This blog uses WebMention technology. If you write an article on your website and mention one of my blog posts, I get a notification. That notification can then be published as a comment. It usually looks something like this: This means readers of my post can see where it has been mentioned around the web. They can read your article after reading mine. Nice! I've also set up a "bridge"…
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I do not care for the game of Rugby. After many wet and cold days on the school sports field, I had any latent enthusiasm for it beaten out of me. There is nothing you or anyone else can say which will convince me to take an interest in it. You may feel the same way about a specific sport, or the Great British Bake Off, or Linux. That's fine. We're all different. This can be a problem on…
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This is a short piece of mostly fiction. It looks at the secret life of data and algorithms. Enjoy! Data Becomes Her I never knew my mother. OK, no one ever really knows their mum. But I never even got to meet mine. She made it clear at the hospital that she'd smother me to death if she was ever left alone with a mewling baby. Looking back, I think I might have preferred that fate. I never…
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Image files are a grid of pixels - each pixel contains colour information. But they don't just have to contain colour information. Here are some thoughts on other things that a future image format might contain. What exists already? A typical bitmap image looks like this under the hood: 0 1 2 3 0 Black Red Red Blue 1 Red White Blue Yellow 2 Orange Purple Green…
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Mastodon - the distributed social network - has two interesting challenges when it comes to how users share links. I'd like to discuss those issues and suggest a possible way forward. When you click on a link on my website which takes you to another website, your browser sends a Referer. This says to the other site "Hey, I came here using a link on shkspr.mobi". This is useful because it lets…
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To understand this blog post, you need to know two things. There exists a class of numbers which are illegal in some jurisdictions. For example, a number may be copyrighted content, a decryption key, or other text considered illegal. There exists a class of algorithms which will take any arbitrary data and produce a fixed length text from it. This process is known as "hashing". These algorithms …
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There's no way that I could find to report this to the Canadian Government - and I didn't fancy trying to raise a bug report with the first Mountie I met - so here's a blog post. As part of Canada's Electronic Travel Authorisation system, prospective visitors to the country get sent emails. The email I received had a broken image right at the top: At least there's some alt text! Gmail on…
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A few years ago, I had a chance to work with an exciting tech startup. They had just become 5 years old. The day I went for an interview, about a dozen of the founding members announced they were quitting. Including the CEO. Was this a good sign or a bad sign? Over beers, my friends were all adamant that this was the end. The sky was falling and the little-startup-that-could was crashing and…
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When I was a kid, our school had one computer per classroom. Luxury! Teachers had long-since given up on the state of my handwriting. So I got special dispensation to write up some of my work on whatever primitive word processor was installed on the PC. With one caveat: no spell check! Which, even as a ten year old, I thought was reasonable. Learning to spell is an adult life skill. So using …
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Back in 2007 - an eternity in web years - the BBC published a document showing their 15 Web Principles. I thought I'd take a look at how they stack up today. And investigate whether the BBC is still living up to them. Here are the slides if you want to play along at home: BBC2.0: The BBC’s 15 Web Principles from hvs 1. Build Web Products that meet user needs This is still good advice! …
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Mostly notes to myself - I hope you find them useful. So, you want to write your dissertation or thesis in Markdown. But how do you manage all your citations? Install Zotero Install the Better BibTex plugin Restart Zotero. The BBT plugin will launch a configuration screen - use it to set your preferences Install VS Code (or VS Codium) Install the VS Code Zotero plugin Now, when you want to…
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I was at an event a few months ago, where someone from the Bank of England was talking about understanding the user needs for cryptocurrency. One of the things people do when trying to create a new product or service is to write little user stories to illustrate the problem they're solving. You've probably seen this sort of thing: As a… busy parent, I want… a push alert from my washing mac…
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