PNGtools 1.2
This is just a delightfully retconned note to say that PNGtools 1.2 was released on this date.
PNGtools 1.1
This is just a delightfully retconned note to say that PNGtools 1.1 was released on this date.
I have a new respect for gitlab admins
It is hard to transition from one gitlab machine to another, especially if you have a stupidly large OCI registry using the new metadata database. If you happen to need to dump the metadata postgresql database from an omnibus container, may I comment this pattern to you: $ docker exec -u registry -it gitlab /bin/bash $ cd /var/opt/gitlab/postgresql/ $ pg_dump -U registry -h /var/opt/gitlab/postgresql registry > registry.sql That's an hour of my life I'm never getting back right there.
I think I just experienced my first hallucinated security vulnerability
Yesterday my time I experienced what I think was my first LLM hallucinating a responsible security disclosure. Honestly it was no curl situation, but I think it was still interesting. The bug is on launchpad.net if you're interested in taking a look. I think in total I spent a couple of hours on the whole thing, with the hardest bit being trying to understand what the author was claiming. Fundamentally they had conflated being able to change the state of memory and other hardware inside their virtual machine with changing the state of those things for the hypervisor. They did not seem to understand that the video memory of the guest was not the video memory of the host for example. That said, I tried to be nice and I hope my replies were perhaps a little useful to them.
Ancient code, mental health, and AI tooling
In the early 2000s I was in my mid 20s, working a dead end job as a Windows programmer, and had two very young kids who were not super good at sleeping. I had worked as what I would now call a systems programmer for the Australian patents and trade marks office for a few years in the late 1990s doing low level image manipulation code -- we had a for the time quite impressive database of scanned images of patents and trademarks, and sometimes we need to do things like turn them into PDFs or import a weird made up image format from the Japanese patents office. So when you combined those things -- previous experience in a field I found interesting, a job I did not currently find interesting, and a lot of spare time very early in the morning because the kids wouldn't sleep but my wife really did need a rest -- you end up with a Michael who spent a lot of time writing image manipulation code on his own time. Even back then I was pretty into Open Source, so I released what I think was probably the first Open Source PDF generation library,…
PNGtools 1.0
This is just a delightfully retconned note to say that PNGtools 1.0 was released on this date.
Talking to people about AI is hard
I am not entirely sure what makes the AI debate so polarizing, although I suspect it has something to do with feeling threatened by a changing landscape. What I can say with certainty is that I find having a nuanced conversation about AI with people often difficult. It seems to me that people fall into two polar opposite camps — those who thing AI is completely great and that we should fire all the programmers and creatives; and those who think that AI is all bad and we should go backwards in time to a place before it existed.
Thinking about things
I am on vacation, as I am sure many people are at this time of year. This means the usual things for me — cleaning up the home office, this time in the most annoying manner I can think of; playing with personal projects I haven’t had time for during the year; and just… resting. Part of resting for me is reading, which is how I happened up this excellent blog post about how the expectations placed upon Silicon Valley engineering managers have changed over the last couple of decades.
Initial thoughts on Creality CFS 3D printing
I’ve had a Creality CFS upgrade for my K1 Max sitting on my workbench for probably a month waiting for me to install it. Part of that delay is that I knew it would take a while to install, and I am glad I waited.
I finally got around to doing that yesterday, and I have thoughts… First off, the Creality installation documentation is ok, but not great. I would have been in a lot more pain without Thinkering with Jerd’s tutorial video. So thank you to Jerd, whoever you may be. I also agree with Jerd that the extensive use of hot glue on connectors is super annoying. While I suspect it makes sense in terms of ensuring that devices work when they arrive to a customer, it makes upgrades super annoying and surely there is a better way. Overall I think I spent at least six hours on the install.
A self drive computer science degree, 2025 edition
What is you want to study computer science, but can’t afford university fees? Or, studied computer science a really long time ago and want to see what’s changed? Or just like learning stuff? Well, lots of schools now post their lectures on YouTube, so its entirely possible to construct a zero cost “self driving degree”, as long as you’re good enough at Canva to make your own certificate at the end. I consider this list incomplete, but in the end I decided I’d post the things from 2025 that I’d found and liked. I can always do an updated version later.