Author Archives: Justin

Maciej Ceglowski asks for a massive surveillance program to defeat COVID-19. However, as I mentioned on twitter — there IS an alternative, privacy-preserving approach, which is what is being done in Singapore with their TraceTogether app. In summary, everyone carries a phone running an app which has an anonymized a random ID, scans local Bluetooth […]

Here’s a quick tip for people using Huawei or Honor phones. Huawei recently released EMUI version 9.1.0.326 as an OTA update, which I applied once it was offered as an upgrade option. Once I installed that OS upgrade, however, I noticed that whenever I listened to music or podcasts using a Bluetooth headset or stereo […]

I came across this cocktail in Pals, in Catalonia, in 30 degree heat, a few weeks back — I saw it on the menu at the cafe in the square of the old town, and had to give it a go. It’s incredible. Basically, it’s lager mixed with a lemon granita — like a beer […]

It’s been a while since I wrote a long-form blog post here, but this post on the Swrve Engineering blog is worth a read; it describes how we use SSD caching on our EC2 instances to greatly improve EBS throughput.

Man sues RMV after driver’s license mistakenly revoked by automated anti-terror false positive: John H. Gass hadn’t had a traffic ticket in years, so the Natick resident was surprised this spring when he received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles informing him to cease driving because his license had been revoked. […] […]

So, after just over 3 and a half years, I’m leaving Amazon. It’s been great fun — I can honestly say, even with my code being used by hundreds of millions of users in SpamAssassin and elsewhere, I hadn’t really had to come to grips with the distributed systems problems that an Amazon-scale service involves. […]

Reminder to Dublin-based readers — next week, Amazon (my employers) will be putting on Under the Hood at Amazon, billed as ‘A night of Beer, Pizza and Cloud Computing for Software Developers’. I’ll be speaking at it. It’s partially a recruiting event, but even if you’re not looking for a new job, please come along. […]

I’m uncomfortable voting for David Norris for President. Here’s why. In November last year, he was a key voice in a Senate debate on the topic of “Protection of Intellectual Property Rights”, where he quoted heavily from the flawed judgement by Mr. Justice Peter Charleton in the Warner, Universal, Sony BMG and EMI vs UPC […]

It’s pretty common for apps to require “configuration” — external files which can contain settings to customise their behaviour. Ideally, apps shouldn’t require configuration, and this is always a good aim. But in some situations, it’s unavoidable. In the abstract, it may seem attractive to use a fully-fledged programming language as the language to express […]

Happy new year! Or maybe not. Doh. Over a year ago, Lee Maguire noticed that a contributed SpamAssassin rule, FH_DATE_PAST_20XX, was naively written — simply to match any date in the year 2010 or later — and would start to false-positive on all mail in 14 months. We made the trivial fix to avoid this […]

Found here: On Wednesday 20 May 2009, speaking at a parliamentary Justice Committee debating his new blasphemy law, Dermot Ahern joked that people were making blasphemous comments about him, and he compared his own purity to that of the baby Jesus. So we have a Justice Minister joking about himself being blasphemed, at a parliamentary […]