ACCU World of Code

ResOrg 2.0.10.31 has now been released. This a recommended maintenance update for ResOrg 2.0, and adds support for Visual Studio 2022 Preview: ResOrg 2.0.10.31 running within Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4.1 The following changes are included in this bu…

Windows Smartscreen is a great idea, but if you develop downloadable software for Windows it can sometimes be incredibly frustrating. That has certainly been our experience this year, as Windows has displayed the following warning when running every bu…

Windows Smartscreen is a great idea, but if you develop downloadable software for Windows it can sometimes be incredibly frustrating. That has certainly been our experience this year, as Windows has displayed the following warning when running every bu…

I started a new job today at Element! It has been a long-standing ambition of mine to work in Free and Open Source software, and I am very excited to work for a company that is the main developer of a really important project: the Matrix communication …

I’ve been using a 2009 cheesegrater Mac Pro for quite a while now. I bought it used quite a while ago – around 2013 if I remember correctly – and it’s been serving as my main photo/video/general programming workhorse, although the latter ta…

Visual Lint 8.0.4.342 has now been released. This a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0 and includes the following changes: The Eclipse C/C++ project (.cproject) file reader now attempts to take into account buildTools.path and toolcha…

Visual Lint 8.0.4.342 has now been released. This a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0 and includes the following changes: The Eclipse C/C++ project (.cproject) file reader now attempts to take into account buildTools.path and toolcha…

As I mentioned in my post from a few months ago, I had received the temporary fix in the form of the nylon screws and nuts from NZXT. At that point in time, NZXT’s customer support was not able to tell me when to expect the “real” fix…

Update: caching $RUSTUP_HOME and $CARGO_HOME does not work for me – I removed them. When building your project with Gitlab CI or a similar build tool, you can end up spending a lot of time watching your build repeat the same steps over and over. This i…

To print a Maven project’s version number, try: mvn help:evaluate -Dexpression=project.version -q -DforceStdout -q suppresses all output(!) -DforceStdout unsuppresses the actual thing you asked to be printed. I will refrain from commenting on how diffi…

In Emacs, I usually end up enabling the same set of minor modes when I use one of my “writing modes”, namely modes like markdown-mode and org-mode. Enabling a single minor mode automatically is generally pretty easy via the appropriate mode…

I’m by no means an Emacs org-mode power user – in fact, anything but – but I do use org-mode a lot for note taking and also when I need an outliner to try and arrange ideas in a suitable manner. It excels at both, and usually does what I need inc…

The Kotlin docs describe some things you need in your pom.xml to create a project that is a mix of Kotlin and Java code, but there is no complete example, so here is mine: pom.xml:<project> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> &lt;g…

Visual Lint 8.0.3.340 has now been released. This a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0, and includes the following changes: Visual Studio 2022 now appears as a supported project type in VisualLintGui and VisualLintConsole. Added a s…

Visual Lint 8.0.3.340 has now been released. This a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0, and includes the following changes: Visual Studio 2022 now appears as a supported project type in VisualLintGui and VisualLintConsole. Added a s…

My Peertube server is shutting down, so I need to move my videos to another one. The official scripts don’t seem to cover this case very well, so here is what I did. My script fetches videos and their details and uploads them to the new server via the …

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 was released by Microsoft last week. One of the changes included in Preview 2 is the addition of the Visual Studio 2022 specific v143 platform toolset (Preview 1 used the v142 platform toolset from Visual Studio 2019). Sup…

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 was released by Microsoft last week. One of the changes included in Preview 2 is the addition of the Visual Studio 2022 specific v143 platform toolset (Preview 1 used the v142 platform toolset from Visual Studio 2019). Sup…

I’m in the middle of a server redo – right now, I’m setting up a replacement server for my trusty Dell T30, plus it was time to give this web server a new home. When I started the migration from my old WordPress site to the new static site,…

Ever since news broke in April of Microsoft’s plans for Visual Studio 2022 we have been waiting to get our hands on a preview build of the new version. The first public preview was finally released on 17th June, so naturally we have spent the past few …

Ever since news broke in April of Microsoft’s plans for Visual Studio 2022 we have been waiting to get our hands on a preview build of the new version. The first public preview was finally released on 17th June, so naturally we have spent the past few …

My new game, Rightwaves, is out now! It’s a tribute to the great classic R-Type. The entire implementation, including all the graphics, is contained within a single ~5000-line JavaScript file. Why? This is a terrible idea Let me start by saying I do n…

Visual Lint 8.0.2.338 has now been released. This a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0, and includes the following changes: Updated the values of _MSC_VER and _MSC_FULL_VER in the PC-lint Plus compiler indirect file `co-rb-vs2019.lnt …

Visual Lint 8.0.2.338 has now been released. This a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0, and includes the following changes: Updated the values of _MSC_VER and _MSC_FULL_VER in the PC-lint Plus compiler indirect file `co-rb-vs2019.lnt …

On my phone and computer I use WhatsApp, Signal, Slack, Keybase, Discord, IRC, XMPP/Jabber and Element/Matrix. In addition, I occasionally use the messaging features of Mastodon, Twitter and even LinkedIn. I’ve never used Telegram, Line, WeChat, Sessio…

This was quite a challenge, and I nearly gave up, but I managed to write a Snake game in Terraform: Slides: artificialworlds.net/presentations/snake-terraform Source code: gitlab.com/andybalaam/snake Slides source code: gitlab.com/andybalaam/videos-sn…

I have recently started using Kupfer again as my application launcher in Ubuntu MATE, and I found it lacked the ability to suspend the computer. Here is the plugin I wrote to support this. To install it, quit Kupfer, create a directory in your home dir…

PeerTube’s API documentation gives an example of how to upload a video, but it is missing a couple of important aspects, most notably how to provide multiple tags use form-encoded input, so my more complete script is below. Use it like this: # First, m…

Being fed up with the limited configurability of some of the more widely used software used for video conferencig, I have put together a small LD_PRELOAD-able shared library that limits the available resolutions a webcam reports. Have a look at the REA…

Being fed up with the limited configurability of some of the more widely used software used for video conferencig, I have put together a small LD_PRELOAD-able shared library that limits the available resolutions a webcam reports. Have a look at the REA…

Category Theory is an incredibly exciting and challenging area of Maths, that (among other things) can really help us understand what programming is on a fundamental level, and make us better programmers. By far the best explanation of Category Theory…

Visual Lint 8.0.1.337 is a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0. The following changes are included: If the Visual Studio plugin is selected for installation and the Visual Studio Debug Console (VsDebugConsole.exe) is running, the insta…

Visual Lint 8.0.1.337 is a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0. The following changes are included: If the Visual Studio plugin is selected for installation and the Visual Studio Debug Console (VsDebugConsole.exe) is running, the insta…

It’s hard to believe it’s already a year since the release of RFC 8771 (The Internationalized Deliberately Unreadable Network NOtation), which for me at least made me think about IP addresses in a whole new way. So, it seems fitting for the anniversary…

Lots of people are filling in the extremely detailed UK government COVID test result page twice every week. It asks you to fill in a very large list of details, most of which are the same every time, but it doesn’t remember what you typed last time. I …

The first public build of Visual Lint 8.0 has just been uploaded to our website. As of today, Visual Lint 8.0 replaces Visual Lint 7.0 as the current supported Visual Lint version. As such Visual Lint 8.0 licences (as well as upgrades for Visual Lint 6…

The first public build of Visual Lint 8.0 has just been uploaded to our website. As of today, Visual Lint 8.0 replaces Visual Lint 7.0 as the current supported Visual Lint version. As such Visual Lint 8.0 licences (as well as upgrades for Visual Lint 6…

The Internet is full of outdated Python code for doing things with windows, so here is what I got working today in a Python 3, GTK 3 environment. This script toggles the window decorations on the active window on and off. I have it bound to Ctrl+NumPad…

During my work on RFC 8771 The Internationalized Deliberately Unreadable Network NOtation (I-DUNNO) I have come across a number of questions. I am documenting them here so I can send them to the authors and try to improve my understanding of the intent…

At the ACCU Conference last week I learned about RFC 8771 The Internationalized Deliberately Unreadable Network NOtation (I-DUNNO) from Jim Hague, and thought it would be fun to knock up a Rust implementation. The project is here: gitlab.com/andybalaam…

Sent via WriteToThem on Monday 1 March 2021. Dear Ben Spencer, Your experience on the front line in medicine means you are probably much more able than I to imagine the human impact of the situation in Yemen. On Sunday OCHA stated that 16 million peopl…

We’ve all done it. You prepare a new build, install it, start testing before releasing it and then…it crashes. The immediate thought is always “What have we done…?”. Exactly that happened to us recently when testing a Visual Lint build – all we did…

We’ve all done it. You prepare a new build, install it, start testing before releasing it and then…it crashes. The immediate thought is always “What have we done…?”. Exactly that happened to us recently when testing a Visual Lint build – all we did…

I’ve added the first features intended to make Smolpxl games work well on touch interfaces like phones and tablets: I’ve added a button bar at the bottom (and moved the navigation buttons to the top). I’m looking for feedback on this: Does it work on…

I learned quite a bit today about how to think about concurrency in Rust. I was trying to use a Semaphore to limit how many open sockets my TCP listener allowed, and I had real trouble making it work. It either didn’t actually work, allowing any number…

Here is the email I just sent to the organisation I volunteer for. Feel free to adapt and use in your context. Dear [organisation leaders], Much of the tech industry (e.g. [1]) is warning against the use of WhatsApp due to its policy of collecting and …

I just streamed about 40 minutes of me playing Trials Fusion using Owncast. Owncast is a self-hosted alternative to streaming services like Twitch and YouTube live. Normally, you would need to pay for a computer to self-host it on. Owncast suggest this…

I got a Pinephone for Christmas! Here is quick summary of my experience with it. (Originally published on mastodon.) Update on the pinephone as promised. I love it, but I would definitely not recommend expecting to use it as your actual phone. I have …

Maybe everyone knows this already, but for my own clarity, I think there are really two types of computer program: A function: something that you run, and get back a result. Example: a command-line tool like ls A service: something that sits around wa…

Some Java code with bugs Here’s my main method (in Java). Can you guess the bug? Db db = new Db(); Monitoring monitoring = new Monitoring(); Monitoring mon2 = new Monitoring(); Billing billing = new Billing(db, monitoring); monitoring.setDb(db); runMa…

I’m looking into Edge computing at work. By Edge computing I mean running WASM programs in lots and lots of smallish computers in places near to actual people (rather than in huge cloud data centres). I think it’s cool because I love Rust, and Rust is …

Are you writing schema upgrade code? Then I humbly suggest you take the time to write schema downgrade code too. “Why would I do that?” you might well ask, “I won’t ever need to downgrade.” Now, I imagine you’re expecting me to say you actually will ne…

You can make levels for Rabbit Escape!

It’s a very early beta for now, but I’m ready to announce Smolpxl Scores, which provides high-score tables for Free and Open Source games. Each game can have multiple high-score tables – for example, you might want one for each level. At the moment it’…

I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04.1 and chose to keep my existing config files, and my mail server stopped working. In the log I saw: Nov 25 09:07:57 machine dovecot: imap-login: Error: Failed to initialize SSL server context: Can’t load DH parameters: error:…

Letter I sent to my MP today on the overseas aid budget. Let’s not be foolish. Dear Ben Spencer, Please use your influence to persuade the government to maintain our overseas aid budget commitment at 0.7% of national income. I believe that changing th…

I have a unit test that is running slowly, and I want a quick view of what is happening. I can get a nice overview of where the code spends its time by adding this to the JVM arguments: -agentlib:hprof=cpu=samples,lineno=y,depth=3,file=hprof.samples.tx…

is an excellent book by Carlo Rovelli (isbn 978-0-141-98321-9) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. It doesn’t describe where there is a particle but how the particle shows itself to others. It isn’t things that enter into relations…

is an excellent book by Carlo Rovelli (isbn 978-0-141-98321-9) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. It doesn’t describe where there is a particle but how the particle shows itself to others. It isn’t things that enter into relations…

Recently I’ve been having a lot of fun working on Smolpxl, which is a web site featuring some little retro web games that are all Free and Open Source Software. Here’s a sneak preview of the game I am working on: Why do this? Apart from the fact that …

Dear Anneliese Dodds MP,  I have voted for you in the last two elections, as a proxy for my support for Jeremy Corbyn, though your attendance and performance at the hustings arranged by the Stop the War Coalition was a reason for my suppor…

is an excellent book by Jacob Bronowski (isbn 0-7088-2035-2) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. Evolution is the climbing of a ladder from the simple to the complex by steps, each of which is stable in itself. The turning point to…

is an excellent book by Jacob Bronowski (isbn 0-7088-2035-2) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. Evolution is the climbing of a ladder from the simple to the complex by steps, each of which is stable in itself. The turning point to…

is an excellent book by Paul Nurse (isbn 978-1-788451-40-6) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. Cells repair these mutations, but they are not completely successful. If they were, all individuals of a species would be identical and evo…

is an excellent book by Paul Nurse (isbn 978-1-788451-40-6) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. Cells repair these mutations, but they are not completely successful. If they were, all individuals of a species would be identical and evo…

Welcome! We are going to code a whole snake game. It’s going to look like this: It doesn’t matter if you have never written any code before: I am going to try and explain everything from scratch. I’m going to assume you are using a Raspberry Pi. but y…

is an excellent book by Yuval Noah Harari (isbn 978-0-099-59008-8) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. Whereas chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food. Since long inte…

is an excellent book by Yuval Noah Harari (isbn 978-0-099-59008-8) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. Whereas chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food. Since long inte…

is an excellent book by Daniel Coyle (isbn 978-1-847-94127-5) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. Much of the connection happens around the dinner table, as Popovich is obsessed with food and wine. One misconception about highly succ…

is an excellent book by Daniel Coyle (isbn 978-1-847-94127-5) As usual I’m going to quote from a few pages. Much of the connection happens around the dinner table, as Popovich is obsessed with food and wine. One misconception about highly succ…

I love simple games: playing them and writing them. But, it can be overwhelming getting started in the complex ecosystems of modern technology. So, I am writing the Smolpxl library, which is some JavaScript code that makes it quite simple to write simp…

I was looking for the right way to make a “Share This”-style button for my tiny games site Smolpxl, and I found shareon which worked exactly the way I wanted (load the JavaScript and call a function to display the buttons, with no privacy concerns), an…