Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

Background We build a bunch of stuff for RISC-V using the Dart official Docker image, but the RISC-V images can often arrive some time (days) after the more mainstream images[1]. That means that if we merge a Dependabot PR for an updated image it might well be missing RISC-V, causing the Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline […]


TL;DR RISE did it’s job, and in the past couple of years RISC-V support has found its way into stable releases of key infrastructure software like Debian. So from a software perspective, it’s arguable that RISC-V is now ready for production. Progress has been a little slower on the hardware front, but hardware is… hard; […]


Last week my former colleague Doug Todd asked a question about recording decisions on BlueSky: Of course I replied suggesting Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), with a pointer to the at_protocol GitHub repo where we use them. A few days back Doug demoed how he’s using ADRs with his coding assistant (Claude and Claude Code), and […]


TL;DR Start writing down why decisions are made. Future you may thank you. Future other person who’s wondering what you were thinking may also thank you. Then keep a dependency graph of the things impacted by the decision. It will help unravel what gets woven around it. Background I was at an excellent AFCEA event […]


TL;DR After 6.5y+ of service my PC needed a refresh – so it has a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and SSD, and I’ve taken the opportunity to switch to Linux. It’s still completely silent, but noticeably faster :) Background I built a Silent PC based on a Streacom DB4 case back in the summer of […]


TL;DR Once we get past ‘bullshit work‘, the primary enterprise use cases for Large Language Models (LLMs) appear to converge on various ways to make it easier to work with unstructured data. That’s because an LLM can generate an ‘understanding’ of the data, saving the painstaking process of getting humans to provide context. Of course […]


TL;DR The Flint 2 seems to be a pretty awesome router. It was a little fiddly to set up my (quite complex) existing VLANs and wireless networks onto it, but it’s been working without a hitch since then :) Why? I’ve had a Draytek 2866ax router paired with an AP960C access point for about 18m[1]. […]


October 2024

01Nov24

Pupdate Autumn is definitely here, and it’s been wet enough that the boys have needed their coats some days. The good news at the start of the month is that Milo’s treatment is working, and he’s back in remission :) Travel The end of the month has been quite busy for travel. NYC One of […]


Grace Hopper

12Sep24

It’s wonderful that this lecture by Grace Hopper at the NSA in 1982 has made its way out into the world. It’s SO prescient on a variety of topics like distributed computing, language standards, service ownership and the leadership vacuum. She could see it all – 42 years ago. If you work in IT today, […]


It’s right there in the title. If the word offends you, just stop, now. TL;DR Generative AI is a bullshit machine, but that’s fine because we need machines to do the bullshit jobs. Military Grade Bullshit I first heard the phrase ‘Bullshit Baffles Brains’ in my early days in the Navy, and I would hear […]