Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

Theme Switcher:

Book Review: The Names by Florence Knapp

· 450 words · Viewed ~379 times

Book cover featuring a man with three shadows.

This has an excellent narrative structure, some beautiful prose, and I just didn't enjoy it. The story is Sliding Doors meets Same Time Next Year mixed with a distressing amount of domestic violence. A mother faces a difficult choice. Should she name her child after her abusive and violent husband? In one strand she does, in another she doesn't, and in the third she makes a compromise. We…

I've found just the right paper for my Bottom Hole problem

· 4 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~1,249 times

Some pissed old fart reading a newspaper called "The Hammersmith Bugle" with the headline "No news shocker..."

A few weeks ago, I went on a mad quest to find the newspaper used in 1995's Bottom Hole TV show. During the episode, Eddie starts reading this newspaper: Obviously, the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". But judging from all the other shots, the prop is based on a real newspaper. So I decided to rip off Dirty Feed's shtick and find out…

RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google

· 13 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~17,245 times

Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1. I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for my site. I've been writing this blog for a while. I've never much bothered with "aggressive" SEO - I have a fairly semantic layout, all my reviews have metadata, and stuff like that - but I'm not…

Vertically Aligning Roman Numerals in Code

· 1 comment · 200 words · Viewed ~1,917 times

The PHP logo.

I have a PHP function which uses Roman Numerals. It looks like this: $romanNumerals = [ "Ⅿ" => 1000, "ⅭⅯ" => 900, "Ⅾ" => 500, "ⅭⅮ" => 400, "Ⅽ" => 100, "ⅩC" => 90, "Ⅼ" => 50, "ⅩⅬ" => 40, "Ⅹ" => 10, "Ⅸ" => 9, "Ⅷ" => 8, "Ⅶ" => 7, "Ⅵ" => 6, "Ⅴ" => 5, "Ⅳ" => 4, "Ⅲ" => 3, "Ⅱ" => 2, "Ⅰ" => 1 ]; The problem is, the…

NHS Goes To War Against Open Source

· 26 comments · 1,050 words · Viewed ~17,548 times

All source code repositories must be private by default. Repositories may be internal where there is a legitimate need for visibility within the enterprise. Repositories must not be public unless there is an explicit and exceptional need, and public access has been formally approved by the Engineering Board. Purpose Public repositories materially increase the risk of unintended disclosure of source code, architectural decisions, configuration detail, and contextual information that may be exploited — particularly given rapid advancements in Al models capable of large-scale code ingestion, inference, and reasoning (e.g. developments such as the Mythos model). This red line establishes a default-closed posture for code while the organisation assesses the impact of these changes and ensures that any public publication of code is a deliberate, reviewed, and justified decision. • For P&P Public repositories we will switch to Private on Monday the 11th May 2026 • Teams that have a need for an exemption need to declare this to the Engineering mailbox by COP Wednesday 6th May 2026 • Teams can change to private at any time ahead of this • Central tracking of public repositories: NHSE public repositories.xlsx

The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to dozens of departments about it, wrote guidance still in use today, and briefed Ministers on why it was so important. That's why I'm beyond disappointed at recent moves from NHS England to backtrack on…