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Superhighway84 on FreeBSD

Intro A couple of weeks ago I saw Superhighway84 on HackerNews and started to check it out, but didn’t get very far. I finally spent some time to get it up and running on FreeBSD which works, but r...

Gitlab RCE Stealth Shellbot

Last year, a major RCE was found in GitLab, CVE-2021-22205, where GitLab versions >= 11.9 and <13.10.3 were affected due to improper image validation before passing it to a file parser. Malicious i...

One strange model

Introduction I’m interested in the model that is described in this post by Alexander Volkmann, which is a riff on a model described in Chapelle and maybe elsewhere too. Volkmann describes a Bayesia...

Sharing a Kubernetes cluster between multiple tenants

Running and maintaining Kubernetes clusters is hard. They need to be upgraded, automatically scale based on demand, be monitored and most importantly, ensured to be highly available at all time. So...

Bottle Deposits are Bad Policy

Bottle Deposits are a popular environmentalist policy worldwide. However, they are a bad policy that imposes outweight costs on society while barely helping the environment.

Invisible Obvious

Most people used to presume the Earth was the centre of the Universe. It sounded bizarre to others when Nicolaus Copernicus came up with Copernican heliocentrism. His model positioned the sun as th...

Coaching Leaders During Covid

It’s 2022. Strange as it is to write this, that means we’ve been living in a Covid-19 world for two years. For many of us that has meant a shift into remote work and remote leadership. Looking back...

2021 in review

The post-year ramble is here, slightly late this time The last year was quite eventful to say the least, and I’d been putting off on writing this retrospective simply because of the sheer number of...

Conway's Emotional Law

Conway’s Law. The idea that your organizational structure will be mirrored in your design (software) structure. Simple in concept and true to my experience, it’s a principle that drives many an org...

What are you really doing when you fill in an hCaptcha

It's not clear exactly why hCaptcha gives the challenges that it does, but it's certainly more interesting than you might think to take a closer look and try and work out how it all ticks.

Why append-only writes are much faster than random writes

I resigned.... what's next? 🚀

Should I ever have a role="button"?

This article takes a dive into the question of role="button" usability and provides insight into it's use. But you should never need to use it.

Biggest Trends and Talking Points of 2022

I will list the most significant trends in many subjects for 2022. I think most articles share too much fluff; for instance, I read many articles mentioning that companies should be focusing on use...

Table of contents using recursion trees

Table of contents algorithm using recursion trees

Bookmarking and Creating a Local Internet Archive

Intro While I’m a heavy user of RSS with Newsblur, I’ve never had a coherent bookmarking solution. Last week I finally setup a proper bookmark manager, and as a bonus, archived bookmarked pages loc...

SBIDIOT IoT Malware: miner edition

The SBIDIOT IoT malware was observed earlier this year in april. Recently I spotted a sample with a cryptominer added on, so let’s see what’s changed. The botnet’s main use is for DDOS attacks on g...

Semantic HTML in React with zero new ideas

When writing websites it is important to know the underlying HTML elements. This article considers the means to keep them visible in your React JSX.

Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era

In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career.With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and ...