Another day, another unfiltered reflection of user-supplied content! You know how this goes by now. You type into a search box <em>test and the whole page suddenly turns italic. Luckily, the Macmillan Publishers' website filtered out any <script> elements it encountered. But that still leaves the attacker with the ability to draw SVGs over the page or, more maliciously, start harvesting…
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Every so often, an employer asks me to help make a dashboard. Usually, this causes technologists to roll their eyes. They have a vision of a CEO grandly staring at a giant projection screen, watching the pretty graphs go up and down, and making real-time decisions about Serious Business. Ugh! What a waste of time! The thing is - that's not what a dashboard is for. And that's generally not why a …
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The book starts by referencing one of my favourite book - The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. That book looks at the history of criminal trials of animals and gets in to the philosophy about whether a flock of geese can be considered liable for the damage they cause. It is a deeply weird, but totally enlightening book. This book is a bit more of a roving travelogue. Roach …
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This is a massive tome. Or do I mean tomb…? What if you discovered that your widower-father was not a mild-mannered historian but, instead… A VAMPIRE HUNTER! The caper takes us all over Europe - a veritable travelogue of bustling capitals and dusty backwaters. It holds itself ever-so seriously - occasionally dropping into the meta-narrative of fictional vampires - but always treating the got…
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The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and attempted to show that we can never really understand another living creature's consciousness. I had hoped that Stray would answer the question "What is it like to be a cat?" But it doesn't. Frankly, it doesn't even try. It feels like the developers lost the courage of their convictions. Cats can see in the dark - but your…
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You've been on the Internet a long time, right? Of course you know what BIMI is. All the cool kids do. But, for those of you who aren't hip to the jive of the Infobahn... BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) is a new standard that can curb the issue of online impersonators. ... BIMI is a new standard that enables you to include your company’s logo alongside the emails you send. T…
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About five minutes into the show I already had tears of laughter streaming down my face. I didn't stop laughing and squealing with delight until the curtain call. The plot - unusual for a jukebox musical - is relatively well thought through. What if Juliet didn't die at the end of Romeo + Juliet? What if she left Verona to seek her heart's desire? And, much like a Shakespeare comedy, there's no…
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I hate academic tests. Wouldn't it be great if you could find the official answer papers? Oh, cool, the OCR Exam Board is hosting answer sheets for all my classes! What happens if I click it? Yeach! It redirects users to a scammy ebook service hosted on an external website. Which, I assume, the exam board does not endorse. Alongside exam books, textbooks, literary classics - there's a…
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A few days ago, I posted about my quest to find a decent HDMI cable for my original XBox. The good folks at Kaico Labs were kind enough to send me a demo unit of their new Xbox to HDMI + Optical cable. I agreed to give them feedback - and they were happy to let me blog about it. It is important to note that this is a demo unit. I don't know how much, if anything, will change before it gets…
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I present to you, dear reader, a spiral containing every Unicode 14 character in the GNU Unifont. Starting at the centre with the control characters, spiralling clockwise through the remnants of ASCII, and out across the entirety of the Basic Multi Lingual Plane. Then beyond into the esoteric mysteries of the Higher Planes. Zoom in for the massiveness. It's a 10,000x10,000px image. Because…
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This book is outstanding. It is a clear-eyed view of the future as it was seen from 20 years ago. I've never taken so many scribbled notes in the margins of a book. Many of the ideas are ahead of its time - and only a couple of clunkers which never made it. One thing to note is that it is written in the shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York City. There are around 50 mentions of 9/11 in…
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A few notes to myself. Let's consider a set of 1 dimensional data. For example, the alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ What do we mean by "1 dimensional"? Consider the element "B". From there you can go left to "A" or right to "C". Left and right are the only directions you can move. You cannot go up or down from "B". There's no way to go in or out. You're trapped in a single dimension. …
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