Paul

UK Whovian, railway & politics geek and event organiser. Freelance PHP developer and Linux system administrator. He/him/Paul

Gradually migrating to Paul (npub1ysl…t2sa) - please follow me there, follow requests here won't be accepted

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Business / hire me: https://www.phpdeveloper.org.uk
You might know me from: https://www.roguetory.org.uk/about/biography/
Programming languages: PHP, Go, SQL, C
Natural languages: English (native), French (A1/A2), Latin (Beginner)

Public Key

npub1e5frt7j9xgjmzhfxxvq5e9dv08tl8zrxn69gzkqwexgmj90l3ryqlnx7jr

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsv6y34lfznyfd3t5nrxq2vjkk8n4ln3pnfaz5ptq8vnydezhlc3jqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsljf86y

Publishing to

relay.snort.social

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Last Notes

2025-04-22 13:31:15 UTC

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I do think it's worthwhile writing to your MP regardless of party (or none). He won't have the same influence as say a Labour backbencher or minister, but he can still speak in Parliament, make written questions, write to the relevant ministers on your behalf etc. In some ways he might be more receptive as he's not going to get re-elected so can take an unpopular but principled stand (I know that's expecting a lot though).

2025-04-22 12:41:56 UTC

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It applies to any case that relates to what 'sex' means in respect of the Equality Act, so much wider than this specific example.
For example, as the Court has decided that trans women are men for the purposes of the Equality Act (regardless of whether are living as a woman or have a GRC), so they wouldn't be able to bring a sex discrimination claim if they were paid less than a cis man for doing an equivalent role, whereas a cis woman could.

2025-04-22 07:15:25 UTC

I got very cross about the Supreme Court judgement on the meaning of 'sex' over the Easter weekend and wrote a fairly lengthy blog post about it, including how the Supreme Court operates (e.g. interveners, statutory interpretation):
https://blog.politicsgeek.co.uk/2025/04/20/supreme-court-judgement-on-meaning-of-sex/

2025-03-12 10:30:37 UTC

Had a look at my Pi Hole blocked queries list and there are entries for:
incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org
I thought I had disabled all the 'phone home' functionality in Firefox, but it appears to be still sending telemetry. about:telemetry claims it is disabled but there are several telemetry settings set to true in about:config. I don't know how to turn these off in settings, the only option seems to be to set:
toolkit.telemetry.server
to an empty address.
#Firefox

2025-01-30 15:57:49 UTC

The list of sexiest professions has been updated and the top 3 are: healthcare, teaching and emergency services.
I'm sure my legal followers will be delighted that they are in fourth place.
Techies are seventh with 17%! (despite the jokes about undatable geeks, I actually found my profession wasn't an issue for most women when I was using online dating - and I was upfront about what I did / was interested in).
https://metro.co.uk/2025/01/27/singles-arent-looking-a-man-finance-this-sexiest-job-2025-22439366/

2025-01-25 11:51:24 UTC

Apparently White Van Man really doesn't like it if you respond to his pavement and double yellow lines parking with 'what if I had a wheelchair?'
(I could barely squeeze past and I am about as slender as you can get)

2024-12-31 12:46:56 UTC

Fellow geeks are making fun of people who don't get the 'you can have the same username on different servers' part of the Fediverse, but non-techies don't get IT.
I used to use [email protected] as my email address so I could filter incoming mail and track if anyone sold my details or got hacked. Quite often the person who saw the address would comment 'oh I didn't know you worked here' because I had the company name in my email address.
(it even happened at Bletchley Park of all places...)

2024-12-31 12:31:37 UTC

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Interesting - that's on my wishlist (Clarkson's Farm got me into thinking about the wider subject) so I'll have to see what I think when I get to it. Looks like my library has a copy.

2024-12-31 11:45:50 UTC

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2024-12-26 15:13:42 UTC

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as someone who loves creme and mini eggs I approve of this situation

2024-12-26 15:01:50 UTC

Did a 100km round trip taxi ride today and asked the driver how the different booking options were as I'm considering switching.
Local firm: Driver gets more but there can be favouritism in terms of giving out bookings. No support if things go wrong, sometimes passengers don't pay.
International app: Lower prices but they make up any loss due to damage etc. No failed payments.
Overall he said he preferred apps to local firms, despite bad rep over employment rights etc.

2024-12-24 09:36:40 UTC

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The 'good reason' is that gofmt doesn't allow:
if someCondition { return someValue }
You can type that if you want, but gofmt will change it automatically to multiple lines.
I'm not aware of a common way to do what you want, given the opinionated nature of gofmt.

2024-11-19 17:28:04 UTC

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6th February, Kolide link (spoken in one of the sponsor slots) goes to 1Password. They were bought 2 weeks after the episode I think.

2024-11-19 17:22:01 UTC

Not saying I'm behind with listening to @npub12qh…k48x but I just followed the sponsor link in the episode I'm listening to and it went to another site because they've been bought in the meantime...

2024-11-16 09:32:14 UTC

I'll be giving a talk on Advent of Code at 14:00 today (UK time / UTC) at the Manchester Linux User Group. Everyone is welcome, but please check the website or DM me if you want the Jitsi details as we don't publish them widely to avoid gatecrashers.
If you can't make it, the talk won't be recorded but the slides will be online. I'm open to giving the talk elsewhere if there's demand (remote-only and sensible overlap with UTC).
https://www.manlug.org/
#AdventOfCode #ManLUG

2024-11-09 15:33:31 UTC

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How did you get there? I have only been by car as it looks like a long journey on public transport (train from Bolton then 30-40 minutes walk)

2024-10-15 10:05:33 UTC

On the subject of IPv6, is there any pressing business reason for a residential ISP with mostly non-technical customers and a lot of IPv4 addresses to deploy v6? If customers have more devices that doesn't mean more IPs (because of NAT on the customer's router) and most ISPs are not going to massively increase their customer base (so don't need more IPs).
#IPv6

2024-10-01 09:28:12 UTC

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Definitely do not host mail on a residential ISP - even if you have a fixed IP address you might find that big providers will simply reject all mail from the whole block, regardless of how well you run your server.
I use a VPS, but I'm also hosting websites etc. so there is minimal extra cost in running mail as well.

2024-10-01 09:23:37 UTC

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I've run my own server with Exim (and previously Postfix) and it doesn't require too much maintenance. If you setup SPF + DKIM + DMARC + reverse DNS your mail tends to get delivered.
The main deliverability problems in my experience come with Google, and the worst is if the IP address of your mail server changes - you end up starting your reputation-building from scratch.
@npub1ksf…r6s6 has a book out on this very subject recently, although I haven't read it yet.

2024-08-23 09:26:04 UTC

@npub1t2q…n4vh Your latest release notes for iOS asked if anyone reads them - I do and consider them useful and important (and much better than 'fixed some bugs'). 😀

2024-08-22 14:03:45 UTC

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Fantastic, thanks! That seems to do the trick, although /g isn't supported on my system (I don't think I need it in this case).

2024-08-22 13:15:08 UTC

Does anyone know if there's a way to do case-insensitive search + replace in PHP, but retain the original case, for highlighting search keywords?
For example, if I want to make the search results bold, searching for 'paul' in 'Paul Waring' should return:
<b>Paul</b> Waring
and not:
<b>paul</b> Waring
str_ireplace does nearly everything I need, but doesn't retain the original case. Maybe preg_replace with capture groups?
#php

2024-08-19 08:57:11 UTC

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I managed to find an alternative to Postman, Insomnia etc. which hasn't (yet) gone down the paid / cloud route.
It is called Pororoca and is cross-platform, though there's no Snap (something I need to look into as lots of projects I use don't have Snaps, and I'd like to change that).
https://pororoca.io/

2024-08-16 09:46:42 UTC

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I tend to change at the latest stop, so that I can make as much progress as possible to my destination on the service that I know is running because I'm on it.
I might change this though if an earlier stop allows an easier change, e.g. both services go from the same platform and can't overtake each other.

2024-08-16 09:37:36 UTC

If you're making a multi-stage journey on public transport (as I will be shortly) and there's an overlap of stops between the two stages, which stop do you change at?

2024-08-12 09:11:23 UTC

What's the recommend open source GUI for working with APIs now? I used to use Insomnia but they went over to 'you must have a cloud account, even for local data', which gives me zero confidence that my data stays on my machine.
Ideally something that's packaged as a Snap and updated regularly.

2024-07-05 12:47:11 UTC

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I generally start with -Wextra and then turn things off if I absolutely have to - sometimes via an indirect header with a pragma to turn it off just for a single library like GLib.
PHP is very similar to C, in that you can selectively turn off groups of warnings/errors. If a third party deprecates something that only affects your code if you've decided to turn deprecations into exceptions, so it's low impact.

2024-07-05 09:11:28 UTC

One thing that I find a lot when working with existing code is how so many developers ignore warnings and don't use the equivalent of E_ALL (PHP) or -Wall -Wextra -Werror (C).
The first thing I do when taking on a new project is to enable all warnings and turn them into errors, and there's usually a huge number of bugs to fix as a result (e.g. invalid assumptions about what will happen if you use an undefined variable).
#C #PHP

2024-05-24 09:39:57 UTC

If I'm ever feeling a bout of imposter syndrome, or feel like I've screwed up (e.g. with a bug deployed to production), I like to remember the time that an outsourcing company failed to provide enough security guards for the London Olympics and the gap had to be made up by the Royal Marines and paratroopers.
None of my mistakes have involved the armed forces being deployed.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/24/london-2012-olympics-g4s-military

2024-03-31 10:48:49 UTC

Is there an authoritative way of finding out whether the public has access to a road (or part of) in England? I've just walked past a business unit on the continuation of what I'm pretty sure is a public highway and a speaker told me to 'leave the site immediately or response will be deployed'.