Category Archives: Random thoughts

The Matrix

Posted on September 12, 2021 by Gaius

With Matrix IV just around the corner, I re-watched the original trilogy. The first movie has held up very well, it’s just as good as I remembered, a perfect slice of 90s nostalgia or zeitgeist or whatever. But I had … Continue reading →

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After WNC/COVID-19

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Gaius

Our dear leader Boris has stated that if everyone follows the guidelines, we might stand a chance of dealing with the local outbreak of Wuhan Novel Coronavirus in 12 weeks. I think it’s pretty safe to say that that is … Continue reading →

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RIP Gobbolino

Posted on December 31, 2019 by Gaius

Our beautiful and much-loved cat Gobbolino, 23rd July 2000 – 28th December 2019. An intrepid exploring cat in her youth, as she got older, she preferred her familiar places with all of her important things nearby. So we brought the … Continue reading →

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Password Strength Is A Hard Problem

Posted on August 31, 2019 by Gaius

We are all familiar with the classic advice on password strength, a mix of lowercase, uppercase, symbols, numbers, of a certain length. It is trivial to construct a validator for password strength in Python The problem with this is that … Continue reading →

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Microsoft Professional Program Cybersecurity

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Gaius

In a previous job, amongst many other things I was responsible for the tending of a small herd of HP DL-whatever servers, ~1500 machines all running RHEL. These were considered mission-critical for the business unit. I used various tools for … Continue reading →

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Forgotten Features

Posted on February 23, 2019 by Gaius

The ancient wizards who defined the ASCII standard knew what they were doing. ASCII for those who have not come across it, is the standard means of encoding mainly textual data as a stream of 7- or 8-bit bytes¹ for … Continue reading →

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Learning a New Language

Posted on February 10, 2019 by Gaius

Generally, every program I write, regardless of what useful thing it actually does, and regardless of what programming language it is written in, has to do certain things, which usually includes Importing a library and calling functions contained within that … Continue reading →

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ML in the Real World

Posted on December 22, 2018 by Gaius

About a decade ago now, I was doing a lot of what we would now call ML†, using the what is now called data exhaust‡ from the production infrastructure of an exchange, both the OLTP and DW sides. It was … Continue reading →

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Article 13

Posted on November 30, 2018 by Gaius

A lot of fuss is being made about the potential impact of so-called Article 13 on YouTube. I think there are two possible outcomes that would be acceptable to me. Either: YouTube verifies the identities of all uploaders, and the … Continue reading →

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Advice for Students

Posted on September 2, 2018 by Gaius

I went to UCL to study a 4-year programme in Mechanical Engineering. I wanted to work with big gas and steam turbines, for propulsion or bulk power generation. While there I realised that control systems were very interesting as well. … Continue reading →

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