I’d just finished a new iteration of the program¹ (one that converts images to WebP files), when Google announced their new Jpegli library. And so, in a ritual I know far too well, I spent the best part of this weekend working on rewriting yet another version of this program - this time with Jpegli.

The pictures cover a trip to Cambridge, a trip back to my hometown of Corby, and some walks around Egham.

In Eureka: Journey to the Underworld and the Christmas special Eureka and the Five Gold Rings, Eureka and Brad face a number of monsters and gods, some of whom are easier to defeat than others. Join me as I rank each in reverse order of how formidable they are.

Changing all of their appearances however to start with var(--variable) would’ve been painful. Fortunately I leveraged VS Code’s find and replace with regexp to make it painless. (--\w+(?:-\w*)+) found all the CSS variables and I replaced them with var($0), where $0 is the name of the variable I captured originally. Easy!

This post is up-to-date as of August 2022.

This post lists my (hopefully!) up-to-date ranking of all the Marvel movies I’ve seen.

As caveated in my original attempt to rank Marvel’s catalogue there are a lot of issues with creating a list like this. Marvel movies don’t allow like for like comparisons - even within the bounds of a specific character’s story directors change and genres are blended. For instance, Thor and Thor: Ragnarok have almost nothing in common aside from some of the cast. Then, of course, are the set of bias that I bring to the table. Whilst I think I have a generally have a good nose for films, there are a few films in the collection that I have a particular fondness for and a few that I’ve only seen once.

Whilst the specifics of the phrase itself are immaterial I think it captures the reality that consistency achieves more than pure effort. Today I found an illustrative example of this doing some digital housecleaning. I manage my collection of RSS feeds using Feedbin and whilst I started with the intention of keeping an orderly collection of feeds over time their organisation has tended toward chaotic. I spent some time today to organise and curate the set of blogs I follow and as I did I noticed that a large percentage of the blogs I follow had ceased to be active some time ago and another large proportion of them only had a handful of posts each year.

I recently migrated to Fastmail and switched my email address from arranf@gmail.com to arran@arranfrance.com in an effort to avoid sharing too much information with Google and ensure people can contact me at the domains I own. Migrating email is hard, and will be the subject of another blog post I’m sure, but one specific area of difficulty was replacing every reference of arranf@gmail.com in my code bases. A lot of these references are innocuous - for example author emails in package.json files, but a few are more important for example the email address listed in my CV. I wanted to catch them all in one fell swoop.

The first project I’ve tackled is replacing an outdated an abandoned npm package, hugo-lunr. This blog’s search is powered by Lunr which requires an array of JS objects containing information about each post. hugo-lunr is designed to run during the site’s build step to produce the static index by iterating over Hugo markdown files and extracting key information from the front matter and dumping the contents to a JSON file which can be retrieved and consumed by Lunr at runtime. Unfortunately hugo-lunr is a fairly bare-bones implementation with a number of open pull requests and issues making it an excellent candidate for replacement.

I decided that in order to add my CV to the website, it was time for a rewrite. I considered writing the whole website in regular plain HTML and CSS, but I wanted some things to ‘just work’ like routing and a basic theme, and the power to go ‘under the hood’ when needed to define a unique layout for the CV. I ended up settling on VuePress. VuePress comes with a great out of the box theme as well as the ability to write Vue components in Markdown. For the CV page I defined a custom layout which contains multiple reusable components.

A lot of these utilities are old and are written in C. C is a great language for high performance work but it’s long in the tooth and it’s speed often comes at the cost of reliability and/or security. Of course, whilst classic Unix utilities like cat are battle tested they are often difficult to change. Decades old codebases aren’t the easiest thing to work with and doing so in a way that is backwards compatible and with the same level of assurance of reliability isn’t trivial. Thankfully Rust provides a solution - a language with safety and performance at its heart.

The TADA68 hit a number of my key wants including customizable mechanical switches, QMK firmware to reprogram the keyboard, and a small 65% profile. Most important of all the TADA68 was available in the standard UK (ISO) layout unlike most other mechanical keyboards which are only available in the US (ANSI) standard.

Given that most of the gaming my friends and I do is through Steam I figured I’d give a Steam Link a whirl and for £12 it didn’t seem like a bad deal. My main concern with the purchase was performance, reviews suggest it has minimal latency over a wired connection (in the region of 1-4 ms) but performs less optimally on a wireless connection. Our rented flat doesn’t have any cable runs anywhere so I was going to have to either endure performance degradation using wireless or find some creative way to connect the Steam Link to my computer.

The premise is pretty simple, your starting character is one of the two main characters from the original TV series - (Yami) Yugi or Seto Kaiba; and your aim is to rise to the top of Duel Links tournament which pits the best duelists in the world against each other. You have a starting deck based on your character’s deck from the original series and you battle other duelists to gain experience points in order to level up your character, which unlocks skills and new cards for your deck. Separate from your character’s level there are ‘stages’ of the game which can be progressed through by competing various challenges, such as ‘Win 5 duels’ or ‘Use 10 trap cards’. Completing stages unlocks additional characters from the TV show such as Joey Wheeler, who can be battled against or played as. Although a tad cheesy the game’s theme is actually one of its strengths, the setting is familiar and embedded deep in the heart of the game without being overbearing or annoying.

This has been updated after reviewing the consolidated Imperial Assault rules.

Star Wars: Imperial Assault is a behemoth of a game and with epic scale comes the challenge of complexity. Fantasy Flight, to their credit, have done a decent job of making the game digestible with the tutorial mission and the two rules books: the Learn to Play guide and the Rules Reference booklet. Shut Up and Sit Down have a fantastic getting started video to bring new players up to speed as well.

A great example of Fantasy Flight’s cash over consumer culture is Star Wars Imperial Assault and it’s ally and villain packs. Rather than offering extras for purchase with the ally and villain packs Fantasy Flight is effectively stripping content from the core set and big box expansions and transplanting them into separate blister packaging. Nowhere is this more evident than in the base Imperial Assault box where Luke and Vader, and their corresponding missions and agendas, are packaged separately as ally and villain packs hinting at their near exclusion and a last minute audible, probably because of the menacing and otherwise misleading image of Vader on the box’s artwork. Unfortunately, despite as a similar depiction on the box art of the Twin Shadows expansion, Boba Fett wasn’t so lucky and didn’t escape the villain pack fate. As a result he’s only included as a token in the Twin Shadows expansion and you have to buy his miniature and additional missions separately.

My journey started when I asked Reddit for suggestions on how best to tackle introducing my girlfriend at the time, who wasn’t particularly socially confident, to my family. A number of responses suggested board games as an easy way to break the ice and forwarded me to /r/boardgames. There I discovered a host of games that went beyond the typical circus of family classics that are dusted off each Christmas and I became immediately hooked on the concept; investing the majority of my Christmas money on some of the recommended and popular games at the time.

I’ve spent a huge part of today figuring out how to take advantage generation and some of the difficulties that come with the way Rails migration generation works.

One of the biggest difficulties with maintaining a blog, aside from writing it, has been ‘Where do I keep it?’. In fact, my very first blog post is a rather confusing and contradictory read in which I describe this very problem.

Recently I decided to jump ship from a Ghost instance hosted on $5/month Digital Ocean droplet. There are a few reasons I made this decision but the primary factor was things kept breaking.

I started and completed an Undergraduate Research Project at Royal Holloway to provide a Web Service for ExpoSE.js, a tool for JavaScript testing. During which I learnt Rust, Angular 1, and got to tackle some really cool problems. I even submitted a pull request to a Samsung repo!

Walks, Trails, and Paths

A walk from node A to node B is a sequence of edges from A to B where the edges in the graphs share endpoints (an endpoint is one of the two terminating points of an edge).

EDIT: I’ve also produced a static website that performs the same task in your browser.

I found very few details on how Travis performs their encryption in their documentation so I thought I’d outline a few of the details I discovered along the way.

Definition

For a relation to be classified as a function it needs to meet two criteria:

• For every input there is an output
• Each input only has one output

We can define those formally. For a relation between two sets A and B, f ⊆ A×B such that:

For instance in terms of videogames you can describe the relations: developed, published, and plays.

Realtime Worlds developed Crackdown Microsoft Studios published Crackdown Arran plays Crackdown

Crackdown is related to Realtime Worlds, Microsoft Studios, and Arran but notice the relation is ordered. Crackdown developed Realtime Worlds is not true.

A binary relation R is a subset of a Cartesian product SxT of two sets, S and T, where each set represents a a type of object. Let’s define some sets for our examples. S = {Realtime Worlds, Valve, Bioware, Bethesda} and T = {Crackdown, Half-Life 2, Mass Effect, Skyrim}.

Objective

Take a singly-linked list 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5 and reverse it 5 -> 4 -> 3 -> 2 -> 1 returning the new head of the list 1.

Today I stumbled across this Wikipedia page that describes the use of the <sub> and <sup> tags to express things in subscript and superscript, pretty much everywhere.

Releases

Associated with each release will be features, in various states of completion, bugs, requested enhancements, updates to old technology and old technology that needs updating. On a larger scale each releases requires training, marketing, and an element of timing.

This blog post is going to explore the different algorithms and I’ll write a simple Java program for each to demonstrate how they work.

Background

Although the examples in this blog post will demonstrate how to sort integers the approaches taken are generic to all possible entities you might want to sort provided you have a method for comparison and to check equality between entities.

The work assignment view helps project managers plan and allocate resources.

¹

Within each subsystem or module the work needs to be divided into tasks. Tasks can be categorised into types: faults/bugs, involve fixing existing functionality; wishes, implement new functionality; and changes, improve existing functionality.

Many ways of evaluating design

Design Quality

There are a number of measures each with a specific focus. Some focus on object orientated principles,

Safety Analysis

Safety analysis aims and identifying faults. It uses a process called fault tree analysis to identify faults that need to be handled as well as data flow and control flow graphs.

I took a break from revision to write an additional data select field (children’s parents’ email addresses) in Rock, what I thought was a quick and easy job. In truth, it kind of was. I’d already produced a data select like that before and I had a quick and dirty version working in under 15 minutes. Awesome!

Architecture documentation is important because it’s used as the basis for further design decisions, quality assurance, and project management.

Software Architecture Document

There (as always) is a standard for SADs outlined in ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010. You can find a Hello World equivalent here. Typically a Software Architecture Document (SAD) will include :

Why Prototype?

Prototyping helps elicit more details about a proposed system. It allows you to get feedback from potential users and a client about aspects that need improvement, features that aren’t useful, and missing functionality. By creating a prototype you also discover whether an approach is a feasible solution to the problem, or whether there is a feasible solution.

Design is the process of deciding how to implement the client’s requirements and coming up with a resulting design plan. This occurs at different levels a high level view will address the structure of the system and later lower level views will focus on the design of individual units.

Why review requirements? Well poorly specified requirements are a huge source of faults in projects. Reviewing requirements gives you a chance to prevent these faults which propagate through the process. The more ‘upstream’ a fault occurs the more collateral has to be dealt with and consequently the more expensive fixing the fault is.

As you might expect there are many different ‘standards’ for modelling notation, each with advantages and disadvantages. We’ll consider a few each operating at different levels of depth before discussing user stories and use cases in detail.

You can look forward to maths based posts about: the fundamentals of computers including number representation, logical propositions, boolean algebra, logic and switching circuits, finite state automata, and regular expressions; mathematical structures including sets, relations, functions, induction and recursion, algorithms, discrete graphs, vectors, vector space, and linear transformations; and probability and distributions.

The basic premise of all software engineering processes is that software is large and complicated. To tackle engineering any software the basic paradigm is to take the problem, abstract it decompose it into smaller sub-problems and then engineer software made up of small components to produce a system that solves the problem - analysis and synthesis. Easy, right?

So we decided that user experience (UX) was a bit of a fragile definition but usability is very well defined. It’s the aspect of UX that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. Simple.

It’s defined into a few attributes:

• Ease of Learning - How easily can users understand how to perform simple tasks?
• Efficiency - Are experienced users able to perform tasks quickly?
• Memorability - How easy is it for users to remember how the system works if they haven’t used it for a significant amount of time?
• Errors - How frequently do users incur errors and how serious are they?
• Satisfaction - How pleasant is the interface to use?

Evaluation

User Testing

You can apply the same techniques you use to evaluate UX, scientific based user testing, to evaluating usability. Interestingly, and rather counter intuitively, Jakob Nielsen, a pioneer in the field, suggests you only need to test five users to obtain enough data to find most of the usability problems in an interface.

User Experience (UX) is an interesting term, and difficult to define. My simple definition is as follows.

UX is a user’s perception of a product as informed by their use of the product.

The study and design of UX is a multidisciplinary field that requires input from computer science, psychology, and other areas. Disparate fields to tackle a difficult to define area - a promising area of research I’m sure.

There are things known as ‘webhooks’, an address for a message to be sent to when an event occurs. When the message is sent to that address the webhook captures the message and processes it in a useful way.

For instance, if you send email using a service like SendGrid there’s an option to have events like emails being opened to a webhook. You can then take the message sent to that webhook and use it to store information about who opened it, when they opened it, and what email client they opened the email in.

We’re both big believers in open source and so right at the start we made the decision to open up development and host our source code on Github, a site which lets users share, distribute, and collaborate on code.

To connect user’s IsThereAnyDeal accounts with our application we utilize their OAuth2 API which works on the basis of a client ID and client secret, the combination of which are unique to our application. Our client ID can be shared publicly but our client secret, as the name might suggest, is meant to be known only to us.

Despite appearing on paper to be a positive thing in reality Engage was perhaps the most difficult element of my past year. Although I’d only been distanced from formal education for a year I found there was a significant drop off in my academic ability (not that I was the most studious student to begin with) and from the outset it was clear that the course demanded a lot more of my time than I had expected to need to give it.

I believe in “long-form”, relatively speaking, and I believe that the process of blogging is an important one. Twitter and Instagram capture a reaction at a given moment but a blog post captures a much more mature perspective - one who’s age is measured in days not seconds.

So I’ve had a fairly inadequate router for a while. There were no advanced configuration options to speed up gaming, block adverts, or anything similar. I put up with it mainly because of the expense of replacing it but also because of the knowledge that DD-WRT (custom router firmware) might just be on the horizon. I’d Google every now and then, perhaps once a year, to see if anyone had managed to get it working never with any luck.

In the first week of August I spent a week in Romania on a trip that, if I’m honest; prior, during, and after departure I was not looking forward to. The temperature was forecast for 35 degrees, I was already stressed out and emotional, and on top of it all I somehow had to magic an evening’s youth service out of my brain and onto paper in the spare moments I could salvage from the day of our flight.

Two weeks ago I bid farewell to my internship which I’ve dedicated the past two years of my life to in various forms and ever since I’ve been ramping up my preparations for university.

My two major concerns up until recently were finance and accommodation but both potential issues have been put to rest. After resolving an issue with Student Finance England I’ve been awarded the full amount of finance I was expecting and after some quick budgeting it looks like I’m covered for the year if I spend wisely. My first year will spent in the coincidentally named Kingswood 2, a site of a former monastery about 20 minutes from campus.

Up until three weeks ago I’d written off the prospect of me going. The cost of flights, a hotel, and conference entry totalled up was in the region of £1200, a seemingly insurmountable amount of money. Still, I mentioned the idea to my Dad, and he suggested that if I had the opportunity to go that I should grab it.

When I tested the changes on the remote server I had a panic moment when I realised my simple change didn’t work. I had got my inequality the wrong way around! The change I’d made was checking if _groupId was less than 0 rather than greater than 0. Oops.

It’s all in the aid of a trip to Romania to visit the Corabia Foundation. For my shearing I’ve raised enough to pay for my flight to spend over a week working with the young people there.

What excites me is developing, expanding, and innovating. I want to build a competent and effective church with a vision for transforming people’s lives. What enthused me about the idea of studying at Moorland’s was the concept of studying one day a week and spending five days a week in an environment where I could make my mark.

They have one key page on their website that lists all the major changes to their API. After a bit of Googling I discovered a service that monitors pages for changes which then alerts you via RSS, perfect!

The past week I’ve been sat in front of my computer typing up coursework in a last ditch effort to get my first batch of assignments completed before the (slightly extended) deadline. Today I’m rushing off to Northampton to hand those in.

Here are the major headlines

• I’ve found a course I’m potentially going to do next year. A placement based BA (Hons) in Applied Theology
• I’ve almost summed up the willpower to write a CV to knock on some churches doors and offer my services
• I helped lead a young persons weekend away
• I’ve visited London to see Kate
• I’ve been geocaching with Carl
• I’ve kitted out my old computer with a new mini-ITX H97N motherboard, a i5 Haswell processor, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a fancy new 500W semi-modular power supply, and a 3TB HDD. All of which is Hackintosh compatible.
• A new tiny case is arriving tomorrow and I hope to squeeze it all in to an incredibly tiny form factor like these two guys. If I do I’ll be a SSD drive and a wireless card away from having a dual boot hackintosh!
• We’re nearly at the point we have Rock running at church
• I wrote my own first piece of functional code – an address verification system for Rock
• I also set up a community blog for the Rock project

Fortunately, today marks the start of a two-week break in which I can recover and relax. I’ve booked a few appointments in with friends and family but for the most part I’m planning on spending a relatively solitary holiday.

Since then, I’ve seen the Cowboys come close and fall at the final obstacle twice. Their 2012 and 2013 seasons both ended at the hands of a divisional rival on their sixteenth game leaving them with an 8-8 record.

If you were to ask anyone who knows me well if I was an “Action Man Boy” they would probably tell you I wasn’t – and they wouldn’t be wrong. To be honest Action Man left very little of an impression on me, the toys were always a tad too expensive and on the whole something about his hypermasculinity never quite appealed to my geeky younger self. Preteen me preferred his heroes to use their brain rather than their brawn and so buff characters like Action Man were shunted in favour of the wiser Obi-Wan Kenobi and the more inventive Harry Potter.

My last three blog posts have been posted to three different web addresses using three different web services.

Choosing where to host my blog and which service to use has been a bit of an ordeal.

I initially started out using Scriptogram (which has now long since died) but their theme support didn’t quite cut it. Postach.io was my next stop but they removed their Dropbox integration recently forcing me to relocate.