Month: August 2018
Fighting the pen-test with regex and sweat
Regex. I think its close to becoming sentient. My first experience with it was in the glorious days of Usenet and c-news (no b-news for me), and a chap by the name of Henry Spencer who wrote it about the time I started University. I can still recall m first thread (it was on uw.general about…
Crypto crash means graphics upgrades!
So I get home and this is waiting on my porch. Yes, no outer box, just like that! Glad my neighbours are honest folk. What’s happening? Well, you see… the crypto miners are crashing out of using video cards, driven by the pressure of custom-asics (more efficient) and lower $/coin. This means that people like…
This pie needs more raisins!
For a long time now I’ve been explaining why pie charts are a bad visualisation. I’ve been complaining when they get used. Even worse, sometimes they are fake 3-D (where the 3rd dimension is not a new fact, just there to make it ‘pretty’). Today I was in a presentation on data visualisation and, unsolicited…
Tales from the road: rabbits and cats
You’re probably going to want to click on that picture to make it bigger and more glorious. So I’m in the Taipei airport. I’m at the security line. The woman in front of me has a rabbit. No, not a stuffed rabbit. No, not a caged rabbit. A real live bunny, slung over her shoulder,…
Tales from the road: great expectations and the cheese sandwich that wasn’t
Its been a long journey, I’ve arrived at the site of a potential customer in Mumbai. We arrive at the gate (the site is enormous, many buildings spread out over a multi-km complex). Sadly, our hosts have forgotten to arrange transport for us. So we hang off the side of one of the ‘worker busses’…
