Recent content on Lucas Pardue - Bits && Pieces
The core HTTP specifications don’t define their own means of providing
integrity. Although “hop-by-hop” protocols underneath HTTP, such as TLS or QUIC,
provide integrity for HTTP message transactions, it isn’t enough. HTTP powers
massively distributed systems where intermediaries (aka proxies) are first-class
citizens. Coupled with that are the powerful…
I recently changed my Bluesky handle from @simmervigor.bsky.social to
 @simmervig.org . I did this using the HTTP validation method, which relies on
providing custom responses to /.well-known/atproto-did . The blog explains how
I used Hono to set up a simple request router and run it in
Cloudflare Workers. You too can use this method to easily and quickly set up a
bunch of…
This website was previously powered by a self-hosted WordPress, running on a
VPS. In front of that, sat Cloudflare and its
 APO 
product that helped to speed it up and reduce burden on the origin. 
 The origin server was an old-school, janky, LAMP stack. In spite of the rest of
the world seeming having ditched LAMP (or its ilk) and performing a chain of
moves from the…
For as long as I’ve used email, someone else has provided it to me for “free”.
Detoxing in January is a staple, so why not extend that to weening off Google
and call it a degox. 
 This was supposed to be a short post about my experience migrating to Fastmail.
However, it went sideways and turned into an essay. I’ve knitted together
various experiences…
Due to a single embedded tweet, it seems my website at https://t.co/jLqWpZKaB6 loads about 2.5 megabytes of JS across a dozen HTTP/1.1 requests to https://t.co/7OXJ9hd5oI . WTF, this doubles the total size of download resources. I think I'll just delete the embed. — Lucas Pardue (@SimmerVigor) January 2, 2021 
 As the embedded tweet says, I was shocked to discover that a single…
Dicey Dungeons is a roguelike where you roll dice in dungeons. The premise is a
game show but it reminds me more of The Running Man than Wheel of Fortune. 
 
 Anthropomorphic die uses non-anthropomorphic die to attack charming Honey Monster in a space suit 
 
 

 This game has simple mechanics on the surface but steadily grows in complexity
and difficulty; each…
This blog has been a little quiet in 2019. After a days work it can be hard to
think of something worth blogging that isn’t tied to my working day, and without
inspiration it becomes difficult to muster up the energy to write anything. 
 So I’ve decided to create a framework for blogging: a single post, once a week,
that reviews a different game in a maximum of 200…
New Year, same old blog. A new style, some broken links and some fixed-broken
links. Here’s to yet another Wordpress-based blog! Now for some background. 
 
 An actual front page of a newspaper 
 
 

 This website has been through a small number of hosts. It started off being
hosted on a wordpress.com subdomain. I then migrated it over to a cheapo…

 FYI: SpotifyStatusApplet was broken by a Spotify API change made in Q3 2018.
This page is provided for archive purposes and the download has been removed.
More information is available on the Project Page . 
 A small update to SpotifyStatusApplet has been released as a beta. 
 This version fixes a critical issue with newer versions of Spotify that prevent
the applet from…

 FYI: SpotifyStatusApplet was broken by a Spotify API change made in Q3 2018.
This page is provided for archive purposes and the download has been removed.
More information is available on the Project Page . 
 A small update to SpotifyStatusApplet has been released as a beta. This version
adds the ability to toggle on/off the Field titles (Track, Album and Artist)…

 Since I moved to London I drank a lot of beer. It is easy to lose track of: 
 
 
 What I’ve tried 
 
 
 When I’ve tried it 
 
 
 and would I drink it again 
 
 
 In order to keep a better track of these beers I created a beer catalog page
capturing what I deemed to be the important details. 
 In 2024, I retired the catalog…
Ode to Rhapsody 
 to the tune of “Comme d’habitude” / “My Way” 
 
 And now, the end is here 
And so I face, the final codegen 
My friend, I’ll say it clear 
I state my Use Case, I’ll draw a Lifeline 
I’ve declared a class that’s pure 
I created each and every dependency 
And more, much more than this, I did…

 Software Development Metrics are a notoriously difficult area, there exists a
large allure of quantitative measurements that can be condensed into a top-level
dashboard showing progress, plan alignment, effort , costs and so on. However,
the unfortunate reality is that the collection and analysis of Software
Development Metrics is difficult for a number of factors such as…

 Up vs. Back or in other terms hierarchy vs. chronology is one of the User
Experience aspects touched upon in my post UML: Modelling User Interfaces Part
1 – Hierarchy
and 
 Navigation . The Android
methodology for UI navigation has received some attention over the years and the
largest change to date was brought in with the introduction of the Action
Bar 
as…

 One of the recurring issues I have experienced with UML, or more generally Model
Driven Design is the continual struggle between definition and interpretation.
One of the tenants of UML is to abstract upwards towards a level that avoids
implementation specifics. However, this introduces the potential for a need of a
“Leap of Faith”, something that was discussed my…
In the process of updating and refactoring an old Android project I unwittingly
changed a Project configuration option (the “Is Library” option) that lead to my
resource file being generated differently. E.g 
 Before 
 [java] public final class R { public static final class id { public static final int button1=0x7f090001; public static final int button2=0x7f090002;…
I belatedly came across the news regarding
 warp ,
a C and C++ preprocessor written by Walter Bright in a joint project with
Facebook. This has been released under the Boost license and is available at
 https://github.com/facebook/warp . 
 The Facebook blog makes the following statement with regards to improved
efficiency over the GCC preprocessor 
 
 Replacing…
This is the first post in a series that looks at the modelling of User Interface
(UI) related software using UML. 
 The main purpose of the post is to explore how we effectively model the
navigation of a tree-like hierarchy, especially when considering the premise “In
a tree structure there is one and only one path from any point to any other
point”. 
 The tl;dr…
I am a principle software engineer that specializes in Internet and web
protocols like HTTP/2, HTTP/3, QUIC, and WebTransport. 
 I previously worked at Cloudflare on the Protocols team who own Layer 4 and
Layer 7 termination and proxying, helping to improve the security and
performance of Internet-facing services. In this role I focused on the
application-layer enhancements…
I produced this poster as part of a university module entitled Communicating
Science. 
 The poster was targeted toward GCSE and A-Level students hence the bold design
and colours to help improve attraction and interest. 
 I originally uploaded this poster to a past incarnation of
 www.lucaspardue.co.uk and I was partially surprised to
find relinked or reblogged on several…
During university I produced a poster on the topic of Antimatter as part of a
Communicating Science module. 
 I put this up on the web in 2007 and years on, I am seeing traffic to the site
driven by a link contained in a Rutgers
 assignment 
concerning Information Design. Unfortunately, across the years the poster image
had become unavailable…. until now. While the…
Temporary page for testing. Not linked from any menu and attempted to be hidden
from the bots ;-) 
 The core HTTP specifications don’t define their own means of providing
integrity. Although “hop-by-hop” protocols underneath HTTP, such as TLS or QUIC,
provide integrity for HTTP message transactions, it isn’t enough. HTTP powers
massively distributed…
The following is a collection of openly available publications beyond this blog
that I have authored or co-authored. 
 RFCs 
 
 RFC 9218 Extensible Prioritization Scheme for HTTP 
 RFC 9297 HTTP Datagrams and the Capsule Protocol 
 RFC 9530 Digest Fields 
 
 Adopted Internet-Drafts 
 In-progress documents being standardized in the IETF: 
 
 Maintaining…

 SpotifyStatusApplet was broken by a Spotify API change made in Q3 2018. All previous downloads have been removed from this site. I switched to a Logitech G915 TKL in 2021, so I no longer have any plans to work on applets. 
 SpotifyStatusApplet - an LCD applet for the Logitech Gaming keyboard family. 
 From version 1.2, the field titles (Track, Album and Artist) can be…