Posts filed under the 'Blog' category


Tesla and Colorado Springs

I was chatting the other day with Paul Usher about the goings on in the UK and he suddenly veered off on a weird tangent. He’d heard a rumor that Tesla lived in Colorado Springs, which is where I live, and was it true? By that he meant Nikola Tesla, not the cars. […]

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I don’t have a website?

Like many of my readers I’m sure, I get scam texts trying to sell me something, or pretending to be some financial institution, or attempting to deceive me into doing something I don’t need to do. Me? Probably one a week on average, although of late I’m getting “Vote for Me!” type texts as well. Roll on November 8th when that’ll all go away. […]

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BSOD City

For some unearthly reason, over the past week I’ve been suffering from daily Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) issues on my Dell XPS 13 laptop. Essentially all of a sudden, my keyboard freezes up, I can move my mouse but clicks no longer have any effect, and then after about 10 – 15 seconds I get the BSOD. […]

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Mechelen (Malines)

One of the things I’m missing a lot at the moment is conference travel. 2020 was the year in which face-to-face conferences were suddenly tossed aside in favor of virtual or broadcast versions, and slowly but surely 2022 – especially the latter half – has brought them back. We’ll see how things go for us at work, especially in the spring next year. […]

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Facebook password hacks

You know it’s a great evening just as you’re getting ready to go to bed and have a good night’s sleep after a hard day’s work when you get two – yes, TWO – emails from Facebook that start: […]

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London Congestion Charge Zone

Me, a month ago, while on our holiday in England: Yeah, it's Saturday, let's nip into Oxford Street and do a bit of shopping. It's Saturday, so no issues with the congestion charge. […]

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The Times and Star Trek

Recently, I’ve been reminiscing a bit about the past ever since I rediscovered a small set of old dairies in some box in the basement whilst looking for something else. For some unknown reason at that particular stage of my life, I managed (endeavored? was encouraged?) to keep a daily diary, and did it for a couple of years, basically from my last few months of University well into my first job. Since then? Nope, no diaries. […]

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Some minor changes

For a few reasons, this year has been very different for me. More so than even 2020 and the start of the big pandemic was. For instance, I went to get my eyes checked about 6 months ago, got some new glasses with a new stronger prescription, and I still feel awkward and clumsy since everything seems closer but isn’t. Witness me falling flat on my face at Heathrow at the start of our vacation because I didn’t realize the curb was higher than I noticed. […]

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CSP and javascript:void(0) links

What the heck does that mean? […]

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Security and web apps

One of the things I do on this site is to monitor requests that produce 404 errors. Originally it was for purely personal reasons (I use a URL shortener for many URLs I post so it was a way to check I’d got the URL-lengthening right), but very quickly it became obvious that script kiddies were the main source of 404 errors (one, two, three, etc). The one that still makes me laugh is the script kiddie trying to access a vulnerability in a long-since-fixed Telerik control on my web site (hello! I’m the CTO for DevExpress!). […]

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