Recent Posts
The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England
January 2, 2021 · 2 min read
My News years resolution 2021 is to watch less TV and read more books. Off to a good start with my Christmas reading.
This was a gift from my wife who heard me complain to many times about history books being all about Kings.
The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England
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Good Enough
June 3, 2020 · 2 min read
Steve Jobs famously said
Good enough isn’t good enough
Despite being famous I’m not sure he actually said this.
It’s a popular idea but I consider it harmful.
Sometimes we should strive for excellence, but by no means always.
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Website Tests
June 3, 2020 · 1 min read
Having got this website running fairly well I ran it through some tests to check it looks OK
These test for
- security
- accessibility
- performance
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Hugo Theme using Bootstrap
June 3, 2020 · 2 min read
I built the first version of this site a year ago - but couldn’t really find a theme that I liked and that works well for what I intend to be something of a stream-of-consciousness website.
Like many people I spend a lot of time reading news and social media.
I end up with lots of half formed thoughts that I don’t know quite what to do with - I’m hoping that the discipline of writing them down will help bring me calm.
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Hugo Syntax Highlighting avoiding Unsafe Inline
June 2, 2020 · 1 min read
If you use CSP headers to add security to your website and you use Hugo with Syntax highlighting you may run into a problem in that by default Hugo generates inline styles.
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Test and Trace Scams
June 1, 2020 · 1 min read
A very good question was put to Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Jenny Harries
John from Gloucester asked: “If I receive a call from someone who says they are from the test and trace scheme telling me to self isolate, how can I confirm that the call is genuine and not from someone acting from ulterior motives?”
The answer given by Dr Jenny Harries does not correctly represent modern information security issues.
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Coronavirus vs Economy : No Conflict
June 1, 2020 · 1 min read
There is no conflict between lockdown and business.
Of course the lockdown is bad for business - but it’s better than (more) mass death and the loss of confidence that would follow.
Unlocking early only means we can have no confidence in our trajectory - we may well see a rise in infections, NHS overwhelmed again, and we go back to square one.
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Fabric build scripts and Nightwatch test Reports
April 2, 2019 · 2 min read
I’ve just started some work on a fabric script that works as part of a build process.
The actual script is part of a long process, and I’m not familiar with fabric (or even python) so I spent a little time cooking a basic script that does a few things I need.
- Hello world stuff just to check I understand the syntax
- Define a remote host which is a local vagrant instance
- Run some tests
- Copy to the local server any test reports (even if the tests fail)
- Return a failure result if tests fail
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Increase Swap Size on an Encrypted Drive
April 1, 2019 · 3 min read
I recently started a new job with www.codeenigma.com and they use a very interesting dev stack.
This uses Docker and Vagrant and for this project it hosts several servers locally some of which run quite memory hungry processes.
I also use the Chrome Browser which is notorious for using memory.
I quickly found I was running out of memory and my laptop would hang.
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Http Headers Aws Cloudfront Lambda
January 29, 2019 · 11 min read
All website need appropriate headers setting, even though this is a static site I wanted to start off from a strong security position.
Too often security is an added extra and can’t be properly implement because it would break existing functionality.
Amazon have a good tutorial
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