The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) was passed into law in 2023 and is now being implemented, with the first parts of it going into effect in March 2025. The guidance provided is rather impenetrable, so I’ve decided to write my own summary here. If you run a small site, you might be interested in joining Promising Trouble’s mailing list – they are trying to get some more solid guidance for small…
In March 2014, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to Mendip District Council for the Premises License and supporting documentation for Glastonbury Festival. Today, two and a quarter years later, I received an inch-thick sheaf of paperwork in the post. The Documents These documents were released by Mendip District Council under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, with reference…
This is an attempt to build a fairly comprehensive list of metrics you should be monitoring on a PostgreSQL 9.4 database server. If you’ve found any particular metrics useful which aren’t listed here, please let me know . Many thanks to the Government PaaS team at GDS , who I’ve been working with, for giving me the chance to put this list together. System Metrics You should be recording a…
In October I had the privilege to attend another lovely /dev/fort . The concept of /dev/fort is to bring a group of web types together in a beautiful, remote location, spend a week building something, and (ideally) result in something usable at the end. Generally a /dev/fort cohort is around ten people, but in this case logistics meant there were eighteen of us heading to the Isle of Eigg in the…
After a rather long hiatus, here’s a bit of a technical brain dump while I have all the details in my mind. I like graphs, and I like having them displayed on dedicated screens. My preferred way of doing this is to use Chrome on Linux to display the monitoring web page (generated by the likes of naglite2 / nagdash or cactiview / graphview ): Whenever I set one of these machines up, I always spend…
Every time I get depressed about things being shut down because of “Health and Safety” and the compensation culture, I like to take time to read the judgment in Grimes vs Hawkins et al (2011) (pdf). It’s a court case filed by an extremely unfortunate 18-year-old (Grimes) who ended up at a friend’s house late at night, misjudged a dive into the pool, shattered her spine, and ended up tetraplegic.…
I’ve been hacking on WAL-E , a nice little Postgres backup system from Heroku which uses gevent for concurrency. Much of my changes are related to UNIX pipelines, and I’ve run into a subtle issue which not only affects gevent but also Eventlet (which is our coroutine library of choice at Smarkets). Here’s a trivial example — an Eventletized version of an example in the Python manual: from…
We knew Facebook was going to announce a big music-related feature today, and the rumour was that it was going to basically be scrobbling. So a small army of Last.fmers and ex-Last.fmers convened our legendary keynote backchannel on IRC to watch it. It almost crept up on me. This was a developer event, so Zuckerberg (as inexpert as he is at giving these talks) assembled their scrobbling feature in…
Yesterday morning, close to a year’s worth of planning and aborted attempts finally came to fruition. Twelve of us involved with London Hackspace took a train from Victoria to Whitstable, then boarded a boat for the 45-minute journey to the Red Sands sea fort. <img src=/blog_images/2011/08/21/red-sands-sea-fort//1.jpg class=”img-responsive”> With the weather not looking too promising, we managed…
The last space shuttle has landed . It’s sad, but not because America has lost its only way of putting humans into orbit; not because there’s no replacement ready (there wasn’t one when Apollo ended either). It’s sad because each shuttle wasn’t just a disposable machine like all its predecessors; it was a ship , and like earthbound ships each orbiter had a life — and a personality — which was…