BlogDB

Stubbornness and programming

Every now and then, there will be the type of problem to solve where I know it will require an extra cup of coffee, a long block of dedicated time, and a lot of careful reading, debugging, note tak...

Life’s a Glitch

The non-apocalypse of Y2K obscures the lessons it has for the present

Who Can It Be Now

On social platforms, the "fluid self" is not a rejection of personal branding but another manifestation of it

Tracking the I’ll Give You Series vs. My Mental Health at the Time

I wrote a post a while back: “Tracking Contrivance vs. My Mental Health at the Time,” an exercise in tracing changes in my writing versus changes in my mental health. For this post, I’m doing it ag...

Writing a toy WebSocket server from scratch

WebSocket (WS) connections are pretty neat. I’ve gotten to play around with them before, both for personal and professional projects, but my view has mostly been at a high level and concerned mainl...

Colony Collapse

God games like Civilization and The Sims offer a fantasy of control based on miniaturization, giving us little ant hills to rule over. But they are also premised on the idea that we too are ants an...

Top 3 USELESS JavaScript interview questions 🤮

Unix is not Linux

Things to be aware of when discussing the shell and Unix programs.

Trying to add search to this website

I’m interested in adding some search functionality to this website. Unfortunately, it looks like adding search to a blogdown site is something that is more theme specific. Since my theme does not i...

Dreaming in Color

Satoshi Kon's movies, which paralleled the rise of social media, explore the surreal meeting of interiority and public life

Hold the Line

Media technology is not a modern antidote to older, vernacular modes of information transmission. Folklore instead thrives through these new channels, helping explain and assimilate new technologie...

What happens if you point two CNAMEs at each other? Not much, really

I dabble with DNS for work, and I’m frequently checking if CNAMEs are properly configured. CNAMEs are Canonical NAMEs, kind of like nicknames, that indicate that one domain name is a nickname for a...

The data do not speak for themselves

Statistical modelling may seem like a very complex enterprise. Our correspondents often say “I’m not interested in modelling my data; I only want to analyse it.” However, any kind of data analysis ...

Search engines are now recommendation engines

Search engines increasingly blend recommendations with search results. I differentiate between a search result and recommendation: A search result is a “match”, a document that contains the search ...

The Mental Health Benefits of Music

Most people have come home from work or an outing felling stressed and angry. You may find that when you put on some music, these powerful emotions begin to fade the more you listen to the upbeat t...

Living in a Building Site: The Over-Development of London’s Housing Estates

London's housing crisis necessitates inventive solutions to build new social housing. But have they gone too far at Antony and Roderick Houses?

How to prevent your Mac from sleeping in a Makefile

Often I find myself using third-party software like Caffeine or Amphetamine to keep my Mac awake while running some specific commands. Sometimes it is because I am running backups. Sometimes it is ...

To Escape the Heat, Just Apply Suncream?

Heatwave precautions are a meme. Is it really more important to wear your suncream when outside on a hot day than a cool day? Of course not, but the advice to do so is copied across the media and s...

Sharpening the axe for programming

A woodsman was once asked, “What would you do if you had just five minutes to chop down a tree?” He answered, “I would spend the first two and a half minutes sharpening my axe.” When it comes to so...

Planning Our Manchester Network Migration

Over the next three months there are going to be a lot of moving parts in the FAELIX machine. All of these will be choreographed around the establishment of our new presence in Equinix MA5, the con...