At the Fivium Christmas party this year I got given a Strandbeest kit in the Secret Santa. I thought this was excellent and had enough fun building it and playing with it that I figured it was good enough to make a quick post about before closing out the year. Below is a picture of the box I unwrapped (along with a kazoo, but that’s another story entirely) and it instantly made me want to go home and put it together.…

Another year working for Fivium, another Fivium Hack Day. The format of the Hack Day at Fivium is now fairly well settled so the organising was much as it was for previous years. Unfortunately this year I wasn’t working in the main office to do the bulk of the organisational work but thankfully there were other people more than willing to do the arduous work of sending out a couple of emails and seeing what prizes people might want.…

My girlfriend works for a company that was having a cake making contest recently. This company has its own registered tartan (yes, individual tartan patterns can be registered) and a logo of an eagle which looks pretty cool and we figured would look even better all made out of icing. A quick google for “tartan icing” reveals minimal decent results and what is there is mostly just printed patterns rather than hand-made.…

As with most typical geeks sport usually isn’t one of my main interests. One of the few sports I do enjoy is Formula One however with its well designed and engineered cars, abundance of technology in the cars and behind the scenes and the general noise and spectacle of the sport. After watching it on television for many years now I thought it was high time that I actually went along to a race to see it in person so this summer myself and my girlfriend went along to the British grand prix in Silverstone for 6 days to enjoy the camping and racing.…

I have been thinking about interfacing with my Game Boy for a while via the link cable but had no way, other than destroying a cable, to connect to it. Eventually I stumbled upon a blog post where someone had written about creating a link cable breakout board. Unfortunately they didn’t distribute their CAD files but I figured now would be a good time for me to learn how to create my own PCBs as it’s something I’ve never even attempted before.…

Last summer I wrote about 3D printing a replacement gear for a mechanical device in my office at Fivium. This topic came up recently while talking to one of the directors during the company’s 10th birthday party and I mentioned how it was a fairly simple thing to do, fun and how much I’d like to do it more yet the cost of paying a third party to print is a high barrier for personal projects.…

I bought a Leap Motion years ago and despite a few hack day projects here and there it doesn’t get much use aside from gathering dust in one of my cupboards. During lunch with a friend we got talking about 3D scanning tools I figured I’d see if the Leap could do it as aside from a 1st generation Kinect I don’t have anything which has decent stereo cameras.…

Rust is all the rage these days and it seems that barely a day goes by without a post on Hacker News extolling the virtues of Rust: blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety. After what feels like decades of reading all this hype I figured it would be a good idea to jump aboard that hype train and try my own hand at making something with Rust that would take advantage of the features Rust gives you as a developer.…

This past Christmas (2015) I was given a Konstruktor camera. The Konstruktor is a Do-It-Yourself kit of a fully-functional 35mm SLR camera which comes in a fairly flat box with all parts, except the mirror assembly, requiring assembly. The Konstruktor kit was created and sold by Lomography, an organisation dedicated to experimental and creative photography, with a fairly heavy focus on analog photography. Building the camera was quite fun and only took an hour or so, with some minor confusion around the gearing system for winding film but no real problems.…

In my previous post, Contributing to iText, I talked about my use of a great Java library called iText that lets you create and read PDF files. This is a post explaining the project, Adventurer, that I was working on which uses iText. All the way back in December 2012 I backed a Kickstarter project by Ryan North for a choose your own adventure version of Hamlet called To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure.…

Recently I’ve been working on a coding project in my spare time where I stumbled upon a bug in an open source library I was using. As I’m a software developer who works on a few open source projects already I figured I should investigate and try to fix the problem myself and contribute back. As some people can be wary of contributing to an established open source project I figured this post detailing what I went through may encourage others to take part too.…

In my previous post I wrote about organising the Fivium Hack Day 2015, this post will be about how the event went, what people created and who ended up going home with prizes. After all the organising we had around 15-20 staff taking part, which for a company of 40-50 isn’t bad considering not everyone in the company is a developer. Everyone taking part was a software developer or support tech, but as we started on a Friday at lunchtime we did get some idea discussion with some of the staff from other roles in the company such as software testers, marketing and company directors.…

Some people may think that organising a hack day is just a matter of picking a date, sending an email invite and hoping the internet holds up but actually there’s quite a a lot of things to do if you want to make a hack day fun. Back in February 2014 I organised the inaugural Fivium Hack Day, you can read about how the event turned out in my post Fivium Hack Day in April 2014.…

A couple of months ago something broke in my office. Typically in a modern office, especially at a software development company, when something breaks it is software with bugs. For a change it turned out to be a hardware failure, and not hardware like an SSD or their Air Con (which happens to frequently break) but a gear inside a large piece of archaic office machinery. After dismantling the original mechanism we noticed one of 4 main gears had some teeth missing.…

One of my fellow developers at work recently started complaining that he was getting an alert showing up on his page on a development system. Obviously this raised our XSS-aware eyebrows and investigations soon started. Thanks to the way JQuery subsumes event handlers it can sometimes be very tricky to find out what exactly was triggering the alert, and without finding out what triggers the alert you can’t find the problem and fix it.…

Recently I was working with a C# tool and found it didn’t quite do what I was expecting. Knowing that C# is fairly similar to Java in terms of compiling down to bytecode and running on a language VM I figured I might have a go at disassembling the C# executable and attempting to patch what I needed. As a Java developer who occasionally has to deal with bugs in third party, closed-source, libraries I have become fairly adept at disassembling code to figure out what’s going on and potentially patch it to have the behaviour I need.…

This is just a quick one but it’s something I forget every time and always forget where to look. I deal with lots of Java software at work and on our development network we have our own self-signed SSL certificate which we use for self-hosted internal tools. This can cause issues when bits of Java software need to communicate with those self-signed SSL using tools. This post is here to explain my common use-case and a common pitfall I have when doing it.…

The work I do for Fivium is mostly developing a Java servlet called FOXopen which is a stateful web framework that typically runs on top of Tomcat. Unfortunately, as with all software, it occasionally crashes and hangs (typically using 100% CPU stuck in a GC loop). When a Java application has hung because of underlying memory issues the best way to investigate the cause would be to dump all the memory, a Heap Dump.…

QCon is A practitioner-driven conference focused on facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in enterprise software development, or at least that’s what their Twitter account says. This is a post about some of the interesting talks I saw at QCon London 2015. I’ve been before, in 2013, and had a great time. The talks at QCon are always some of the most varied of any conference I’ve been to.…

I’ve been typing on keyboards since I was around 5, but the hardware was never something I considered and I can’t even remember which brand of keyboard we had on our first PC back in the early 90’s. Recently I have been converted from using thin laptop-style keyboards to mechanical keyboards and thought I’d write a post with some information about why I switched and what’s different for me.…

Until recently I had heard of security flaw finding competitions and websites and assumed they were only for the hacker elite. As someone who spends his days creating software I’d not really looked in to them, thinking that I wouldn’t be able to find anything that hadn’t been found before. However thanks to a bit of serendipity and some great people working on support I managed to report a security vulnerability and earn myself some money through a website called Bugcrowd as well as getting an extra bonus for finding the issue during OWASP Bug Week 2014.…

As you can probably tell from this blog, I go to a fair amount of hack days and coding events in London. I like these events as it gives you a completely open playing field to work on pretty much any project you like and use any tools and languages you want. Unlike regular work where we have technical debt, paying customers and Gantt charts. While talking to people in the office at Fivium, the company I work for, about these events sometimes people show an interest and come along, as Matt and Stephen did with Music Hack Day 2013.…

Music Hack Day (MHD) is an international 24-hour event where programmers, designers and artists come together to conceptualize, build and demo the future of music. Software, hardware, mobile, web, instruments, art - anything goes as long as it’s music related. I have been before, as I’m sure you all remember from last years blog post Transcribertron is the name of the software I worked on with a couple of Fivium colleagues for London Music Hack Day 2013.…

Back in October 2013 I went to Battlehack along with 3 colleagues (Ben Basson, James Atkin and Aled Lewis) from Fivium. The hack day was initially advertised in early 2013 and when we signed up in March they hadn’t even figured out a venue. But the lure of a genuine metal battle axe and a possible $100,000 top prize was enough to make the early registration worth it. We went in not really knowing what the requirements for hacks were; there wasn’t much information on the site apart from making “something for your city”.…

Hacked.io was a London based hack day I went to in July, along with 500 other developers, artists and general creative people. The event was one of the biggest of its type that I’ve been to before. It was held at indigO2 in what was once the Millenium Dome. There wasn’t any general aim like other hack events I’ve been to, Music Hack Day / Accessibility Hack, instead it was more of a “Make whatever you like, as long as it’s cool” atmosphere.…

CPU-S is the first project I have re-written from my old website for this new one. The original version was created on a whim after having a module on my course at Loughborough University in my first year. When going over basic CPU internals and architectures our lecturer, Dr. Daniel Reidenbach, came up with a simplified, idealised CPU and accompanying system to help illustrate his points over the course of the module.…

What is/was a Chumby anyway? Chumby was an open source hardware project by Andrew “bunnie” Huang (mostly known as the MIT student who made his own hardware to help crack the original Xbox security) that was meant to put all the great promise of the web right by your bedside or on your desk. It was an ARM based linux box with a 3.5" resistive touch screen, decent speaker, WiFi, Accelerometer, microphone and flash support.…

Music Hack Day (MHD) is an international 24-hour event where programmers, designers and artists come together to conceptualize, build and demo the future of music. Software, hardware, mobile, web, instruments, art - anything goes as long as it’s music related. Barbertron is the name of the software I worked on with a friend for London Music Hack Day 2012. It’s software that takes in audio and (tries) to make it sound like a barbershop quartet.…

Last August I went along to the London stop on the Adobe Create the Web Tour at the Vue cinema in Leicester square. The day was mostly filled with Adobe showing off their new web-focused tools and techniques aimed at creating content for a modern web. Basically no Flash or action script but a slew of Javascript, CSS and HTML5 instead. The event was well organised and pretty much all their new tools impressed me and inspired ideas in my head about how I could find uses for them in my workflow.…

Well, after many years of planning and talking about it I’ve finally started moving my online presence from the old palmnet moniker to the new palmr name. The old palmnet.me.uk site has served me well, though it has been through many styles over the years. Initially from 2004-2006 is was a horrible mass of static black pages with white text, flash intro files with blaring music and even bravehost widgets.…