The First Post on a new Blog Stack!

This now constitutes v3.0 of my personal website and sounding board. It’s been a long journey from some bloated and slow bootstrap template that I picked up and cannibalised, to a bespoke website written in Pure CSS with a Wordpress Blog component - to the current (as at 25 Aug 15) iteration. Currently the site is hosted off github pages. It’s Jekyll with Foundation 5 at the core, I’m using markdown and liquid to handle blog posts....

August 25, 2015 · 2 min · Alex

Blood Donations

I’m donating blood today. It’ll be my 20th donation. Probably around 4 were whole blood, another 6 were plasma, the remaining 10 being apheresis aka platelet donations. I’m O- so my blood is quite useful, it can be given to anyone. Mostly it goes to newborns. That’s always been a pretty cool thing for me, but when my own little one was born it made things quite a bit more important....

May 27, 2015 · 2 min · Alex

Update 2 :: I need sleep edition

On Thursday my son, Tobias, will be one month old. The days are getting longer but the weeks are getting shorter! I’ve been neglecting this platform, but haven’t forgotten about it. At Uni, exams times are approaching, I’ll be posting all of my revision notes on the blog - to keep me honest and keep everything searchable. In the time between posts I’ve been crazy busy. Juggling Uni with work and having a son, while still doing pet projects for my own learning....

May 4, 2015 · 3 min · Alex

Update re lack of posts

I have been offline for a long long time. Here’s the situation. Last Friday, my wife Laura and I found out she is 34 weeks pregnant with a potentially life threatening complication, forcing her to remain in Hospital. We have been overwhelmed with the generosity of our family and friends, we are truly grateful for all the love and support we have received thus far. I have been meaning to write up all my notes and use this blog for revision....

March 24, 2015 · 2 min · Alex

Scrambler Program Update 2

I’ve decided that it’s not accurate to call the python project a crypto project..yet. Initially it will be a text scrambler of some kind. I’m also taking a bit of time off the project to work on making sure my employment docs (CV etc) are all up to date for the coming year. You never know when you might need something like that on short notice. I also bought a great book today with a bunch of coding exercises in it....

February 3, 2015 · 1 min · Alex

Simple Crypto Program Integrity Call

Okay, so it’s not really crypto. At least not yet. I started writing the GUI in tkinter, but have decided to try a newer tech called Kivy - which allegedly has multitouch support and other such features I don’t really need. Neat! Also, started reading ‘Cracking the Code Interview’ - this book makes me appreciate how little in know about interviewing! I’ve got a lot of work to do if I want to bum rush the bigger software firms!...

February 2, 2015 · 1 min · Alex

Why Hash Functions are cool

I had a bit of down time after work today so I thought I would go over some hash functions. I never really got hash tables. Like truly understood them. I could see the purpose but where was the justification for them being everywhere? Fortunately Uni is exactly the time and place to be smashed down for having silly thoughts like that! Hashing is used for a whole lot of really useful, really cool stuff....

January 22, 2015 · 2 min · Alex

On fiddling with DNS

Note to self: Be patient when changing domain name. This site was down for most of the day today because I was an impatient prick. Be patient!

January 19, 2015 · 1 min · Alex