There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻

What breaks when one of your developers leaves?

On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.

It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit.

Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!

This afternoon I'm acting as backup driver for my partner Ruth, who's walking the length of the Thames Path by (very gradual) instalments. A delightful tree climb soon gave me this great cache container!

A little sad to DNF this cache which is probably just well-hidden, but I've only got limited time to hunt as I'm the backup driver for this segment of a walk down the entire length of the Thames Path.

Terence Eden takes us on a rabbithole of trying to work out what actual newspaper formed the basis of the newspaper prop in an episode of Bottom, and it makes an amusing ride-along.

I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. We found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: but Icouldn't place exactly why I'd been there before.

Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I've been in the last decade or two, so I was able to pluck the relevant records right out of my own database.

Personal location tracking continues to be an awesome aides mémoire. It's hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it's a slow-burner - you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! - but I still recommend it.

I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse!

Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it.

Last night I wrote a stupid userscript to exploit a stupid XSS vulnerability to add a stupid feature to a Web-based chat room I'm in.
Everybody else's name is coloured in accordance with the theme they're using. But mine... can be a rainbow, or an image, or something else entirely.

As if I hadn’t suffered enough “flood damage” this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup – hour the first time in months! – in our rental… by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱

Now that we've finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment... with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!

Inspired by Jeremy Keith doing the same, I've made the salary history of my career transparent.

A goldfinch came to my bedroom window to say hi, this morning. Good morning, Goldfinch!

There's a special spot in my wallet where my "front door key" lives, but - despite the practical reasons to do so - I've resisted adding the Chicory House key in that spot. Instead, I've found myself keeping it in the "secondary key" spot, as a tiny reminder that the current state of affairs is a temporary one.

Today's mission in what we're calling the Chicory House - our home while our actual house gets repaired - was to unpack the kitchen. I think it's looking pretty good!

(The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induction hobs at the Chicory House, boo!)

Next weekend's mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn't the conservatory dining table. 😬

In a longer article about the less-known Duleep Singh princesses, my friend Sundeep argued that it was inappropriate to describe Irene's death as her "committing suicide" because it implies criminality. One rabbithole of the laws of four countries later, I argue a (pointless) counterpoint.

I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk's "100 Days To Offload" blogging challenge. And today... I just completed it for the seventh time! Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me - he counts "posts over a twelve month period", while I ...

Minas Karamanis has produced a fantastic article about his experience of the use of LLMs for research in physics, and the concerns that he has about its use by less-experienced researchers just beginning to find their way in the field. I echo his thoughts, from my own field of software engineering, and wonder... how will we allow junior developers to gain experience in a world that may encourage them to use LLMs rather than trying and failing for themselves?

Long ago, you could move to a new area, scan for local WiFi networks, and fully expect to see a wonderful diversity of different network names. Some named for their locations, sure, but others named for people, or fandoms, or just "fun" ones.

Has this art form died? Most residential SSIDs nowadays seem to just be the default one that comes with the basic router supplied by the ISP. Most commercial ones are just the name of the business. Sometimes you'll spot a phone configured for tethering but even that's usually just "Alice's iPhone" or similar.

I can't remember the last time I saw a "Chicken Crossed the Road to Steal Our Wifi" or a "Russian Hackers" or a "Routy McRouterface" or a "All Your Bandwidth Belong to Us" (okay, that last one's a bit dated). Has the art form died?

The dog is concerned. Why, despite all her warnings, am I still letting these men take all of our (surviving) furniture?

It’s fifty-five days since my house flooded. Since then, I’ve lived in hotels, with friends, on volunteering retreats and – mostly – in a series of one- or two-week AirBnB-style short-term lets. It’s been wild. It’s also been wildly disruptive. To our work. To our kids. To our general stability. Today, we make a change. […]

On our last day out at our current AirBnB, we searched for a takeaway.

Google Maps found me a Chinese takeaway, but it had an unexpected suggestion when I asked for an Indian...

It's my final day in the cute garden office of the AirBnB we're living in, this week, and every time I step through the door I catch a glimpse of our small, sandy-coloured dog squatting in the garden.

Except the dog isn't even here. My brain keeps getting tricked...  by this statue of a pig.

I’ve lived in a LOT of different places these last few months while we’ve been arranging a place to live for the next six months or so of our house repairs. Each new AirBnB has had its pros and cons (and each hasn’t felt like “home”). But man, I really like the “garden office” at […]

I guess I’ll need some “assistnace” from Tesco to explain why my (long-neglected!) Clubcard didn’t work when buying some emergency sunscreen this morning. 😂

Inspired by Mike Cook's argument that old video games should be allowed to die, I was inspired to jot down some of my own thoughts and experiences in the area of video game preservation.

Today I had a Cadburys’ Cream Egg… for breakfast. I am a monster.

Found successfully on an Easter morning dog walk from Bledington. The geopup and I came out across the fields, trying to get outdoors early before the rain that's forecast for later in the day. Careful patience, logical elimination, and a determination not to give up were the keys, here.

The final of the short term lets we’re staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is peak-Cotswolds, for sure!

The final of the short term lets we’re staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is peak-Cotswolds, for sure!