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ChatGPT version reference
This will become out of date quickly but a useful guide for which models to use for which tasks and which to avoid.
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Introduction to Rust
Chris Woodruff produced an excellent series of posts to introduce the C# developer to the language of Rust.
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Home cooked software
Software is in a massive transition phase where it is now possible for non-developers to produce software that was previously the remit of professional developers.
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The evolution of finding data
In a recent article Seth Godin identifies that the sorting of information into directories had a big impact. He gives the examples of the phone directory, TV guide and even department stores.
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Resolving the Xbox "too many requests error"
My son hit an error on his Xbox that stopped him logging in.
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Solve your own problems
I have been asked numerous times to write a small application to solve a specific problem for someone.
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Innovation tokens
When you work in technology it is tempting to bring in the new exciting technologies that claim to make your life easier, run faster and bring you rainbow unicorns every day.
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Finding better domain names
Finding a good available domain name for a project, product or company is hard but there is one web tool that I have found is more successful than others.
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Thinking differently can be worth a lot
We use the technology Apache Kafka as a key element in the implementation of the distributed ledger we have developed.
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The ultimate in debugging
Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn’t been used in over forty years!
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An unknown pioneer of computing
Ed Roberts is a forgotten person in the history of home computing but played a huge role in getting us to where we are today.
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What is a photo?
Back in the mists of time if you wanted to take a photograph you would have to use a camera that you had to carry with you.
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Using Omnivore to save pages
Sometimes it is handy to save a webpage for later and there are lots of ways to do it.
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Simple versus Complex
It is very difficult to develop a simple piece of software and keep it simple.
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Missing images
I hadn’t updated my blog for a while so I thought I would write a short post about The Keeper Test. That is when all the images suddenly stopped displaying on this blog.
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Pushing The Limits
A lot of coding jobs can involve fairly “normal” tasks - create a page, write to and read from a database, add a new field to this screen. These tasks have been done numerous times by numerous developers around the world in different flavours.
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Speeding up Windows PC
My dad is pretty tech-savvy (he was an electronic engineer) however he was having problems with how long it took his Windows PC to become usable.
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Turbo Pascal is 40
Turbo Pascal is 40 years old and it had a big impact on the direction of my career.
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Assumptions can be dangerous
There is a quote “A backup is not a backup unless you have recently performed a restore from it”; I got to find this out the hard way.
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The unknown future of software developers
The role of the software developer is set for a major upheaval over the coming years.
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I rely on RSS
I rely on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to keep me up to speed on what is happening in the world.
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Ignoring the bad
Nearly every technology can be used for good and bad. Quite a bold statement but something I believe is true.
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Photos on a map
It is possible to see a (heat)map of all the photos you have taken in Google Photos.
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Show seconds in the Windows 11 taskbar
I noticed the other day that my wife’s laptop was showing seconds in the time in the taskbar but my laptop was not; a very handy feature to have.
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My most used Obsidian plugins
I have started using Obsidian a lot. One of the things that I really like is the ability to add community plugins to add functionality as required.
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Should I edit my photos?
I am not a photographer. However I like thinking that I can take a good photograph.
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Uncovering the Benefits of AI Search Engine Perplexity.ai
I have tried to avoid writing about AI as everyone seems to be doing it however I have found one site that is pretty usable and actually seems to work quite well.
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Load balancing algorithms
Sometimes you come across a post that is so brilliantly put together you have to share it - and I am not talking about any of my posts.
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A local version of AWS
One of the things that has deterred me from doing much personally in the cloud has been the potential cost.
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Hyper-V on Windows 11 Home
I am dabbling with .NET Maui and developing an application for Android. Tied to that I have just changed laptop. On my previous laptop I had Windows 11 Pro but the new one has Windows 11 Home.
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My Free Blog Setup
I thought it was worth documenting my current setup for this blog. Most of it is automated and it costs me nothing to host it.
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The origins of Space Invaders
When I was at school they had a building which was mainly for the use of those doing their O Levels (the old name for what is now GCSE examinations). There were only two reasons I would get to go to the building: one was for music lessons as for some reason the music department was located there. The second was to attend the weekly youth night they held for each year group.
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The seagull data centre algorithm
Could studying the habits of seagulls lead to better cloud computing approaches?
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The first pictures from space
It turns out the first pictures taken from space were not initially planned.
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Twitter to Mastodon
It definitely feels like Twitter is slowly dying.
I have used Twitter for years, definitely more as a consumer than a publisher. During this time I have refined the accounts I follow to provide a clean and useful stream of information. This was aided by the use of Flamingo as my client of choice which provided a feed free of adverts and cruft.
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High value low engagement versus high engagement low value apps
Most mobile apps, and websites to an extent, seem to be driven by how much they can get the end user to use or engage with them; the more usage the better.
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A quick fix for missing Gmail notifications on Android phones
I occasionally stop getting Gmail notifications on my Google Pixel 2XL android phone. I later find that I have a whole bunch of emails that I had missed. I am not sure what causes it however I have found a way to make it work again.
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The fastest way to switch Gmail accounts on Android phones
Using Gmail on Android it is possible to support multiple email accounts. The normal way you can change which account you are looking at is by pressing on the account picture in the top right hand corner and then selecting the user.
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Finally a to-do app I use ... Microsoft To Do
I have tried numerous to-do applications in the past; from the very simplest to the all-singing, all-dancing applications and they have never stuck. I used them for a week or so and realised a month later that I hadn’t used them for a while.
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Goggles give back sight
This short clip is pretty remarkable. A young woman lost most of her sight due to a brain tumour. All she has left is a small blurry circle in her right eye. With the use of some AR goggles and some very clever tech she was able to read for the first time in years - very moving.
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Lazy programmers can be the most productive
There is often a work culture that you should be busy all the time - if you are a programmer you should always be typing and producing code. Programming is a mental process and so requires thinking. Sometimes a little thought upfront saves a lot of pain and work down the line.
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Technical debt is like Tetris
This article uses a really neat analogy with Tetris for illustrating the impact of technical debt. Leaving gaps is akin to leaving technical debt in the code base and makes subsequent changes more difficult or slower to ship.
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The value of throwing code away
We had a discussion at work about “throw away” code. One of our developers was very against developing any code that would be thrown away afterwards. He referred to this as a waste. In my view sometimes the biggest gain can be in developing code that is meant to be thrown away. It can be used to try things and, more importantly, learn things that can shape the code that is kept. This article sums it up much more eloquently than I can.
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Creating 3D animations from a 2D photo
This is a pretty amazing demonstration of animating an aspect of a 2d photo. This even includes pulling out bodies and animating them moving away from their original scene.
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Black Mirror - technology ethics and can it be used for wrong?
Nearly every technology that has been developed has been used for both good and bad. Developments that look like they could have a massive impact on civilization have usually also spun off a side effect that has a detrimental effect. This could be the latest technologies such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence or older technologies such as the automobile.
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Setting up Github SSH
Just a reminder of the starting point for setting up SSH with Github so I don’t have to keep looking for it each time.
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Git - what to do when it goes wrong
This has a great summary of what to do when things go wrong when using Git. Added here so I know where to look in moments of panic.
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The secret history of Ctrl+Alt+Del
The background to why the famous “three finger salute” was chosen to be so difficult to do.
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Abandoning the baggage of Agile
I have worked with various flavours of “Agile” over numerous years. These have ranged from the very formal where everything is done by the book to more ad-hoc versions where different parts are cherry picked or in most cases done because people think they should be done.
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The legacy vulnerability of the Internet
This article documents developments over the last ten years at all layers of the network stack. It also highlights how vulnerable the current Internet is.
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In a distributed system ... there is no now
This paper is a discussion around the issues faced by distributed systems when dealing with time, ordering and failures. This is particularly relevant with the work I am doing at the moment designing a very large distributed system that will need to scale massively.
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A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Consensus Algorithms
This is a summary of a number of consensus algorithms currently being used in the Blockchain space. The most common at the moment is Proof of Work however this is slowly being replaced by other approaches that are more performant and don’t use all the Earth’s energy.
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REST API Guidelines
This is here for future reference - a very good set of guidelines for REST APIs.
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The accelerated pace of image processing developments
There are some amazing things happening with image processing at the moment. I remember my graphics class at university 25 years ago and the primitive, by comparison to now, image processing algorithms we had to code. Oh how things have moved on.
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Making the explanation of distributed systems fun
I love the way this article explains some of the key issues with designing distributed systems and how to solve them. It uses the illustration of a theme park and the rides - very clever and a fun read, which is unusual for a distributed systems article!
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A MacBook touchscreen for only $1
I don’t own, and have no intention of owning, a MacBook as I own a touchscreen Windows laptop however this approach to make it support touch is genius. They use a mirror at the top of the screen and some image processing to work out where the finger is. They can determine if the finger is actually touching the screen by whether it is touching its reflection - very clever lateral thinking.
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It is 'just' ...
It is very easy to make assumptions about a subject you know well and others may not. You will have knowledge you have learnt over time that you perceive is so simple or obvious that others should just know it - forgetting that once you too had to learn it. This article sums it up really well with the word … “just”.
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The term 'Blockchain' is meaningless
There seems to be no single clean definition of what “Blockchain” actually means. There are a lot of woolly statements, several of which are clearly either wrong or too narrowly focused. This article goes into some of the different definitions and why they are wrong and then the implications of this from a business but also a legal perspective.
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Using AI to find code problems
Ubissoft have introduced a tool that “uses AI” to identify potential coding issues when the developer commits code. They claim it can detect a significant number of errors and even suggest solutions in some cases. There will always be some errors that it will not be able to identify, for example where the implementation doesn’t match the requirements, however this approach could have a significant impact on the amount of time spent debugging. And it should improve over time as it learns more potential errors.
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Reducing the team size to deliver
A project was struggling to deliver in time and the project manager resolved it by reducing the team size where the typical approach is to increase the team size. This decision was based on the overhead of communication and Brooks Law.
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Developer platforms must listen to developers in order to grow
This is an excellent study on why developers are so important to a platform. At the moment we are developing a platform and we have been trying to get this message across to the business side of the company. This article backs up what we have been saying.
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How do crypto-currencies work?
A very simple introduction to how Bitcoin works … using a stuffed penguin!
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Making technology less manipulative
This was an excellent podcast on the ethics behind some of the decisions being made about technology today. The whole talk is excellent and thought provoking however for me one part (about 27 minutes in) stood out:
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Smart glasses you might actually wear
Intel have just announced a new set of smart glasses that don’t look stupid. Admittedly the functionality is a lot more limited that other offerings however these look a lot more normal than them. It provides very limited functionality to display a small red image in the lower part of the wearers vision. Cleverly it also disappears when the user is not looking down.
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Extending a wifi network with a TP-Link RE650
I had a very unusual setup for the network for my office. The office is situated a floor above and at the opposite end of the house to where the main router is located. A fully wired connection is not an option at the moment due to concrete floors and limited access to roof voids.
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Professionals do everything necessary - not just the fun bits
This article defines the difference between a professional developer and an amateur as:
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Blockchain - what impact will it have?
There are a lot of stories around how Blockchain could revolutionize every industry. This is a nice summary of some of the companies that are trying to make this happen and the way they are trying to make an impact.
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Technology - Am I past it?
This is an interesting post from Rob Conery, someone I’ve followed for quite some time, and his observations as he gets older about how he wonders if he is past keeping up with new technology.
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Getting started with the Hugo static site generator
This blog is being powered by a static content generator called Hugo and hosted on GitHub Pages. Getting Hugo up and running was relatively easy. Download the relevant version and installation was just copying it to a folder.
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