Recent content on Segmentation Fault
The other week we did a thing and brought this beautiful furball home. She is 12-ish weeks old and you can find her in one of two moods right now: love or war. We named her Lucy after Lucy Brennan, the sweet receptionist at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department. © Paramount Pictures Something else I want to let you know about Lucy is that she’s an accomplished vimmer. Here are a couple…
I have come up with a quick way to rank the popularity of a bunch of characters from a popular JRPG franchise using people’s replies to a Reddit post, all from the command-line. My approach involves extracting all the comment content from the desired Reddit thread (this one happens to be from the thriving Atelier JRPG community subreddit) and counting up the number of times each…
As a university student, I often wished to have my lectures transcribed into text, creating a comprehensive and easily accessible reference of all my lecture material. The benefits of converting this body of content to its written form are numerous: Easy preservation of lecture content Faster comprehension and review Searchable text for quick reference Portability and effortless backup: recorded…
I’m beginning this year caring a lot more about my data online than I did around this time in 2022. There seems to be a concerning trend of careless sharing of personal data online, fuelled by the normalisation of social media. Despite this, over the last few months, I’ve discovered and started to regularly use many new software products which have proved to me that privacy on the…
I was faced with an interesting question related to web security recently: are data-fuelled denial of service attacks possible against modern Next.js web applications? Picture a server-side rendered Next.js application which exposes a login endpoint expecting a JSON payload like this: { "username": "xx.darkangel.xx@gmail.com", "password": "hunter22" } Would it be possible to supply a string of…
If you’re reading this, you’re probably viewing a version of my blog generated by Hugo (unless you’re reading this on gemini ). If you’re not familiar with Hugo, I can assure you he’s not my smarter twin, who decided to rebuild my personal site for me. Hugo is a static site generator developed in Go. I personally think it’s great because it’s easy , simple…
The C programming language is 50 years old this year. I wanted to break my blogging hiatus to write this post to celebrate the occasion and explain why I think someone (maybe me?) could be writing a similar post to this within another 50 years. But first, let’s take a small detour… Boring, loosely related preamble about my childhood My deep interest for computers began at a rather…
Este artículo es una traducción al castellano del artículo originalmente escrito por Rohan Kumar , “WhatsApp and the domestication of users” . También disponible en la versión Gemini de mi blog . Publicación original: 2021-01-27. Última actualización: 2021-02-13. Última actualización de esta traducción: 2021-02-21. Jamás he usado WhatsApp y jamás lo haré. A pesar de esto, me siento…
A few days ago I built a new website, though calling it such might be a touch too generous. It’s called 500 as a Service or 500aaS for short. You can visit it on 500asaservice.com . Don’t sue me if you find it disappointing. It’s meant to be a failure after all. I figured, with the wealth of things available to consume as a service nowadays, it felt just appropriate to…
This is the second and final part of my tutorial on creating your personal OpenVPN server on the cloud. Please read part 1 of the series first if you’ve not done so already as this part builds directly on top of the infrastructure stood up in the previous instalment. Making the ECS Instance More Reliable The first thing we need to do is to create the IAM role that we will attach to our…
Increasing concern around the fact that our browsing habits and personal information are being mined by many of the websites and service providers we use on the Internet is driving a higher interest in ways to protect our anonymity and personal information on the Internet. Virtual Private Networks or VPNs are one of the more comprehensive and robust answers to this problem. A VPN allows you to…
Here we are, a year on, heading into the end of 2018 with another instalment of Hacktoberfest . Deal stays the same: make 5 PR’s by the end of the month, get a T-shirt and a bunch of stickers. Some participating projects also stay the same, or rather, are reborn so that the coming generations of avid coders can bask in the satisfaction of their first accepted PR, or the first five! Last year…
Developing software as part of a team can sometimes be a pain, especially when the setup required to get that software to a working state is not trivial. Setting up dependencies, the state of the environment the application needs to run in and, worst of all, ensuring this configuration works just the same for everyone in your team, can feel like a fool’s errand. Things can get very…
Even in 2018, when modern, feature rich instant messaging applications like Gitter or the extremely popular Slack, are as pervasive as ever, IRC remains the preferred method of communication for many developers. It’s simple, stable, ubiquitous, and most importantly, fully decentralised. It is an old protocol though, as IRC has been kicking about since the early nineties ( the IRC protocol…
Are you the kind of person that likes to gratuitously partition their hard disk because they’re obsessed with compartmentalisation? Do you think Docker is great but it’s eating up all of your /var or / space? Are you sick of manually cleaning up all Docker volumes, images and dangling containers for Docker to fill your disk to the brim with this useful junk within a fortnight?…
esoteric /ˌɛsəˈtɛrɪk/ ADJECTIVE. Intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest. Oxford Dictionaries Operating systems are complex. Their mission is to provide a connection between some squishy flesh (that’s me and you, dear reader) and a plastic box made up of sand, lightning and even water in some cases. Its task boils down…
If you’re just starting out with Linux or have been using it for some time but are sort of afraid to go beyond what you know now, allow me to take you on a journey. Read on as I talk about the different stages a Linux distro-hopper driven by a desire to learn more about this system, may walk through. Writing a post like this is an exercise in indulgence but I’ll try to make it…
This year’s Hacktoberfest edition has now come to an end. Everyone seemed to have a really good month, as the parting numbers reveal . Here they are, in case you don’t feel like clicking the link. 239,164 pull requests 31,901 completed challenges 64,166 participating repositories These figures may be somewhat inflated as people didn’t mind submitting one or two cheeky PR’s…
Last week, the awesome guys from DigitalOcean launched this year’s installment of their Hacktoberfest… hackathon? I’ve decided to take part in it because there’s a limited edition T-shirt up for grabs. I mean, it’s limited edition . Who could say no to that? But wait… Hacktoberfest? For those of you who have no clue what I’m talking about, here’s…
As explained in my previous post , application sandboxing doesn’t need to be relegated to the cloud and server space, desktop users can also enjoy a pain-free and transparent local app experience thanks to technologies like Flatpak and Snappy. Today I’ll show you how this fantastic concept can come to fruition on your own desktop with the simplest packaging framework I know: AppImage.…
Software virtualisation and sandboxing have been concepts familiar to software engineers since the venerable IBM mainframe era, the 60’s. Fast forward a few decades and now anyone can tap into the increasingly larger pool of power their own home computers offer to run virtual computers inside their own physical device. A decade ago, thanks to the widespread use of ridiculously powerful…
This will be a rant rather than an educational, well thought article. Sorry for that. I write this chiefly as a reminder to myself; a public, shameful mental note that I don’t want to do things this way anymore. The question you should ask yourself if you decide to join me in the next few lines is: when is upgrading early too early? When Upgrading Early Is Too Early Fedora is my favourite…
Freedom of choice lies at the core of all that Linux strives to achieve. This is both its greatest virtue and its most overwhelming trait. Since I first got into Linux, I have installed and used many different distributions. Some, like Ubuntu, place ease of use at the forefront of their design, and it shows; others, like Arch, empower the user to the nth degree, allowing him or her to build their…
The Linux kernel was written by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student of the University of Helsinki. Torvalds started working on a new kernel, drawing inspiration from MINIX, a minimalistic Unix variant very popular at the time, especially in academia. The first release of his personal project, a tiny working kernel, was made in 1991. Soon after a number of volunteers joined Linus in what they’d…
Freedom is the essential principle around which Linux (a.k.a. GNU/Linux) as an operating system revolves. You’re free to choose your distribution. You’re free to change your office suite. You’re free to change your kernel! It is only natural this extends to the visual appearance of your system. Virtually anything can be swapped with something else and configured to the nth degree…
NOTE: This blog post is here for historic purposes. The current blog platform I use is no longer RefineryCMS. However I figured this tutorial would still be of use for many, not only for its account of a specific CMS configuration but everything else. What better way to start off a tech blog than explaining how it was put together? I’d already acquired some experience during university…
On the hope this web log serves some purpose other than being an excuse for learning how to maintain one, I welcome you, the curious mind, who ventured -probably by accident- into this conspicuous hide-out. These pages are not about me but about the knowledge I wish to share. This was conceived with the intention of becoming a technical site where I discuss technical stuff for people wishing to…