There's one of those "I've come up with a perfect analogy for life" blog posts going around. It's sort of like those stock photos with an "inspirational" quote on it - but in long form. Apparently, Your Life Is Tetris. Stop Playing It Like Chess. It's all vaguely plausible, life-lessony, woo - which tries to map one person's journey onto a greater human experience. Frankly, it's unmitigated…
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The UK's official web infrastructure is in a shockingly poor state. I've been doing some light digging into the security of UK Schools' websites. As I've written about ad nauseum, the Government takes almost no interest in the way some of its official websites are managed. The Department for Education is particularly inept when it comes to technology which - given that our country's future…
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I spent my Saturday crewing the reception desk at the amazing UK GovCamp Unconference. Part of our task was to check people in, hand them their name badges, schwag, and offer them a free conference T-Shirt. If you're anything like me, you've got hundreds of conference Ts stuffed in a drawer somewhere. They're all the same - a funky logo on the front, and usually a list of sponsors on the back. …
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I few days ago, I was somewhat surprised to find that one of my Tweets had been used as a citation in Wikipedia! I began to wonder - how often are Tweets used in citations? It's possible to search for your own Tweets using this (somewhat obscure) link: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=twitter.com%2Fedent Just edit the end of it to see if you, or your…
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This isn't a review of the new Star Wars film, it's a diary entry about my experiences at the première. No spoilers, sweetie! I love Star War. Probably more than is healthy. When tickets for the new movie were released, I snaffled up a pair... for the next morning! Look, I'm getting old, and I didn't fancy watching a midnight screening full of screaming fans. So I booked a 10 am showing on …
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Regular readers will remember that I run Ubuntu on a MacBook pro. Why? I'm a contrarian sod. It's the machine work gave me. I can do everything I need to do with Linux without having to deal with OSX or Windows. What can I say, it works for me! The only problem is that the MBP is heavy. Much to unwieldy to carry around without a decent rucksack. The keyboard - while…
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The British State's desire for its citizens' private data is becoming unquenchable. As part of a minor act of disobedience, I decided to send two Freedom of Information requests. The first to the Home Secretary asking for her email metadata. The second to the Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey asking for her web browsing history. After all, if they can spy on me, why can't I spy on how…
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If you've ever reported a bug, you'll have seen the dreaded response "works on my machine." So, I was using a small open source project (I'll leave it anonymous for now) when I noticed a bug. Not a show-stopper, but one which would affect and annoy lots of users. I wrote as detailed a bug report as I could: Scroll Bars Always Showing In Browser In browsers X and Y on platform Z, I notice that …
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Last year, the battery on my Motorola Nexus 6 died. It got hot enough to melt the glue holding the phone together and started bulging - so I replaced it. Now, sadly, the new battery has failed. The phone will suddenly switch off as though the battery were yanked out. After a few minutes it will happily turn on again. Most frustrating. Rather than go to the expense of replacing the entire…
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I don't particularly like picking on the security of Government websites. I do it a lot - but I always feel guilty about besmirching the good name of the many talented people who work in the Civil Service. Today's flaw, however, is a particularly basic mistake which simply shouldn't be allowed to happen by any competent site owner. What Is An Open Redirect? A redirector is a small web service …
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I've just read an interesting article by M.G. Siegler entitled - "What you’re working on sucks, just give up now, they said." It can be summed up thus: Commentators said our startup wouldn't work. Our startup did, in fact, suceed. ∴ All commentators are wrong about whether startups will work. This exhibits one of my favourite logical fallacies - survivorship bias. If you only look at the win…
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WordPress has a built in media player. Chuck in an .MP3 or other sound file, and it will play directly in the browser. Nifty! The only problem is that is looks a bit... dull. 🔊 Celeste🎤 Alex Fitch 💾 Download this audio file. (From Alex Fitch's Eola) It works, but it's not exactly what you'd call gorgeous, is it? Wouldn't it be nice if we could have something like this? Well, the…
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