This section contains assorted ramblings, meditations, musings, rants and op-ed type pieces that I’ve written — kind of like most people’s personal blogs.
Musings
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9 lines of code, 9 billion dollars
Six years ago Oracle, the database company which acquired the Java programming language when Sun Microsystems went titsup in 2009 started a lawsuit claiming that Google, by using some of the Java APIs in its Android operating system.After trying to licence Java from Sun in 2005 …
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On losing my father
My father, Chris Harvey, died two weeks ago on Friday, 29 April. He had had cancer for some time. The end was quick. So quick that his family weren’t able to get there before he died. Just the day before he had been sitting up in his chair smiling and joking with the medical staff and his visi …
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Digits in page numbers and thoughts on optimization
Sometimes solving problems with dumb code involves a simpler expression of a problem than solving the same problem with highfallutin' maths. Sometimes the simpler expression involves more time or space complexity. That might be fine, depending on the inputs we need to process, indeed spending a long …
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How to make an email signature that makes you seem like a dick
It used to be that in order to seem like a dick you had to meet people in real life and act, well, dickish. Not any more. The internet has effectively democratized the ability to annoy both friends and people you have never even met. Indeed it seems now everybody is acting like a dick these days. O …
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HTML5 and covert peer to peer filesharing
Imagine a well-designed P2P distribution network that was reasonably anonymous, took no effort to install or configure and could be used without large amounts of effort by any normal computer user. Such tools can and indeed have been built and open up a range of opportunities for illegal use to cybe …
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Obama crypto leak: no mandatory broken encryption. Yet.
A recent leak published in the Washington Times seems to point to the Obama administration backing down on recent proposals to include backdoors in encryption products following pushback from the public, crypto experts and some of the big US tech companies.The memo, which was published last week, …
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Is GCHQ password advice dodgy?
It is unusual, to say the least, for me to find a part of the work of GCHQ that is not entirely obnoxious. However, their recently published password guidance seems rather reasonable, despite this dig from the Guardian some will be sceptical about trusting the advice of the intelligence agency o …
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How we pronounce WWW in English: a detailed but unscientific survey
I was listening to the radio the other day and heard the interviewee talking about his website as double u, double u whatever dot com, which is a linguistic trait I have noticed happening more in recent years. It set me thinking about how we pronounce the WWW in web addresses, so I spent a day off …
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Windows 10: privacy violations, mandatory updates and bugs
The tech world has mustered a sigh of melancholic resignation along with a squeal of justifiable outrage in response to Microsoft’s new release of its bloated virus-magnet operating system, Windows. The latest incarnation is called Windows 10, not 9 as would make combinatoric sense. Perhap …
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Cameron’s turd in the encryption punchbowl
In a week when it was revealed that GCHQ was illegally spying on Amnesty International, British Prime Minister David Cameron has added yet another turd to the increasingly shitty punchbowl of his vision of the future internet by proposing a ban on effective encryption. Last time Cameron said some …
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