Paul

I have noticed a rift develop in the programming community recently, between those who think AI is great and will gradually get rid of a lot of programming work, and those who think it is overhyped, unethical and environmentally destructive (I am in the latter camp).

It feels like the Brexit / Remain rift, where I simply cannot understand how the other side doesn't see it from my point of view, and they think the same about mine (I know because they've told me).

😢

Problem with political turmoil is that one side of me loves it because I'm a massive politics nerd, and the other side hates it because I would quite like some stability.

I never refer to the situation as a circus though, because a circus is a collection of talented, hard-working individuals co-operating to produce a polished final product.

#ukpol

Not sure if this is even possible with ActivityPub, but a really useful feature would be to see how many of the people I follow have blocked someone when viewing their profile (just a count, not their names). If it's more than 1, they're probably not someone worth following.

I completely disagree with this article suggesting that Manchester is the UK's second city.

London is the second city, Manchester is the first.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8r4e106z43o

#Manchester

Just had a private Covid vaccination. If anyone in England (and possibly the rest of the UK) is looking to get one, Tesco are cheaper than Boots (£90 vs £98.25), have more pharmacies offering it, and seem to be using Pfizer or Moderna (I've had both in the past from them). You might have to speak to a specific person at the pharmacy as only one knew how bookings worked and only one was qualified to give the vaccine.

If I had a pound for every time I've said to a potential client that I need to look at the code to see what state it's in, and they responded 'oh the current developer told me it's great and documented and in version control', I would be able to retire by now.

(the amount of times where the current developer is right is probably a single digit percentage)

I am currently reading the 5th edition of Charles Petzold's Programming Windows, which covers up to NT 5.0 (it was written before Windows 2000 was named). It is very nostalgic and takes me back to a day when things were much simpler, but you also had to have a deeper understanding of the architecture.

Part of the reason for reading it is to possibly write / support legacy C apps for old versions of Windows.

All editions are freely and legally available:

https://www.charlespetzold.com/books/

I got an email this morning notifying me that UKUUG Ltd has now been (voluntarily) struck off at Companies House, bringing an end to over 35 years of conferences and other events.

I have written a goodbye post on my personal blog:

https://www.roguetory.org.uk/archives/2026/03/11/goodbye-ukuug-floss-uk/

#UKUUG

LetsEncrypt stopping issuance is a reminder of why we shouldn't be reliant on a single service for all of our certificates, no matter how good they are. Same goes for everyone sitting behind Cloudflare or reliant on a single AWS region.

Happy Making Tax Digital Day to all those freelancers who are now compelled to comply with this meaningless additional red tape for no advantage to anyone.

(I object to the name in particular, as it implies I wasn't keeping my records digitally before, when in fact I've done so for 20 years and only filed online)

TIL: Gibraltar does not have, and has never had, a waste water treatment plant, and instead discharges everything into the sea.

Makes United Utilities look like Captain Planet and the Planeteers in comparison.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/06/uk-territory-gibraltar-dumps-raw-sewage-mediterranean

Things I regularly find challenging to get prospective clients to understand with software development:

1. It takes far more time than you expect.

2. It costs far more than you expect (a bespoke web app for example is thousands of pounds, if not tens of thousands).

3. There is no such thing as a '2 minute fix'.

4. Companies like eBay, AutoTrader etc. have teams of people like me (no I can't clone their site in 1 month for £200).

#business #freelance #freelancing

Doing a bit more Rust learning this afternoon. Nowhere near ready to be let loose on real projects, or even to tackle Advent of Code, but it is nice to be learning something for fun rather than for work.

#RustLang

I find it very amusing that in publishing details of sites it intends to take action against for not complying with the Online Safety Act, Ofcom is providing users with a handy directory of adult sites that you can browse without age assurance or disguising your location.

#OnlineSafetyAct

Today's personal programming challenge: working out how to traverse a directory structure in Go and do the following:

1. If a directory, create the same path under another path (e.g. content/mydir -> output/mydir).

2. If a file, either copy it as-is to the same path (e.g. content/my.pdf -> output/my.pdf) or run it through a function to convert it (e.g. content/my.md -> output/my.html).

This for an extremely simple static site generator, as I'm fed up with Hugo.

#golang #hugo

Whilst everywhere else is breaking for Reform or the Greens, there's an unexpected result in my ward: Wife of our Labour MP loses her seat to the Workers Party of Britain (George Galloway's party).

#ukpol

Slow handclaps for the police car parked to block road access due to an emergency, not realising that this also stops the fire engine getting down the road (they have left the car so can't even move it quickly)

I love this story about the name 'marmalade' being dropped (spoiler: it's not), not only because it infuriates parts of the media I don't like, but also because it demonstrates again how Yes (Prime) Minister has an episode for most political news stories (this time it's Party Games, where the predecessor to the EU wants to BAN THE BRITISH SAUSAGE).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/04/breakfast-reset-will-marmalade-really-be-renamed-in-post-brexit-food-deal

I do find it weird that lots of open source geeks are saying that Windows 12 will result in people potentially moving to Linux. What's far more likely is they'll continue running an unsupported version of Windows 10 or below.

Been having a rubbish time with new enquiries recently - 3 big projects didn't go ahead because of the costs - but I did receive another nice compliment on how clear and plain my language is on my How I Work page from a new client with a small project that looks likely to go ahead:

https://www.phpdeveloper.org.uk/how-i-work/

#business #freelance

Currently working on my talk on the German Occupation of the Channel Islands. One of the hard things about wanting to know EVERYTHING about the subject is that I have to stop myself getting distracted and buying all the books referenced by the books I already have.

#history

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk I keep meaning to go back to Alderney, and visit Jersey and Guernsey for the first time. I should probably just book something otherwise I'll keep putting it off!

One of the book / film clubs I'm in is passing round the bowl for donations to cover the Meetup fees. I put in a higher amount than anyone else to date, and everyone since has paid that amount too. Feels like a game of poker...

New business blog post: Why I work remotely (the advantages far outweigh the downside of not having colleagues to talk to, even though I miss that sometimes).

https://www.phpdeveloper.org.uk/why-i-work-remotely/

#business #freelance #freelancing

Today's challenge: Recalculating the aggregate figures for 6+ years worth of data and then comparing them to check that nothing has changed. Thankfully MariaDB makes it easy to copy a table (CREATE t1_copy AS (SELECT * FROM t1)) and then compare using EXCEPT.

Will write this up as a blog post in the coming weeks.

#sql #php #MariaDB

I really wish Mediawiki had the equivalent of wp-cli - having to manually download, extract, and run maintenance commands is a bit of a faff and I'm lazy.

(I should probably work out a way of automating this, it's written in PHP and the instructions are the same each time)

#PHP #Mediawiki

Our local market has a mixed attitude towards payment methods.

Some stalls don't take cards. Okay, I can understand you have a monthly fee and a per-transaction fee so maybe not worthwhile.

The ones I don't understand offer card payment but prefer cash because "it's cheaper". But every business bank will charge you for paying in cash, plus the fraud risk lies with you (card payments with chip + PIN generally lie with the bank), you might give the wrong change, theft by employees etc.

TIL: The new Masters of the Universe film is slated for release this June. I haven't been excited about a cinematic release for ages but my hopes are high for this one. Cast looks pretty good, although I'm not sure Nicholas Galitzine has the right build for He-Man, and Frank Langella is a tough act to follow as Skeletor.

(I absolutely love the 1987 film, it's corny and cheesy but I gave it 9/10 at film club)

#films #MastersOfTheUniverse

Previous boost on F-Droid directors: If anyone wants to be nominated (though you can also nominate yourself) or helped through the process or get feedback on what you plan to send, you can DM / email me to ask. I haven't been involved in this organisation but I have been a director of a lot of organisations (and am still a director of one).

(I don't think I will stand as the board could do with a bit of diversity that I won't add)

https://f-droid.org/en/2026/02/26/board-of-directors-nominations.html

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk Working on my talk on the German Occupation of the Channel Islands, and probably a lot of walking.

Consequences of this:

1. Privilege waived: This means that discussions between lawyer and client could be made available to third parties (normally they're not, that's what privilege is for).

2. SRA referral: The solicitor uploading the documents, or their supervisor who has signed off on the work, could be referred to the regulator. The regulator has a range of sanctions, up to and including a ban from working as a solicitor.

3. ICO referral: Embarrassing but the ICO is fairly toothless.

Next film club choice is The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals. Mildly disappointed that the main character is called Paul, given that I like musicals...

Thursday 21st May at 19:00 UK time (UTC+1). Remote (using Teams) so anyone can join - we have people from across the UK and even the US. Message me if you would like to come - we don't share it widely due to gate-crashers in the past.

#FilmClub

Downside to being really keen on writing documentation: Nearly all the documents in Google Drive are owned by me by default as the creator. Not a problem until I wanted to transfer them all to another account, and you can only do one at a time...

Has anyone got an example of a skills audit template for developers that they've found useful? I am about to do this for a team for the first time and would find a template useful as a starting point.

I think I have got a working function that will convert a start of month date and an ISO week to the start date of that week, even when week 1 of year X starts in year X-1 (effectively converting calendar years to ISO years, which are nearly always the same, except for the edge cases where they're not).

This should make filtering and ordering *much* easier on a project that works mainly on a weekly basis (scheduling deliveries) but also needs monthly and 'last X weeks' reporting.

#MySQL

Today's fun challenge: Fixing all the issues that arise when you move a project from a shared hosting provider with very few restrictions to a VPS with a lot more restrictions (all sensible ones like 'you can't insert into a table whilst not providing values for NOT NULL columns with no DEFAULT').

115 tables need to be fixed...

I mentioned this to one of my friends recently, but I should make it clear to others: if you're applying for something, or writing a dissertation / thesis and you want it proof-read, I'm happy to do this. Just be prepared for a detailed breakdown of any queries I have. 😄

Can anyone recommend a privacy focused camera for recording video? The features I want are:

1. Local only storage
2. Remote access only from the same network via a web UI
3. Manufacturer makes money from hardware not subscriptions
4. Can set schedules for auto recording
5. Free standing

Something that runs open source would be ideal, but that might be too much.

Search is dire nowadays and I also want to know what people have used, rather than whoever has paid to be at the top of results.