The port 0 trick
The port 0 trick came in handy when writing eximunit, and it's something surprisingly few developers know about, so I thought it worth recounting here: The p...
Recent Posts
Housekeeping
I've decided to give up on maintaining my own SVN server - Mercurial is my version control of choice these days, and for the scale of the open source stuff I...
Introducing eximunit
For a few years now, I've run a hosting co-operative with a few friends. Although the cost savings versus all renting VMs individually are probably marginal ...
SFTP/SCP without shell access on Debian
You know how it is: you're hosting some creaky mass of PHP and SSIs on your box for historical/hysterical reasons, the site requires some kind of FTP access ...
Port forwarding with xinetd
Port forwarding with xinetd - this is really useful. I spent ages trying and failing to get an iptables-based forward from an IP address/port on machine 1 to...
British Gas find a new way to annoy me…
As if they weren't an inefficient enough organisation to deal with in other respects, today a division of British Gas asked me to send them a remittance advi...
SitRep
Apologies for the absence of updates here in 2012 to date. It's been a frustrating series of false starts to the year for me, with a break-in at St Columba's...
Over-engineering and how it makes people’s lives worse
There's an acid test that we as engineers should always subject our creations to: do they make life better for the end user? "Better" is perhaps quite diffic...
2011 summarized
It's been a very busy year Still working for CFL and enjoying it very much Now living in a much nicer house (not damp! luxury!) Still helping balance the bo...
India diary, day 10
In June/July 2010 I spent ten days travelling in Rajasthan, India with friends; this is my diary of the trip (full list of entries here). Got up at 9.30 and ...