BayesianDice

I (in the UK) used to have a small local restaurant which had a .eu domain. When Brexit was happening, I mentioned this issue to them, and they explained the relevant individual was an EU citizen so they were OK in the short term but they were migrating anyway. (And I see they are now on a .co.uk domain.)

BT in the UK has 17070 which tells you the number and lets you do tests like the "quiet line test". Handy when working out what was going on when I moved into a property with no live phone service (so no normal outgoing calls), lots of phone extension sockets, and (I discovered) two landlines coming in...

And when the book is ruined, she credits her books account (an asset account) $20 and debits her "depreciation/impairment" account (an expense account) $20.

And then your text editor might leave a backup copy with filename "xyz.php~" which PHP won't interpret and Apache will happily serve to a curious user as plain text.

So I've heard :-)

There is another perspective to be aware of on this... I have been caught out by a service provider when it became clear the service I was using wasn't their main business - and their interest in properly maintaining and operating that service dropped - profoundly.

I believe that is (or at least was) true at Google - although from what I knew of the role, it sounded like it also covered what I would consider project management. (I think I would often consider program mangement to be coordinating/managing across multiple projects as part of a broader program of work, but I don't think that was what Google meant by that title.)

Indeed, "Do you use source control?" was one of Joel Spolsky's 12 questions - in fact, the first of those questions - to judge the quality of a software team in this 2000 article: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

I think I read about a tool for the Acorn BBC micros which you could apply to your program to remove unnecessary spaces etc. in the tokenised form and shave off a few bytes.

This had the side-effect that you could still display and (presumably with a bit more mental effort, read) the program listing fine, but re-entering a line as shown in that listing would fail because the computer depended on the spaces to do the parsing, even if they were redundant after the tokenisation happened.

Note the article is from 2018.

I used to play a lot of Catan and loved the game but then stopped for a few years over COVID (while I played other games online). When I tried it again, that's when I noticed this "drought" problem more obviously. (But that's just a niggle in an otherwise great game!)

I use Amazon SES to send system-generated messages from a couple of tiny websites I ran on EC2. When applying I needed to specify the volume, and put in a generous number in case the sites got a busy day - maybe 100-200/day (when realistic traffic probably averages single digits/day).

I promptly got approval for 50,000 mails/day!

I wondered if, being a Sunday evening on the British train system, she'd find herself on a rail replacement bus service for some of the return journey. But luckily not - just some diversions because of engineering work adding 60 minutes to the usual journey times...

And in London, the Underground closes down altogether overnight, except for some lines running on Friday and Saturday nights. (And that Night Tube service is a relatively recent innovation, starting in 2016.)

The amended regulations (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/schedule/made) refer to a requirement for connection to a "gigabit-capable public electronic communications network". And a "public electronic communications network" is defined in the Communications Act 2003 as "an electronic communications network provided wholly or mainly for the purpose of making electronic communications services available to members of the public".

So I expect that either type of service meeting the requirement on speed would be acceptable.

I'm guessing a reference to Patreon in September this year: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/09/patreon-security-layoffs/

Interesting to learn of the US rule. In the UK, up to £8000 of relocation expenses can be provided tax-free, for "qualifying expenses" (mainly costs of buying/selling home and moving -https://www.gov.uk/expenses-and-benefits-relocation/whats-ex...) although there is some allowance for a flat-rate payment if it is reasonable (https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-income-m...). I'm reasonably confident any payment would be tax-deductible for the employer, it's just a question of how much is taxable as income in the hands of the employee.

An alternative approach which I was taught at an enrichment course at school but which became more relevant as life and career progressed - be the minute-taker.

A lesson also learnable from top civil servant (good grief, I sound like a headline writer) Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Prime Minister" (episode "Man Overboard"): "Ah, Prime Minister... It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection. Consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials. And it isn't so it wasn't."

In the UK at least it looks like you can still get inflation index-linked annuities - for example, there are entries in the Hargreaves Lansdown "best buy" tables for for RPI-linked annuities: https://www.hl.co.uk/retirement/annuities/best-buy-rates

But their starting income is less than half the income from the non-increasing annuity, presumably because of difficulty/expense in hedging inflation risk.

Thanks, I'd found the first edition a really good book when I was early in my security career many years ago, I shall have to check the 2020 edition!

I did recently discover that the Estonian standards agency makes ISO standards available, not for free, but significantly more cheaply than other sources I found when trying to locate standards (although I didn't end up using it so don't know any more than is on the public Web site): https://www.evs.ee/en/

Thank you for the comment. The site already has RSS, and I'd agree there are good technical grounds for preferring it, but I get the impression that its use among users is declining, which is why I was considering other mechanisms. I find it an interesting point of view to consider a feature which alternatively allows users to opt-in to email notifications - but which doesn't disadvantage them at all if they don't - as "user-hostile". (But of course I've seen sites which want to coerce visitors to hand over an email address to be able to access the content they were expecting, and depending on context, I can see cases where that could be considered aggressive.)

I agree with comments saying that a key point is producing content. I'd spent a couple of years of considering starting a blog (with no commercial/monetisation, but somewhere to post thoughts on technology / games / books I find interesting) and trying out various platforms/solutions and producing very little. Then I finally got started with a simple Hugo/Github/Netlify setup, with the plan of adding more technology bells and whistles if readership or my inspiration to continue producing content justifies it.

A question on which I'd be interested in views: how important or otherwise do people consider the ability to sign up for a mailing list / newsletter to be informed of new content? I dislike the in-your-face modal pop-ups etc. - but am wondering if readers, if they like existing articles on a site, would appreciate a low-key, unobtrusive option of signing up for an email notification.

There's lots of speculation here on what the Bank of England means by a central bank digital currency (CBDC) - people may be interested in the more concrete indications of what the Bank is / has been considering in a discussion paper which they published in March 2020: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/paper/2020...

The chapter on Technology Design states "Although CBDC is often associated with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT — see Box 5), we do not presume CBDC must be built using DLT. Most existing payment systems are run on centralised technology stacks, and there is no reason CBDC could not also be built this way. However, DLT includes a number of potentially highly useful innovations, which can potentially be adopted independently of each other, allowing us to use the specific features of DLT which are most relevant and appropriate, without using DLT in its entirety."

The paper also discusses the risk-free nature of the currency (compared to deposits held in a commercial bank where consumers in principle face credit risk if the bank defaults), resilience, and innovation. And it notes the interesting related questions of whether the CBDC would be interest-bearing, and to what extent consumers switching from commercial bank deposits to the CBDC would impact the commercial banking model (using deposits to fund lending).

An alternative to storing the pw in plain text is to ask the user to provide their current password at the same time as the new password. The password change routine can then check the current password is correct (which protects against the threat of an attacker coming across an unlocked terminal with a logged-in session and changing the password) and provides the current password against which the new password can be compared.

"Arcadia" is great, but "The Hard Problem" (2015) may also be of interest - on consciouness and philosophy of mind. I'd coincidentally read Daniel Dennett's "Intuition Pumps and other tools for thinking" shortly before seeing the play and there was a hefty overlap in themes.

To clarify this - as far as I've seen, so far, 3 of the 45 Oxford colleges/PPHs (Worcester, Wadham, and St Edmund Hall) are accepting all offer-holders regardless of results.

(Oxford, along with Cambridge but unlike many universities, has the results of interviews and, for many subjects, admissions tests to assess to whom to offer a place. They make offers expecting that the vast majority of them will be met, rather than over-offering and expecting A-level results to prune the numbers significantly. In previous incarnations of the admissions system, candidates who passed the entrance exam and interview routinely got an offer of two Es, i.e. a formality. So, providing places to all offer-holders would not seem an unreasonable course of action in the circumstances.)

Thanks for that - I certainly agree that's simpler than Lambda@Edge, and option well worth considering.

I looked at that approach at the time but didn't go down that route because, as far as I understood (unless I missed something), that would involve having the S3 bucket directly publicly accessible over HTTP (not HTTPS) with the S3-style URLs, including public access. And my main motivation for adding CloudFront to the mix was to support/enforce TLS - I certainly didn't have traffic levels requiring it!

(But, pragmatically, the key risks of someone going to the effort of finding and using the unpublished S3 URL would seem to be be that (a) the site could stop working if I change the hosting and (b) they, through their own choice, aren't using TLS - which, for a static, low-traffic, personal blog, could be considered pretty low.)

Thanks, that makes sense - I've not used ReactJS, but guessed that your site only needed the top-level index.html, so that was handy.

I did find one catch with the S3/CloudFront approach, relating to default document, when I was looking at hosting a static Hugo site a few months ago. With S3 web hosting, you can specify a default object which also works for subdirectories (e.g. so http://www.example.com returns http://www.example.com/index.html and http://www.example.com/foo returns http://www.example.com/foo/index.html). With Cloudfront, the default document doesn't apply to subdirectories, which would have broken my site.

(For the author of this article, it looks like the combination of CLoudFront's default document and custom error handling did the job for their site - just flagging this as something to look out for in cases where it doesn't work :-) )

AWS suggest a workaround using Lambda@Edge (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-default-di...) to rewrite the requests at the CloudFront layer - but at that point I decided that actually getting the site published was more important than adding more to the technology stack, so it's now happily hosted on Netlify's free tier.

^W denotes Ctrl-W, the shortcut to delete the previous word for example originally in Berkley (thanks Wikipedia!) Unix-style terminals (and ^H denotes the control code for backspace, deleting the previous letter). The Jargon File's example shows how these are used for humorous effect: '"Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ." reads roughly as “Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...”, with irony emphasized.' (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html)