A blog about life and programming
I've been aware for years that my code for looking up Ordnance Survey elevation data was doing something weird when tallying up ascent and descent values for GPX files recorded by my GPS device when out for a bike ride. I had tested individual spot heights against OS maps, and was happy that I was retrieving the correct elevation value for each individual location: Here's a screenshot from my…
Once upon a time you could knock out a desktop app (known as a program back then) and give it to a friend to play with. You could attach it to an email or pass it over to them on a USB stick. Maybe even upload it to some site somewhere and send them a link. Sadly, that age of innocence is long gone, for which we can thank the barely human scum who punt out malware with the express aim of ruining…
So my last blog entry looked at some easy newbie vibe coding. I mean, how difficult could it be to vibe code an image converter? The answer turned out to be: not very. So I thought, why not move up to the next level in my AI voyage of discovery and do a full agentic code of a website application? But what kind of website app to build, and how to start? A dev sweating over hitting 'File → New' in…
I've got that Bee Gees song in my head: "v-v-v-vibe coding, you're telling me lies..." . Or something like that. An unconvincing Bee Gees cover band sings their greatest hit I had briefly mentioned vibe coding in The last developer to use AI but thought nothing more about until it Moonshot AI released Kimi CLI , which natively supports ACP . That means that my code editor Zed can now access…
Preface This is a story of one man's Damascene conversion to AI development tools from a starting point of knowing pretty much nothing about them. But first, a quick disclaimer: many people now believe that the use of bullet points and em dashes is a sure-fire indicator of AI writing assistance tools. So I just want to state here that this story is 100% fully organic hand-rolled human…
...there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. – Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S Secretary of Defence Your man Don was right about all of that, particularly the unknown unknowns. His observation also applies to web…
I recently decided to run my own web server after several years of using a web hosting service. The decision was mostly based around saving money (my hosting service had just announced a big price rise). Plus, I had some dev plans in mind which needed more than just access to a web server. Anyway, running your own server is geeky fun. Years ago, I used to run this site on a FreeBSD box at home…
Hi, I'm Bob Osola. I've been married to Karen since 1990. We have two grown-up children, and our first grandchild arrived recently. So I'm a very lucky man. Antigua: Karen & I get personal with a stingray My first career was as a UK merchant navy deck officer. I started off on BP tankers in 1976 trading world-wide. Foreign travel was really only for the wealthy back then, so I hadn't been abroad…