Arts
My word is my bond
Much has been made in recent days on “bond rolls” and “gilts”. As a technologist working in the financial sector I get to look at these things in excruciating detail and have to deal with [more…]
El Cnutador
Hobbies
Active Modelling
Following on from Sweaty Dave’s excellent series on modelling railways, here’s a missive on what I term “active modelling”. Radio Control stuff is now awesome. Forget 12 hour charging times and a 4 hour trip [more…]
Arts
The Internet
So there I was, at 16, with my Commodore 64, a Programmers Reference Guide and no assembler, translating assembly instructions into hexadecimal opcodes, by hand, then typing them in as DATA statements in decimals. A [more…]
Uncategorized
The Internet is Simple, Part Four
The UK, of course, ever keen to gild the lily and gold plate the restrictions that everyone else was putting on the internet, began blocking the torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, through the Cleanfeedsystem. It [more…]
Uncategorized
The Internet is Simple, Part Three
We’ve talked about asymmetric and symmetric encryption keys here but without really going into them. Encryption is a way of scrambling data so that it is unreadable, unless you have the key to turn it [more…]
Uncategorized
The Internet is Simple, Part Two
Routers keep this mapping in a list for future lookup. The chain keeps on going, with each step out to the wider network adding enough information so the network knows how to handle your packet [more…]
Uncategorized
The Internet is Simple, Part One
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, Then the [more…]
Book Review
Review – The Strange Death of Europe, by Douglas Murray
Much has been made of Douglas Murray’s Strange Death of Europe. I’ve just finished it and present a quick review. Needless to say, there are spoilers. TL;DR – well worth a read as long as [more…]