Weight, because the heavier the plane’s cargo, the more fuel it takes to get it off the ground. You pay for the fuel to fly your parcel.

The pricing structure for air mail / air freight is closely linked to the costs faced by the airline.

When you travel with your parcels, a disconnect appears. You buy a certain amount of space – typically a seat for yourself, a small bag and one or two big bags. A bigger seat (‘business’, ‘premium’, etc) is more money. Extra bags is more money. But you’re not paying by weight – and I think that will have to change.

A quote from Seth Godin

Tue, 20 May 2008 05:55:31 +0000

It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.

Host your own Internet

Tue, 20 May 2008 04:39:20 +0000

When I first got my own server (a virtual private server with Linode which I highly recommend), I ran every Internet service I needed on it, and several for my friends.

Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo – just watch it

Fri, 02 May 2008 19:23:53 +0000

If you really don’t want to watch it, read the transcript of Clay Shirky’s talk at Web2.

Finally an explanation to mod_python: (Re)importing module 'django.core.handlers.modpython'

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:49:37 +0000

If you use Django with Apache, no doubt you have noticed lots of these lines in your log file:

The fine line between populism and racism

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 01:16:08 +0000

As you probably know, the U.S.A. is electing itself a new president. The process is that each of the two parties elects their candidate, then they compete against each other. The four remaining Republicans vying for their parties nomination recently participated in a debate here in California. Here is the transcript of the Republican debate of January 30th 2008. It’s mostly standard political fare, until you get to the topic of immigration. Then, well, see for yourself:

Wine grapes from least to most tannins

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:40:40 +0000

Gamay, pinot noir, sangiovese, tempranillo, zinfandel, syrah, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, nebbiolo.

Quote of the day

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:56:31 +0000

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.

AJAX, IE6 and System error: -1072896658

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:43:05 +0000

I have just spent a while wrestling with this problem, so in case anyone else comes across it.

Technologies for better web based applications: XMPP, Flex, and more

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:39:52 +0000

The difference between a web site and an application is that an application is more dynamic, more responsive, to the user.

Migrate from Gallery 2 to Flickr

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:04:56 +0000

I have recently moved all my photos from a Gallery 2 instance I ran myself, to Flickr. This means I don’t need to keep my Gallery2 install up to date, it frees up lots of disk space on my server, and allows me to more easily share pictures with friends and family. Here’s how I did it:

Keep your unit testing lazy

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:49:39 +0000

Oscar Huseyin, via JavaLobby, has an interesting post on how much unit testing is good:

Over the years, l’ve read lots of commentary, white papers, best practice papers, books on the topic of TDD. I’ve heard the rant of many TDD evangelists who preach about how total code coverage brings you closer to code quality perfection and how you’ve failed when you’ve not been able to achieve these goals. Sure, this is an extreme example of evangelical preaching, where in actual fact, most of these individuals commonly drum down their hard line views of testing by using words like “pragmatism” and statements like “do what works best”. But, why do l feel as if I’ve failed if l have not got 100% code coverage? It’s because l, to some degree, shared some of the religious views about testing.

Non blocking console input in Python and Java

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:42:31 +0000

Update Sep 2011: If you’re using Google’s Go Lang see Non blocking console read in Go. Thanks Ostsol

Heavily updated 9th January 2008: This post was originally entitled Non blocking console IO is not possible. Two helpful comments helped me see the error of my ways. Many thanks to ‘schlenk’ and ‘Bob’ for the help. Non blocking console IO is possible, it just isn’t (easily) portable. Read on to find out how.

I have been doing some programming exercises in Python, Java and ActionScript (Flex), using this list from Prashant N Mhatre. The first exercise sounds simple on the surface:

Display series of numbers (1,2,3,4, 5….etc) in an infinite loop. The program should quit if someone hits a specific key (Say ESCAPE key)

Displaying a list of numbers in an infinite loop is trivial, and stopping on Ctrl-C is trivial, but stopping on a key of your choice (let’s use ESC), makes the problem much more interesting.

By default the console on Linux and Windows is buffered. It does not send you character data until the Enter key is pressed. In Python the raw_input method will block until it gets input. In Java you can test the characters available, non blocking, using System.in.available(), but this still doesn’t fill up until Enter is pressed. There are two ways to solve this:

XMPP in your browser: Flex 2 with XIFF

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:40:40 +0000

An entry about using the XIFF API to get your Flex application talking XMPP. If you don’t know what I’m talking about no need to read on really.

Some definitions

XMPP is an open protocol for instant messaging, that runs the Jabber network and Google talk.
Flex 2 is a programmer-friendly way of developing Flash applications, using ActionScript 3, which looks a lot like Java.
XIFF is an ActionScript 3 API for XMPP.

If you put those three items together you get, yes, a paradigm shift in web based application development. But let’s not get fancy just yet (a later blog post might wax lyrical about the future of web apps), for now here are some recipes for doing just about anything with XMPP, ActionScript 3, and XIFF.

Quote of the day

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 02:59:45 +0000

There’s no shortage of smart people digging the wrong hole really well

On the road

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:37:26 +0000

The silence around here is because I have been traveling for two months.

What really kills people like you ?

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 10:09:37 +0000

Update 2018: The excellent Our World In Data has a Causes Of Death section.

Do you remember how we were all going to die of Ebola, then S.A.R.S., and more recently Avian flu ?

Have you got the memo that the job creation program at airports is because Terrorism is such a big threat to your life ? In England at the moment you are, according to the media, at great threat from drug dealing teenagers, and anyone younger than you in general.

And yet, here you are, reading safely. So instead of tolerating idiots pretending to be journalists, I went looking for what we should really be wary of – what really does kill people.

BarCampLondon2 wrapup

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 13:05:28 +0000

Last weekend I attended BarCampLondon2.

Jimbo – Monitor your server with Jabber

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:11:37 +0000

Webapps are often built and managed by single person or small teams. For example, I run 11 sites and web apps, just in my spare time, on one virtual server. I need to know if that server is up. We need a lightweight, low/zero maintenance way to monitor applications and servers. Mainly we are concerned about presence of our application. Is it there ?

Where else does presence matter ? Why, in Instant Messaging applications of course. Currently we record presence of our friends in our messenger clients. Well, servers can be our friends too !

A week in the woods

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 13:42:08 +0000

From the 9th to the 15th May 2004, I went on the Fundamental Bushcraft course with the Ray Mears School of Bushcraft, in the Kent countryside. Here’s what happened:

Factual entertainment

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:34:24 +0000

Most journalists, I assume, aspire to delivering the truth on what is really going on to the reading public.

Printing Word And PDF files from Python

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:13:44 +0000

Recently I had to automate printing a whole bunch of CVs on Windows. Having successfully avoided VBA my whole programming life, it was time to think fast. Thankfully Python has some win32com bindings, which allows you to talk COM to various Windows applications, and get them to print the documents.

First you need the Python win32com bindings.

Wine grapes

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 18:01:09 +0000

The reason new world wines use the grapes they do, is because those are the grapes from the big French wines. But which grapes from which wines ? To find out, you could go to the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine and read the text of each appelation. There are over 300. Or there’s the Wikipedia list of French wine Appelations. Or there’s the handy guide below on which grapes are in which French wines. Happy sipping !

Wine notes

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:04:56 +0000

Some notes from a talk / taster I went to on food and wine pairing. It was led by Tom Forrest – and a very interesting and knowledgeable chap he is.

10 ways to kill a pig

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 12:05:15 +0000

Art at work This is the webgroup’s first online gallery show.

carriagereturn.org

Mon, 15 May 2006 21:57:09 +0000

carriagereturn.org provides a daily dose of software engineering wisdom to your feed reader or e-mail client – it’s inspiring, thought provoking, and sometimes just plain dangerous.

Halliburton solves global warming

Sat, 13 May 2006 20:12:09 +0000

I got the strangest email today, which I originally took to be spam. Read for yourself:

May 9, 2006 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: mailto:EPDU@halliburtoncontracts.com Photos: http://www.halliburtoncontracts.com/EPDU/

HALLIBURTON SOLVES GLOBAL WARMING SurvivaBalls save managers from abrupt climate change

Markdown quick reference

Tue, 09 May 2006 22:18:18 +0000

I use Markdown to edit this blog.

Why your company needs a feed reader on every desktop

Tue, 09 May 2006 21:37:11 +0000

A web feed is, to quote Wikipedia:

… a document (often XML-based) which contains content items, often summaries of stories or weblog posts with web links to longer versions. Weblogs and news websites are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to “top ten” lists of hit tunes. The two main web feed formats are RSS (which is older and far more widely used) and Atom (a newer format that has just completed the IETF standardization process.) Feeds are subscribed to directly by users with aggregators or feed readers, which combine the contents of multiple web feeds for display on a single screen or series of screens

Aggregators and feed readers are widely used, but mainly by tech-savvy individuals. It’s time your company rolled out a feed reader on every desktop PC it owns. Here’s why:

Timestream: Where does the time go ?

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 21:08:47 +0000

UPDATE As of February 2008 mytimestream.

Amazon cuts negative reviews

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 12:29:36 +0000

A very interesting article about Amazon censoring a negative review.

Firefox Sage extension – beginning development

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:25:38 +0000

I have been using Sage as my feed reader.

Sage – the graham patch

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:03:17 +0000

I’ve started using Sage as my feed reader.

Shaun Inman – "10 reasons why you need to build an API"

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 18:08:06 +0000

Shaun Inman is the creator of Mint.

Tom Coates – Native to a Web of Data

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:45:43 +0000

This is a write-up of my notes from Tom Coates’ presentation at the Future Of Web Apps (futureofwebapps) conference, held in London on Wednesday 8th February.

Javascript credit card generator fix

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:40:30 +0000

There was a mistake in the Javascript credit card generator, meaning it would not work on MS Internet Explorer or Opera.

Types of question

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 14:59:43 +0000

From a Greenpeace workshop

Cal Henderson – Building Flickr

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 13:39:52 +0000

These are the notes I took during Cal Henderson’s talk on Building Flickr at the Future of Web Applications conference in London on Wednesday 8th February.

Joshua Schacter – del.icio.us – Things we've learned

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 13:05:24 +0000

These are the notes I took at Joshua Schachter’s talk at the Future Of Web Applications (futureofwebapps) conference, in London on Wednesday 8th February 2006.

Why you need a cluster

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 13:37:24 +0000

If your live web application has more than a couple of users, and they don’t both sit right next to you, you need to cluster it.

Goodbye mod_jk hello mod_proxy

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 13:18:23 +0000

I’ve been using Apache as a front end to a cluster of Tomcat servers for a while.

Javascript and PHP credit card generator

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:39:15 +0000

I have ported the credit card number generator to PHP and Javascript.

Fire

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 18:00:16 +0000

I went on a basic fire fighting course a long time ago.

Fatigue

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 13:59:05 +0000

This is sourced from Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center; ?

jUse

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 19:32:21 +0000

I’ve written a small Python program I’m calling jUse which I’m placing here in the hope that someone might find it useful.

Creativity

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 10:55:20 +0000

From New Scientist, 29th October 2005:

Free credit cards

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 19:09:05 +0000

As you can probably tell from some of the comments in the credit card section, some people don’t seem to understand that the generator just makes numbers that look like credit cards, but are IN NO WAY actual credit card numbers.

JavaWorld unit testing article

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 11:01:22 +0000

JavaWorld have published my third article.

When thieves fall out

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 15:54:10 +0000

by Jeff Elkins Interesting details are emerging regarding a wartime tiff between General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and General Sir Michael Jackson of Britain, former commander of NATO “peacekeeping” forces in Kosovo.

CVV numbers

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:46:27 +0000

CVVs, CVV2s, CVCs, and Indent CVCs are 3-digit Card Verification Values or Card Verification Codes that are all calculated using the same CVV algorithm.

Luhn formula

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:44:52 +0000

A credit card number must be from 13 to 16 digits long.

Irregular warfare

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:25:14 +0000

Political violence, terrorism, military operations other than war (MOOTW), low-intensity conflict, people’s war, revolutionary warfare, war of national liberation, guerrilla war, partisan war, warfare in the enemy’s rear, imperial policing or small wars.

Sea power

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:24:39 +0000

The term sea power covers the control of international trade and commerce, the operation of navies in war, and the use of navies as instruments of diplomacy, deterrence, and political influence in peacetime.

Land warfare

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:23:58 +0000

A maritime blockade, strategic bombing or guerilla warfare are coercive techniques to achieve a particular objective.

International law and the use of force

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:23:03 +0000

Although there is no judiciary or policing capability at the international level (aside from the limited actions and powers of the United Nations), there is a still an influential body of international law, respected almost all the time by almost all nations.

What is strategy

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:22:38 +0000

Strategy is the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy – Lidell Hart

Financial Glossary

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:19:28 +0000

Commodities Commodities are anything that you can take physical delivery of, such as sugar, coffee, wheat, etc.

Derivatives

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:18:41 +0000

A derivative is a financial contract that is based on (derived from) something else, either another financial instrument (a bond, shares, currency, etc) or a commodity (sugar, coffee, energy, etc).

Finance basics

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:18:11 +0000

A loose collection of definitions and information concerning the financial world.

GUI design

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:15:29 +0000

User interface design principles This is the basics to think about when designing a GUI, a website, any software with a user interface.

Get It Done

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:08:05 +0000

This section presents a system for getting things done.

Decider Protocol

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:07:00 +0000

This section is inspired by Software for your Head, by Jim and Michele McCarthy.

Advice

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:05:59 +0000

The best advice I have every been given was to take the highest paying job you can get until you figure out what you want to do.

A short history of Christianity

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 15:55:12 +0000

??The term ‘Christian’ was first used in Antioch in Syria around 35-40 AD to designate a new religious community there which included both Jewish and non-Jewish adherents and was marked out by it attachment to ‘Christos’, a Greek translation of the Hebrew title ‘Messiah’, used by Jews to designate their expected national savior.

Michael Jackson

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 15:53:50 +0000

An unexpected page, dedicated to the world’s strange collection of Michael Jacksons.

Credit card numbers

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 14:16:56 +0000

Credit card numbers that conform to the Luhn formula (MOD 10 check).

Credit card generator

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:43:17 +0000

If you just need a bunch of numbers use the online credit card number generator.

Laws should expire

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:24:12 +0000

In England in 1388 Richard III made a law stating that all men (or only ages 10-18, versions differ) must own bows and practice archery on Sunday’s and holidays.

Prawn / Shrimp garden

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:23:09 +0000

People grow vegetables or fruit in their gardens, and may keep chickens or other animals.

Pedestrian crossing

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:21:02 +0000

In many countries, pedestrian crossings have a button you press to signal your desire to cross.

Anti-gravity platform

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:19:51 +0000

Fact 1: Cats always land on their feet.

Cat stroker

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:19:00 +0000

Cats love affection, but particularly they love being rubbed on their cheek.

Dog Rentals

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:18:38 +0000

If you live in the city and work all day, you probably can’t have a dog.

Office Mum

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:18:16 +0000

Mum’s, over the course of being Mums, develop an extraordinary ability to manage a house, put up with squealing brats, multitask, remember a range of important unconnected information, and generally get things done under duress.

about

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 12:28:39 +0000

This site is maintained by Graham King.

Amusing feedback

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:47:15 +0000

Everyone that runs a website probably gets some amusing e-mails, and because of the credit card numbers I probably get more than my fair share.