It takes courage to sit on a jury. How many of us want to decide the fate of...
I think Regina Brett has a point although having now experienced being a juror in a British crown court I have a much better understanding of both the process and effectiveness of the jury system. The...
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I am not a number I am a free man
Once more the NetSurf developers tried to escape from a mysterious village by writing web browser code. The sixth developer workshop was an opportunity for us to gather together in person to contribute...
View ArticleHTTP to screen
I recently presented a talk at the Debian miniconf in Cambridge. This was a new talk explaining what goes on in a web browser to get a web page on screen. The presentation was filmed and my slides are...
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I said it was wired like a Christmas tree
I have recently acquired a 27U high 19 inch rack in which I hope to consolidate all the computing systems in my home that do not interact well with humans. My main issue is that modern systems are...
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The only pleasure I get from moving house is stumbling across books I had...
I have to agree with John Burnside on that statement, after having recently moved house again rediscovering our book collection has been a salve for an otherwise exhausting undertaking. I returned to...
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Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.
I think Maxwell was probably right, certainly the unit of current Ampere gives his name to has been a concern of mine recently. Regular readers may have possibly noticed my unhealthy obsession with...
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Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones...
It seems Scott Adams insights sometimes reach beyond his disturbingly accurate satire. I have written before about my iterative approach to designing the things I make. such as my attempts at furniture...
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Stack 'em, pack 'em and rack 'em.
As you may be aware I have a bit of a problem with Single Board Computers in that I have a lot of them. Keeping them organised has turned into a bit of a problem. I designed clip cases for many of...
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Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.
Recently I have been very hopeful about the 96boards Hikey SBC and as Evan Esar predicted I have therefore been very disappointed. I was given a Hikey after a Linaro connect event some time ago by...
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I changed my mind, Erase and rewind
My recent rack design turned out to simply not be practical. It did not hold all the SBC I needed it to and most troubling accessing connectors was impractical. I was forced to remove the enclosure...
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Down the rabbit hole
My descent began with a user reporting a bug and I fear I am still on my way down. The bug was simple enough, a windows bitmap file caused NetSurf to crash. Pretty quickly this was tracked down to the...
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If I see an ending, I can work backward.
Now while I am sure Arthur Miller was referring to writing a play when he said those words they have an oddly appropriate resonance for my topic. In the early nineties Lou Montulli applied the idea of...
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I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house in
Sometimes it really helps to have a different view on a problem and after my recent writings on my Public Suffix List (PSL) library I was fortunate to receive a suggestion from my friend Enrico Zini. I...
View ArticlePaul Hollywood and the pistoris stone
There has been a great deal of comment among my friends recently about a particularly British cookery program called "The Great British Bake Off". There has been some controversy as the program is...
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The pine stays green in winter... wisdom in hardship.
In December 2015 I saw the kickstarter for the Pine64. The project seemed to have a viable hardware design and after my experience with the hikey I decided it could not be a great deal worse. The...
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Rabbit of Caerbannog
Subsequent to my previous use of American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) on the NetSurf bitmap image library I applied it to the gif library which, after fixing the test runner, failed to produce any crashes but did...
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The minority yields to the majority!
Deng Xiaoping (who succeeded Mao) expounded this view and obviously did not depend on a minority to succeed. In open source software projects we often find ourselves implementing features of interest...
View ArticleA rose by any other name would smell as sweet
Often I end up dealing with code that works but might not be of the highest quality. While quality is subjective I like to use the idea of "code smell" to convey what I mean, these are a list of...
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You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear
I needed a small Ethernet network switch in my office so went to my pile of devices and selected an old Dell PowerConnect 2724 from the stack. This seemed the best candidate as the others were...
View ArticleIrony is the hygiene of the mind
While Elizabeth Bibesco might well be right about the mind software cleanliness requires a different approach. Previously I have written about code smells which give a programmer hints where to clean...
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The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in...
I fear that I may have worked in a similar office environment to Robert Frost. Certainly his description is familiar to those of us who have been subjected to modern "open plan" offices. Such settings...
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All i wanted to do is check an error code
I was feeling a little under the weather last week and did not have enough concentration to work on developing a new NetSurf feature as I had planned. Instead I decided to look at a random bug from our...
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A very productive weekend
I just hosted a NetSurf Developer weekend which is an opportunity for us to meet up and make use of all the benefits of working together. We find the ability to plan work and discuss solutions without...
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We can make it better than it was. Better...stronger...faster.
It is not a novel observation that computers have become so powerful that a reasonably recent system has a relatively long life before obsolescence. This is in stark contrast to the period between the...
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Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is...
Three years ago I wroteabout using the AFL fuzzer to find bugs in several NetSurf libraries. I have repeated this exercise a couple of times since then and thought I would summarise what I found with...
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