Electronics geek, phone phreak, whiteboard enthusiast, broadcasting nerd, amateur photographer, general troublemaker
How many ways can I say …
My friend Kitty asked me a simple question the other evening: What is the total number of unique messages you can fit into 140 characters (i.e. a tweet) This seems like potentially quite a simple question. So, lets say you have a set of valid characters called , and a maximum message length of (in [...]
XML-RPC Benchmarking
Hokay, so, for my report, I needed to do some benchmarking of how well my XML-RPC server could perform. So I threw together a quick little script with Twisted which allows me to make manylots of requests at once. It makes two files: times.csv (which contains the length of time each request takes) and errors.csv [...]
Multicasting with Twisted Python
Part of my MEng project work is to write some server code which allows alerts to be raised and broadcast to computers in a call center (something along the line of an alarm monitoring response centre – bunch of people in a room which respond to personal alarms in peoples homes). This is but a [...]
Helpdesk Sleuthing
I had an interesting query today on Helpdesk at an institution which will remain anonymous (but will be blatantly obvious to the people who know me). A student came to the helpdesk and was faced with a perplexing problem. Their lecturer had given them a website which they were required to use as part of [...]
Run in case of Death
This is cross-posted from CantHackWontHack, and my first contribution to their blog after they appeared at my house this evening. The first rule of hack-club – DO talk about hack club! OK so I figured – I’ve got irssi running in screen on my virtual server, like most good geeks. What happens if I get [...]