This blog is running on a tiny Linux VPS with 1GB RAM, 1 CPU Core and a 25GB SSD with Debian 10 installed. Thanks to a proper WordPress setup this VPS will handle itself just fine even with substantial traffic. This article describes my setup. Moreover, it costs me only $5 per month. That’s like […]
When you move content, change domains or create aliases on the web, you often use a redirect, like a URL rewrite in your webserver config, to tell browsers that the link should point to something else — but what if you want to move an API that handles POST requests? URL rewrites are useful, because […]
So you are sitting at your home, you stacked your fridge, you have your home supplies (toilet paper!), some books, some games and the things to keep you entertained during the quarantine. You can’t really move outside, more so if the situation gets worse. However, your money can. You can actively protect your money from […]
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Hello world!
Welcome to my blog. It’s not my first, but I hope it’s my last. 10 years ago, when everything on the Web 2.0 was new and exciting, I started a blog. After about a year I let it die & moved on to different things. Now I think it was a mistake. It would have […]
UTF-8 is the best way to deal with text, and I hope everyone can agree with that. Anyway, while Perl handles any character beautifully within variables, things get messy when you want to save and load these characters into a file, for example. God forbid it’s JSON, then you’re in for a wild ride. But […]
When you toss a coin, you place it in a certain starting position on your fingers, you apply a certain force with your thumb to the particular edge of the coin, it starts rotating within a specific air pressure and movement, only to fall on a surface with a given elasticity and friction. An algorithm, […]
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Electric cars & global balance of power
An anecdote has it that during the Industrial Revolution, electric cars lost to petrol over the range of travel — many cheap workers had to be transported to the factories and back, from rural areas. Electric transportation didn’t work outside of big cities, hence production & research focused on the more universal combustion engines. Fast-forward 100 years, […]
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Don’t use IDs in CSS
This article originally appeared on my first blog, f055.net In CSS, you can assign styles to elements in 3 ways: either by a direct reference to an HTML tag, or by a class attribute, or finally, by the id attribute. Each of these approaches has it’s pros and cons, but in this article, I’ll highlight why you should avoid […]
I wrote this paper in 2008 for an ethics class at Oxford University Computing Laboratory. The original pdf is available here. Autonomous weapon (AW) systems are a new and rapidly developing branch of warfare industry. However, autonomous weapons are not devices that belong strictly to the XIX century, in fact some authors date the birth of […]
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Threats to privacy
I wrote this paper in 2008 for an ethics class at Oxford University Computing Laboratory. The original pdf is available here. The rapid development of computer industry amazed everybody — both the IT experts, government, and society. This unexpected evolution of hardware, explosion of various software and growth of the Internet (in 2000-2007 between 100% […]