Originally posted as part of HTML Hell's advent calendar. While browsing Mastodon late one night, I came across this excellent blog post called HTML is all you need to make a website. It describes a few websites which are pure HTML. No CSS and no JS. And I thought… do you even need HTML to make a website? A few hours later, I launched the NO-HT.ML website. Proving, once and for all, that you d…
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How many times can you go back to the well before it is completely dry? With Kevin Smith, it's always once more. I remember watching the original Clerks about a hundred years ago at university. It was a cheap & daring movie then - and remains a mainstay of what you can do if you give a bored kid a camera. Kevin Smith's movies are uneven. He writes an amazing script - but give him a cast of…
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Winter has come! And with it the risk of power-cuts. Thankfully, we already have a Uninteruptable Power Supply for vital things like WiFi and security. But what about lights? Hurrah for candles! They're not just for birthday cakes, you know. But how do you light candles? I vaguely remember something about rubbing two stones together? But who can be bothered with that! "What about matches?" I…
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I thoroughly enjoyed the first Red Matter VR game, so I leapt at the sequel when it was on offer. What's it like? Exactly the same as the first. Lots of creepy corridors, a range of puzzles, and a sedate-ish journey. You're exploring an abandoned space-station, looking for clues and trying to figure out what happened. It's a completely linear journey, and consists of a series of locked-room…
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I'm chuffed to bits to announce that I was recently elected to chair the BCS's Open Source community group! The British Computer Society is an august body, and the OSSG have put on some brilliant talks in the last few years. But I'd like to shake things up a little. I want us to move away from doing talks to a small group of London-centric folk. I want us to spread the message of open source…
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The inimitable Simon Willison has a brilliant presentation all about managing side projects: It is all good advice. But I gently disagree with the slide which says: Avoid side projects with user accounts If it has user accounts it’s not a side-project, it’s an unpaid job I get the sentiment. Storing passwords securely is hard. Dealing with users changing their names is hard. Updating avatars …
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Computer Science has two canonical "hard problems": cache invalidation naming things off-by-one errors Let's talk about how we name unique items in Federated services - for example, posts on a social media service. If you have only one service, it's pretty easy. Every time a new entry is created in a database, give it a sequential number. This becomes a problem at scale. If you have…
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Twitter's over, my dudes! And now everyone is on Mastodon! But Mastodon isn't a site, it is a federated network running an interoperable protocol! Yay for ActivityPub! Anyway, that means there isn't one Mastodon website. There are many. There is only one Twitter. There is only one Facebook. There is only one Instagram. If you want to interact with Twitter/FB/Insta then you have to do it on…
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People contact me with all sorts of weird opportunities. Some are fun. Some are not. I've lost count of the number of NFT grifters who've asked me to "revolutionise" the art space. I'm generally not a fan. But I had one chat with someone who wanted to do something intriguing. They were worried about people right-clicking or screenshotting their precious images and had a plan to stop that. I…
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As long term readers know, I got married dressed as Darth Vader. After keeping my wedding suit in storage for far too long, I purchased a mannequin to display the costume. Ever since then, Vader has lurked behind me in my home office. Looming over my every decision. But a few weeks ago, the old chap took a tumble. A gust of wind caught his cape - NO CAPES - and sent him crashing to the…
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I don't know when social media influencers started banging on about Air Fryers. All I know is that they're the new hip thing and that I am easily influenced. Anyway, I saw this on sale and thought I'd take a punt on it. What's the worst that could happen? The technology is pretty basic. Point an over-powered hair-dryer into an enclosed space, have a motor gently stir the bowl, wait. Done. …
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I recently watched a brilliant documentary about the building of London's CrossRail system. It discussed many of the challenges involved with a "mega project" - and gave a little insight into what went wrong during construction. What struck me though, was how simple it seems to build an underground railway! Dig some tunnels Lay some tracks Done I mean, that's all it is when you get down to…
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