davidwtbuxton

Good write up of security vulnerabilities in a useful web-based tool for Google Cloud that should be relatively simple. It wasn't as simple as the authors intended.

Interesting security bug in Google Cloud's IAP, from 2021. Since fixed.

https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/concepts-overview

My crusty Python code implementing EPUB, with the conforming uncompressed mimetype file as first member in the archive:

https://github.com/davidwtbuxton/ucflib/blob/e576fb97fc2a2ea...

I got hooked by the stereotypical 1970s production and the decidedly untelegenic (but informative) introduction from Dick MacKinnon, but the whole thing is a fascinating view of interactive programming.

Good reminiscing in the YouTube comments too.

Relevant Computer Chronicles episode from 1988: BUS wars

https://youtu.be/aYt4ZPxVkSs

IBM engineer responding to the accusation that MCA is proprietary (around 14' 15"):

"I really don't understand the term proprietary. To me that would mean that it's not available [snip] and it's available for use by anyone."

I am guessing the commenter means computing with and without use of your fingers on touch screens.

My memory of Frak! on the model B was glacial speeds, but looked great.

I was interested to read about got, which uses the same on-disk format as git.

https://man.openbsd.org/ports-current/got.1

The command-line interface is consistent and minimal. It has the least amount of options possible while still being usable. We strive for sane defaults that fit our workflow, instead of offering configurability for every possible use case.

https://gameoftrees.org/faq.html

That UI only made sense if you already understood:

- That there were 4 octets in an IP address.

- Class-based IP addressing.

- Subnet bit masks.

The UI that replaced it was an improvement in that all it asked for was a series of numbers, separated by dots, constrained to 0-255.

Also this https://github.com/xeno14/recordio

From the article:

> That program, which he described as a “shell” around the computer’s whirring innards, gave inspiration—and a name—to an entire class of software tools, called command-line shells, that still lurk below the surface of modern operating systems.

I found this article via Wikipedia as a result of wondering why unix shells are named so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(computing)

I was at a private boarding school, aged 10 in 1985. They had a computer lab with ~20 BBC model B's and we were taught BASIC, how to load and run programs from tape, how to use this paint software I don't remember the name of. It was all solid stuff.

But the real draw was playing video games, which was only permitted on weekends. Hours and hours of Chuckie Egg, Cylon Attack, Stryker's Run, etc.

Also Threads, from the same era, incredibly bleak depiction of British society in the aftermath of a nuclear attack.

https://youtu.be/vgT4Y30DkaA

(For those who haven't seen it, it is grim, but gripping.)

I've seen UTF-8 with a BOM while consuming data when integrating with strongly Windows-centric environments. Relatively uncommon, but does happen. And it is very annoying!

Yes, but I still want this for combining dictionaries. Python already violates this property, I don't find it confusing.

    Python 3.7.2 (default, Dec 30 2018, 08:55:50) 
    [Clang 10.0.0 (clang-1000.11.45.5)] on darwin
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> 'foo' + 'bar' == 'bar' + 'foo'
    False
    >>> ['foo'] + ['bar'] == ['bar'] + ['foo']
    False

WebDAV wasn't a native Exchange protocol. But it was officially supported for Exchange server 2003/2007, and used heavily by Mac Entourage 2004/2008 to connect to Exchange servers as a supposedly "native" client.

In my experience, Mac Entourage clients connecting to suitable Exchange servers worked, but only for very few clients.

Vaguely remember that the Exchange servers would often get overloaded with the quantity of sync requests from the Mac clients.

This doc mentions that WebDAV was a previously-supported protocol for Mac Entourage: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2009/01/20/ento...

Me too. I love In Our Time, so many interesting subjects and I think it is a very well produced programme.

> Simpler code almost always wins. Predicting the future is hard, refactoring simple code that does the minimum it needs to is comparatively easy. Don't write what-if code, YAGNI.

I strongly agree with this point.

I speculate that some people tend to add unnecessary code because they are thinking of all those well-written libraries they use every day, which have evolved to support multiple uses, including the uses that clearly they don't need but they can see are useful to others. Therefore they conclude good software must add features that are useful for other coders!

You can also use css selectors with lxml. Works great, in my experience.

http://lxml.de/cssselect.html

Grow https://grow.io/

> Use format instead of + for generating strings — In Python, str is immutable, so the left and right strings have to be copied into the new string for every pair of concatenations.

It isn't always faster to use string formatting.

    $ python -m timeit -s 'a, b, c, d = "1234567890", "abcdefghij", "ABCDEFGHIJ", "0987654321"' 'a + b + c + d'
    10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.181 usec per loop
    $ python -m timeit -s 'a, b, c, d = "1234567890", "abcdefghij", "ABCDEFGHIJ", "0987654321"' '"{}{}{}{}".format(a, b, c, d)'
    1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.447 usec per loop
    $ python --version
    Python 2.7.13

Why describe the Gherkin as infamous? My impression is it is largely admired by Londoners (myself included).

It would be interesting to hear from those working inside it.

I did a big project involving InDesign and the XML import a few years ago (CS4 times). Once I learnt to be very careful when editing the templates, it was pretty satisfying.

I remember that certain XML tags had to use the exact namespace defined in the Adobe spec, but other than that it all seemed pretty XML compliant.

I was using Python / ElementTree, and had to override the namespaces to make sure the exact name was being used. Or something.

https://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html...

What other problems did you encounter regarding XML compatibility?

A picture of pedestrians in the London smog, 6 December 1952 -

https://twitter.com/robnitm/status/806167347807535104

Lots more great pictures from London's past on Rob Baker's Twitter feed and his blog.

http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/

What does Pyramid borrow from Laravel? I thought it grew from repoze, which was started a while before Laravel.

Git init / clone on case-insensitive HFS+ sets `git config core.ignorecase true`, which can lead to confusing behaviour where it ignores a change in the case of a filename.

> The default is false, except git-clone(1) or git-init(1) will probe and set core.ignoreCase true if appropriate when the repository is created.

https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-config....

Ha! Reminds me of Nick Lowe's reaction to David Bowie's Low.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f6/a2/a1/f6a2a1ca4...

https://tomhuntington.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/bowi-and-r...

Django works well on App Engine. If you are using CloudSQL you can use vanilla models, but if you are using the datastore then you can either choose not to use Django models at all (use ndb/db instead) or use django-nonrel or djangae which provide a db back-end.

https://github.com/django-nonrel/djangoappengine

https://github.com/potatolondon/djangae

There's compromises in using the datastore - you can't do a lot of things that are dead simple with SQL, but in return you get massive scaleability. And the App Engine SDK itself can be a pain to work with, but there are also amazing features like task queues for background processing and Google Cloud Storage integration.

Other than Django I've used Bottle for very small App Engine projects. Works great, it's faster than Django, I'd still prefer Django for a typical complex web app where you need all the features.

Disclaimer: I work for Potato, which sponsors djangae development.

Was just me expressing my distaste for Amis in general and London Fields in particular. He is highly regarded in the UK, but I cannot fathom why (I'm a Brit).

I think London Fields and Time's Arrow employ a lot of clever but bad prose (bad in that the prose does not flow). And specifically for London Fields I felt it quite misogynistic. Currently wading through The Information to see if there's something else that grabs me, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

So far I think Amis is massively over-rated. Not enjoyable.