By @edent · NaBloPoMo Tales Of The Algorithm · 6 comments · 1,650 words
It had been a difficult day at the animal rescue centre and I was looking forward to tucking into a delicious cat-burger. You know when you've been on your feet all day and the only thing keeping you going is the thought of a hot meal? That sesame seed bun, a few slices of salad, […]
Continue reading →By @edent · NaBloPoMo NaNoWriMo Tales Of The Algorithm · 1 comment · 2,700 words · read ~232 times.
Every year since 2009, I've taken part in NaBloPoMo - National Blog Posting Month. The aim is to publish a new blog post every day in November. In the last few years, I've blogged pretty much constantly - daily for 2020, 2021, and 2023. A total of around 2,800 posts. But now it is time […]
Continue reading →By @edent · images NaBloPoMo · 6 comments · 650 words · read ~234 times.
Image files are a grid of pixels - each pixel contains colour information1. But they don't just have to contain colour information. Here are some thoughts on other things that a future image format might contain. What exists already? A typical bitmap image looks like this under the hood: 0 1 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · mastodon MastodonAPI metadata NaBloPoMo ogp · 16 comments · 700 words · read ~366 times.
Mastodon - the distributed social network - has two interesting challenges when it comes to how users share links. I'd like to discuss those issues and suggest a possible way forward. When you click on a link on my website which takes you to another website, your browser sends a Referer1. This says to the […]
Continue reading →By @edent · cryptography hashing NaBloPoMo · 9 comments · 450 words · read ~7,840 times.
To understand this blog post, you need to know two things. There exists a class of numbers which are illegal in some jurisdictions. For example, a number may be copyrighted content, a decryption key, or other text considered illegal. There exists a class of algorithms which will take any arbitrary data and produce a fixed […]
Continue reading →By @edent · canada NaBloPoMo security · 2 comments · 300 words · read ~201 times.
There's no way that I could find to report this to the Canadian Government - and I didn't fancy trying to raise a bug report with the first Mountie I met - so here's a blog post. As part of Canada's Electronic Travel Authorisation system, prospective visitors to the country get sent emails. The email […]
Continue reading →By @edent · career NaBloPoMo · 300 words · read ~270 times.
A few years ago, I had a chance to work with an exciting tech startup. They had just become 5 years old. The day I went for an interview, about a dozen of the founding members announced they were quitting. Including the CEO. Was this a good sign or a bad sign? Over beers, my […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI MSc NaBloPoMo · 10 comments · 600 words · read ~1,214 times.
When I was a kid, our school had one computer per classroom. Luxury! Teachers had long-since given up on the state of my handwriting. So I got special dispensation to write up some of my work on whatever primitive word processor was installed on the PC. With one caveat: no spell check! Which, even as […]
Continue reading →By @edent · BBC NaBloPoMo web · 13 comments · 1,500 words · read ~3,057 times.
Back in 2007 - an eternity in web years - the BBC published a document showing their 15 Web Principles. I thought I'd take a look at how they stack up today. And investigate whether the BBC is still living up to them. Here are the slides if you want to play along at home: […]
Continue reading →By @edent · citation markdown MSc NaBloPoMo zotero · 2 comments · 700 words · read ~485 times.
Mostly notes to myself - I hope you find them useful. So, you want to write your dissertation or thesis in Markdown. But how do you manage all your citations? Install Zotero Install the Better BibTex plugin Restart Zotero. The BBT plugin will launch a configuration screen - use it to set your preferences Install […]
Continue reading →