Read more over at the Living Computer Museum’s restoration page.
17 Nov 2019
16 Nov 2019
UNIX turns 50 this year which means 7th edition Research UNIX is that 40.
15 Nov 2019
Background At RetailMeNot, we are excited by the promise of automating visual regression tests with Applitools . In this post, I’ll show how to make writing Applitools tests for Android a cinch. We’ll start with the official integration guide recommendations and then use JUnit and Kotlin features to make our tests concise and maintainable. This post assumes the reader is…
What is a balance sheet is & what does it tell you about your financial health?
14 Nov 2019
CVE-2019-1378: Exploiting an Access Control Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in Windows 10 Update Assistant (WUA)
BohopsIntroduction Windows 10 is an incredibly feature rich Operating System (OS). In the last four years, the innovative folks at Microsoft have continued to introduce and expand functionality as well as improve and integrate security features in its flagship OS. On the second Tuesday of each month, many of us that live in the Windows […]
Today we are releasing WebThings Gateway 0.10. This new release comes with support for thermostats and smart locks, as well as an updated add-ons system including extension add-ons, which enable developers to extend the gateway user interface. We’ve also added localisation settings so that you can choose your country, language, time zone and unit preferences. The post Thermostats, Locks and…
13 Nov 2019
Earlier this year we decided to reduce the amount of unsolicited notification permission prompts people receive as they move around the web using the Firefox browser. This is an intrinsic part of Mozilla's commitment to putting people first when they are online. In preparation, we ran a series of studies and experiments to understand how to improve the user experience…
It’s been a while since I’ve ranted on this blog, but I was recently challenged by a reddit thread to write about this topic, so here goes… So, you’re writing a service that produces some JSON from your database model. What do you need? Let’s see: STOP IT No, seriously. Just stop it right there! … Continue reading Stop Mapping…
PubNub Chat SDK provides flexible chat APIs and reference applications, making adding powerful in-app chat to any mobile or web application easy.
Plummeting data costs, smartphone accessibility, and consumer trends = chat, chat and more chat. But it won’t be easy.
12 Nov 2019
This week I gave a talk on Hacking Holiday Lights at Kenna Security and here is the promised accompanying blog that outlines the hardware and software I demoed for easy reference for anyone who wants to build their own holiday lights. Controller Boards I looked at a bunch of different boards that ended up having a variety of technical hurdles…
With the ongoing move towards “infrastructure-as-code” and similar notions, there’s been an ongoing increase in the number and popularity of declarative configuration management tools. This post attempts to lay out my mental model of the conceptual architecture and internal layering of such tools, and some wishes I have for how they might work differently, based on this model. Background: declarative…
Announcing the Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure by default, composable future for WebAssembly
Mozilla HacksLin Clark introduces the Bytecode Alliance, and uses Code Cartoon illustrations to share their vision of a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default, fixing cracks in today’s software foundations. Based on advances in the emerging WebAssembly community, founding members of the Alliance - Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat - believe we can make this vision real. And we…
How to get your customers to pay by Direct Debit.
In the cutthroat world of eCommerce, chatbots can unlock the transformative growth in sales for your business.
11 Nov 2019
If this is the first blog post about V-Drum Explorer you’ve read, see the first post in this series for the background. In this post we’ll look at the MIDI interface I use in V-Drum Explorer to send and receive configuration information. MIDI basics (Apologies to anyone who really knows their stuff about MIDI – … Continue reading V-Drum Explorer:…
You probably already know that by default in spring transactions are rolled back only for runtime exceptions. When a checked exception is thrown from your code and you don’t explicitly tell spring that it should rollback the transaction then it get’s committed. In this post, I’m going to create simple reference material on when transactions are rollback when using Spring…
8 Nov 2019
Source code for this episode is here. Welcome to this special bonus episode of Fixing Random, the immensely long blog series where I discuss ways to add probabilistic programming features into C#. I ran into an interesting problem at work … Continue reading →
We’ve rolled out a number of changes aimed at giving you better visibility into how you’re using the PubNub platform on a daily basis.
We searched for the most-asked questions about cash flow. Here are the answers.
If you bill your regular customers on a recurring basis, take advantage of subscription billing and bring more predictable revenue to your business. In this guide, we walk through 5 steps to moving to a subscription model.
Last week’s update to the SoundCloud iOS app includes support for Dark Mode. This took several months of work and collaboration between…
7 Nov 2019
Save money with MapTiler Cloud monthly spending control.
Learn how to migrate your serverless application monitoring to Serverless Framework Pro from IOpipe.
6 Nov 2019
Go borderless: GoCardless launches the first global network designed for recurring payments
GoCardlessComplete with foreign exchange, powered by Wise for Business.
When your business buys goods or services, it’s important to keep track of what you’ve ordered and how much it will cost you. Setting up a purchase order system can improve your business’ efficiency, tighten stock controls and save you money.
Tencent becomes a Premier Cloud Provider of the Serverless Framework.
5 Nov 2019
A few months ago I had a strange behaviour: Sometimes the L2TP/IPSec connection between my workstation at home and our company VPN silently failed. After clicking on the VPN connection icon in the tasktray it only showed Connecting to… and stopped working after 60 seconds. The VPN connection status did […] The post Windows 10 LT2P/IPSec VPN connection fails silently…
As the final model release of GPT-2’s staged release, we’re releasing the largest version (1.5B parameters) of GPT-2 along with code and model weights to facilitate detection of outputs of GPT-2 models. While there have been larger language models released since August, we’ve continued with our original staged release plan in order to provide the community with a test case…
In this post we'll be looking at how to structure a real-world Serverless Framework application.
4 Nov 2019
Bolstered by a partnership with Wise.
There are two cat beds, many chairs, a sofa but no. She will sit there. That’s how I have two step authentication for my Ubuntu.
1 Nov 2019
This post is about displaying the API records with delete and update actions using new Ionic and Angular reactive programming. This is a continuation of Ionic Angular series and it explains to you how to distribute the data between the components using RxJS method like BehaviorSubject. All of the feed API responses/records storing in a reactive object, This help the…
This cat has been in my life for 12 years now. Whenever I get back home and sit on the sofa, she jumps on my chest and starts licking my nose and my eyebrows. She stays there until the moment she realizes I could be feeding her instead of relaxing.
A guide on Bacs payments in the UK: everything you need to know about Direct Debit, Bacs Direct Credit, CHAPS and Faster Payments.
An update on how GoCardless is fully prepared for any potential Brexit outcome.
31 Oct 2019
This is the first in what I expect to be quite a long series of blog posts, meandering over a fairly wide range of topics as they crop up. There’s nothing particularly technical in this introductory post. It’s really just a starting point. V-Drums In July 2019, inspired/encouraged by a friend name Alice, I bought … Continue reading V-Drum Explorer:…
A Faster Payment is a type of electronic transfer, designed to speed up the process of sending money within the UK. This guide will tell you everything you need to know about the Faster Payments Service and how your business can use it.
In this article, we compare Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda for running cron jobs in AWS and offer guidance for when to choose which of the two.
30 Oct 2019
A little background Our two flagship Android apps - Bodyweight and Nutrition serve two very different needs but usually to the same target audience. An essential feature missing in the user experience so far was to share the login across the two apps so that users who were signed into one of these apps could be automatically signed into the…
Invoice discounting is a way to get money flowing into your business faster – here's how it works.
29 Oct 2019
Find out more about our newest software partnership.
One of Java’s big strengths, in my opinion, is the fact that most naming conventions have been established by the creators of the language. For example: If someone does not adhere to these conventions, the resulting code quickly looks non-idiomatic. What about SQL? Many do not agree on the “correct” case: There seems to be … Continue reading A Guide…
In Firefox 70, the Accessibility Inspector has become an auditing facility to help identify and fix many common mistakes and practices that reduce site accessibility. In this post, Marco Zehe offers an overview of what is available in this latest release. The post Auditing For Accessibility Problems With Firefox Developer Tools appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer…
AWS Lambda Performance Optimization & Monitoring with Tracing & Spans (Serverless Framework Pro)
ServerlessTo troubleshoot the performance of an AWS Lambda function, we need the transaction time of each dependency. Come see how we do that with Serverless Framework Pro
27 Oct 2019
I really enjoyed Classic Computer Science Problems in Python by David Kopec. It covers many different problems I hadn’t read detailed explanations of before. For example: neural networks, constraint-satisfaction problems, genetic algorithms and the minimax algorithm. Unlike many other books … Continue reading →
25 Oct 2019
This post revisits the problem described in Versioning Limitations in .NET, based on reactions to that post and a Twitter discussion which occurred later. Before getting onto the main topic of the post, I wanted to comment a little on that Twitter discussion. I personally found it frustrating at times, and let that frustration leak … Continue reading Options for…
Dogfooding, or eating your own dog food, is a practice that all product developers should implement all the time. According to wikipedia: Dogfooding, occurs when an organization uses its own product. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually … Continue reading Dogfooding in…
Short Firefox tip to disable Cmd + MouseWheel zoom. There is a weird interaction with it. Therefore I decided to turn it off completely (I never used it anyway). When I scroll a page using a trackpad and start switching tabs via Cmd + Tab, inertia scrolling would still be active, and the page I switched to gets zoomed in…
24 Oct 2019
This is a case study in the making: how js13kGames, an online “code golf” competition for web game developers, tried out Web Monetization this year. And ended up at the Mozilla Festival, happening this week in London, demoing dozens of interesting web-monetized games. You can check out the MozFest Arcade online as well. The post From js13kGames to MozFest Arcade:…
Hiroki Takeuchi, Co-founder and CEO, reflects on 2019 and a new milestone.
The 3-minute-video Context Taskgraph, the tour Introduction to taskgraph What’s next? Further reading Need any help? Special thanks Comments See the , if it doesn’t display up here.video there It’s a fairly common practice to build and test every time someone makes a change in the code. In the industry, we call this process “Continuous Integration” (CI). Another good practice…
One thing that a lot of people hate to do is writing documentation. Usually, it’s postponed until development is finished and once it’s done there is rarely time to do it properly. If you get past the struggle of writing it down there is always a problem of keeping it up to date. To avoid those pain points I’m going…
23 Oct 2019
I have been meaning to look at Cartography since I saw their talk at BSidesSF last year and I finally had a chance to start looking at it today. One of the first things I noticed was that is was not containerized so I built a quick container for it and decided to document my progress here. Prerequisites AWS CLI…
The display CSS property is how we change the formatting context of an element and its children. One of the first things you will learn about CSS is that some elements are block by default, and others are inline. The display property enables switching between these states. With support currently available only in Firefox 70, it is too early to…
In this article we walk you through how to create a cron job on AWS using AWS Lambda and Serverless Framework and how to get the right alerts and security measures in place.
22 Oct 2019
We live in a day and age where consumers cannot access medication for their ailment because of cost. We are aware of the anecdotes related to delaying treatment. In the same way, some engineering teams are stuck with projects which are in an unhealthy testing state. The team goes on sprint after sprint with the situation getting worse, not better.…
Firefox 70 is released today, and includes great new features such as secure password generation with Lockwise and the new Firefox Privacy Protection Report, as well as cool additions for developers. These include DOM mutation breakpoints and inactive CSS rule indicators in the DevTools, several new CSS text properties, two-value display syntax, and JS numeric separators. In this article, we’ll…
This is a short example of how to use SUNDIALS to solve a simple partial differential equation in Haskell via the hmatrix-sundials library. The example is taken from the C examples that come with the SUNDIALS source. Here’s the full blog. I’ll give a better URL soonish.
21 Oct 2019
Have you ever landed on a web page and wondered what fonts are being used? Have you asked yourself where those fonts come from or why a particular font isn't loading? The font editor in Firefox provides answers and insights, and gives you the ability to make font changes directly, with a live preview. The post Quickly Alter Typography with…
The native Swift SDK provides Swift developers a simplified and more streamlined experience to effectively develop their iOS application using PubNub.
Fitbit has discontinued their Fitbit One step trackers, which seems like a good opportunity to step back and reflect on wearing one for the last decade or so. I’ve enjoyed using Fitbit trackers, but the One devices seemed like they broke down too often. I’m pretty proud that I ended up earning all the activity-related […]
20 Oct 2019
(I’m writing this post primarily so I can link to it in an internal document on Monday. There’s nothing sensitive or confidential here, so I might as well get it down in a blog post.) SemVer is pretty clear about pre-releases. Any version with a major version of 0 is considered “initial development”, and anything … Continue reading Why I…
Most of the time you are doing local web development without HTTPS and self-signed certificates but good-ol’ plain HTTP. For security and SEO reasons, HTTPS should be enabled in your production environment all the time. One important requirement for production environments is, that every incoming plain HTTP request has to […] The post Conditional redirect from HTTP to HTTPS within…
18 Oct 2019
CSS Grid has been available in most major browsers since early 2017, and it makes web layout more powerful than ever before. But complex-looking new syntax (line-names! grid-areas! minmax! fit-content! fr units!) and missing IE11 support can make it scary. Don’t let that stop you. Miriam Suzanne offers some basic approaches you can put to work today. The post Faster…
Intro With the release of Github Actions, we experimented with it to replace our current Continuous Integration (CI) process. This post describes the steps we took in order to do so. Our CI includes of 3 checks: specs rubocop check linter check for swagger docs These checks run every time a developer pushes a commit or creates a Pull Requests…
Credit notes can be useful tools in your invoicing workflow, but what do they do, what information is needed to create one, and when should you send them?
Your comprehensive resource for understanding the challenges and opportunities that Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) presents for global subscription businesses.
Your monthly resource for tracking the complexities and challenges of the international recurring payments space.
17 Oct 2019
See you at one of seven events across New Zealand.
16 Oct 2019
The web-ext tool was created at Mozilla to help you build browser extensions faster and more easily. Although our first launch focused on support for the desktop Firefox browser, followed by Firefox for Android, our vision was always to support cross-platform development once we shipped Firefox support. With the 3.2.0 release, you can finally use web-ext to truly build cross-platform…
When building systems for new products, there’s a delicate balance between writing code that works and writing code that lasts. A common anti-pattern is preemptively optimizing systems for the future while still trying to find product market fit. For new product teams, this can be a costly mistake as it leads to a slower iterative […] The post Evolving Systems…
15 Oct 2019
The Firefox DevTools team and our contributors were hard at work over the summer, getting Firefox 70 jam-packed with improvements. We are especially excited about our new WebSocket inspection feature. To use the inspector now, download Firefox Developer Edition, and open the DevTools’ Network panel to find the Messages tab. Then, keep reading to learn more about WebSockets and the…
We’ve trained a pair of neural networks to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a human-like robot hand. The neural networks are trained entirely in simulation, using the same reinforcement learning code as OpenAI Five paired with a new technique called Automatic Domain Randomization (ADR). The system can handle situations it never saw during training, such as being prodded by a…
Base maps in French Lambert, Dutch Rijksdriehoekstelsel, or global WGS84 available via API for free.
MapTiler Cloud offers map hosting for your own geodata in any coordinate system in GeoPackage format with EPSG coordinate reference system.
MapTiler Desktop 10.2 is able to generate map in any geographic coordinate system in GeoPackage format and directly upload to MapTiler Cloud.
14 Oct 2019
Today I lost access to my home server. As I described in a previous post I depend heavily on the server to fetch my emails, as a file server, to synchronize files, for newsbeuter and irssi sessions and many other things. As no one was going to be in proximity of the server for the next few hours, my goal…
Find out about internships in the GoCardless Product Development team.
After painting the meadow with acrylic colors, I bought oil colors which are the ones Bob Ross uses in “The joy of painting” show. This time I followed the episode 10 from season 13 of the show, called “Mountain Summit”. I am very satisfied by the outcome but being a beginner, I faced a lot of difficulties and the painting…
My job involves a lot of staring at large numbers, mostly latencies in nanoseconds, and picking out magnitudes like microseconds. I noticed myself constantly counting digits in my text editor, in my terminal, and in Jupyter notebooks in my browser.
Learn some of the best practices when it comes to deploying serverless applications.
13 Oct 2019
This morning brings new and exciting news from the land of Apple. It appears that, at least on iOS 13, Apple is sharing some portion of your web browsing history with the Chinese conglomerate Tencent. This is being done as part of Apple’s “Fraudulent Website Warning”, which uses the Google-developed Safe Browsing technology as the … Continue reading How safe…
12 Oct 2019
Update: I don’t know whether it was partially due to this blog post or not, but AppVeyor has fixed things so that you don’t (currently, 20th October 2019) need to use the fix in this post. You may want to include it anyway, for the sake of future-proofing. TL;DR: If your AppVeyor build starts breaking … Continue reading Using “git…
11 Oct 2019
The Mozilla Developer Roadshow program launched in 2017 with the goal of bringing expert speakers and web technology updates to local communities through free events and partnerships. Check out the video playlist from our summer tour, with talks on topics like Mixed Reality, WebAssembly, modern CSS, and more. Or register now for an upcoming Roadshow event in Asia. The post…
What does a typical day look like for a GoCardless customer experience manager?
If the goods or services you deliver are liable to change, proforma invoices could help reduce your admin and create a smoother invoicing process.
We spoke to leading accountants about their experience and advice for firms moving to the cloud. This is what they said.
I have always liked painting but I had never devoted any time to this hobby. I was painting once every 2 or more years but with dissappointing results. Few days ago I tried to create a painting of my cat and I enjoyed both the process and the result. I decided to pursue this hobby and yesterday, I followed an…
We are now accepting applications for our third class of OpenAI Scholars.
10 Oct 2019
If you are not working with multithreading programming and don’t have to test any asynchronous code then this post will probably do you nothing good. But if you have ever struggled with testing some logic running in multiple threads and you don’t know Awaitility. A small library helps testing asynchronous code. If you’ve never heard of it then you should…
Learn how to add API Management, Webpack and CI/CD to your Azure Functions REST API
9 Oct 2019
What does a typical day look like for a GoCardless customer support advocate?
Invoice factoring can boost cash flow and simplify business planning – could it work for you?
How does the Customer Success team help businesses make the most of GoCardless?
7 Oct 2019
A day in the life of Onboarding Manager, Katie Gouyette.
On Saturday I felt like drawing and (no surprises here) I decided to create a painting of my cat. Without further ado, this is the result. At the top center and right section of the photo you may notice the paws of my cat which was present during the whole process and which actually is responsible for some of the…