amp · 2 comments · 200 words
The journalist David Pierce has written a piece about the birth and (almost) death of Google's AMP. Regular readers know I have been a vocal critic of AMP even when I was serving on its advisory committee. Nowadays, well, I can't remember when I last saw an AMP page (yay Firefox!) and I've never had a client ask me to develop an AMP site. Last year, I had a long chat with David about my…
Continue reading →Sci Fi speculative fiction Tales Of The Algorithm · 1 comment · 800 words
The Yamaguchi Foodstuffs Conglomerate emphatically denies causing tumours in vegetables. They did not "give a beansprout cancer". That would be irresponsible and against their 250 year commitment to responsible bio-agriculture development. Every culture has their own version of Grimm's "Der süße Brei". A cautionary tale of a magic porridge dispenser which, thanks to one woman's forgetfulness, e…
Continue reading →laptop linux repair · 2 comments · 350 words · Viewed ~338 times
After three years of constant abuse, my once pristine laptop keyboard now looks like this: My options were: Ignore it. Scrape off all the paint and replace with translucent stickers. Buy a new keyboard. Even if I were happy with the aesthetic of a hard-worn keyboard (I wasn't) the flaking paint just didn't feel nice under my fingers. I also figured that scraping the paint further risked…
Continue reading →games metaverse vr · 2 comments · 400 words · Viewed ~1,528 times
It is hard to get people excited about VR. Even at its best, it is an isolating experience - that's why Zuck is pushing the social features of The Metaverse so hard. But, worse still, it's hard to show people what the VR experience is like. If your friend buys a 4K laser projector, you can immediately understand the appeal of the massive screen. Even if you only see the photos of it on…
Continue reading →Book Review · 300 words
This is an important and informative book. Unfortunately, I did not get on with it at all. The book is an ambitious look at the philosophy of science viewed through a unique lens. What is temperature? How do we define what freezing and boiling are if we don't have a thermometer? How do you invent a thermometer without stable references? It goes right back to the beginning of science's quest to…
Continue reading →Star Wars · 5 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~837 times
I am (what could charitably be called) a Star Wars fanboi. When I was a nipper, there were only 3 Star Warses, and I wore out the video tapes watching them repeatedly. When the Timothy Zahn books came out, I was starved of new content and devoured them eagerly. And... that was pretty much all there was for Star Wars. Oh, sure, there were the Droid and Ewok cartoons but - although I didn't have…
Continue reading →9 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~277 times
I've been reading various entrepreneur books and blog posts. One thing they all emphasise is that success often comes from finding a problem that you yourself would pay money to solve. And that's a problem for me. I don't tend to want to spend money solving problems. I'm not claiming to be a hermit, but I find it weird just how little cash I'm willing to part with to improve my life. So I'm…
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I'm just getting started with Symfony, so I'm blogging some of the weird things I'm finding. Symfony has a concept of Cache Contracts. You can call an expensive / slow / intensive operation and immediately cache the result for a specific time period. Next time you call the operation, the results are served from the cache until the expiry time has been hit. Nifty! But I couldn't get it to work. …
Continue reading →HowTo php Symfony · 1 comment · 150 words · Viewed ~370 times
I'm just getting started with Symfony, so I'm blogging some of the weird things I'm finding. I want to use Doctrine dbal to search a database for a partial match. For example searching for "smith" should find "blacksmith" and "smithy". I have a prepared statement like this: $queryBuilder = $conn->createQueryBuilder(); $queryBuilder ->select("whatever") ->from("table") ->where("name …
Continue reading →metaverse MSc Sci Fi · 500 words
It was only after I started editing my MSc down to its prescribed word-count, that I finally understood the phrase Kill Your Darlings. I spent ages writing florid prose, only to realise it was needless verbiage. The delete key was hammered mercilessly. But... As all fans of Jasper Fforde know - there is a "Well of Lost Plots"; where rejected sentences live on in the eternal library... As I was …
Continue reading →academia DOI MSc · 3 comments · 250 words · Viewed ~242 times
Welcome to acronym city! I recently published my Master's Dissertation. I say "published" - I just shoved it up on a website. But real academic publications should have a DOI - it's an identifier which is supposed to make it easier for people to find and cite paper. You know how books have a unique ISBN? It's like that. I couldn't find a way to publish this via my university, which was a little …
Continue reading →css flexbox HTML5 responsive · 1 comment · 250 words · Viewed ~338 times
This blog has a calendar showing my yearly archives. It was in a table layout - which made sense when I first designed it - but had a few spacing niggles and was hard to make responsive. Now, it behaves like this: The code is relatively straightforward. The HTML for the calendar looks like this: <div class="calendars"> <div class="calendar"> <div class="calendar-year">2018</div> …
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