Category Archives: Uncategorized

In my previous post I mentioned that I was starting to migrate some existing CloudFormation templates to be generated using TypeScript and Amazon’s Cloud Development Kit. I started with some simple static websites that are hosted from S3 buckets, and for these simple sites found it easiest to completely tear down the old infrastructure and […]

The COVID pandemic has affected the life of almost everybody on earth in innumerable ways. One of its lesser-known effects has been the near-total suspension of the ringing of church bells in the English style (change ringing). This is certainly trivial in the grand scheme of things, but the cancellation of my favourite hobby has […]

I’ve been using AWS CloudFormation for many years to manage infrastructure created on the Amazon Web Services platform. Trying to configure such an environment manually is tedious and error-prone. It’s more efficient and reliable to do so automatically – managing infrastructure as code. It’s actually a few years since I last used CloudFormation professionally, and […]

My previous post on Service Testing has become a favourite of mine. I often find myself looking up details of how to check a particular service (and particularly how to use OpenSSL’s s_client). That post is now 7½ years old and I thought it due for a refresh. HTTP It’s still possible to type raw […]

In mid-2017 I set up an automated scrape of a frequently-updated website. Every day my script would crawl the website, download its contents, and commit these to GitHub. This allowed me to back up not just the site contents but the complete history of changes. This scrape did its thing for nearly 4 years until […]

Mail blacklists are a sad fact of life. They exist because of spam and work like this: I send an email from my computer my computer connects to the server that hosts my email my server connects to the server that hosts the recipient’s mail the recipient server looks up my server’s details in some […]

TLDR: privacy. I’m on Signal now. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Facebook for many years. I still have an account but rarely log in. It sometimes sends me emails and occasionally I open up a private browser window to take a look. I don’t want them following me around the Internet (their tracking tags […]

I know it doesn’t look very new, but this blog is now running on brand new hosting with brand new PHP. Hurrah! I might even update it occasionally…

AWS release amazing architecture diagrams. The best of these must surely be the diagram of the architecture used to host the Obama for America campaign. The diagrams look great, but aren’t accessible to others as there’s no publicly downloadable set of icons… until now. Someone has created their own for download: http://blog.domenech.org/2013/04/aws-diagrams-adobe-illustrator-object-collection-first-release.html.

Recently I’ve been entering a lot of phone numbers in a database. This is dull. Phone numbers do, however, open up a load of (slightly) interesting geekery. One of the problems I had was with the London dialling code. Numbers in London tend to start with 0207 or 0208. I decided that this seemed like […]

MSDN: All print providers must export the initialization function, InitializePrintProvidor. Pointers to all the other functions must be supplied in a PRINTPROVIDOR structure. (Note that these two names are misspelled, but are consistent with the names that appear in the header file, winsplp.h.) Of course, one can’t correct the spelling of one’s functions, else one […]

Recently I’ve been writing code to produce a database of Alumni in the University’s Architecture Department where I work. Somewhat irritatingly the servers all run on IIS which required me to learn how to talk to SQL Server with ASP. The irritating part being that I’ve only just learnt how to talk to MySQL with […]

I was amused to have finished migrating this blog over to WordPress to read this article on Coding Horror: I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the […]

Having recently discussed the strategy of comparing one’s antagonist’s actions to those of the Nazis, I was amused to notice Dr Crippen referring to a similar technique: Over the years, I have seen far too many women who have been raped. There will be others, patients of mine, who have not sought help from me […]

Comparisons to the holocaust seem rife today. Any attack on civil liberties is compared to the way the Nazis treated the Jews. Another example crops up today via the UK’s leading anti-vaccine site, JABS (no link love, search for it yourself). The government is considering making vaccination compulsory for children as a way of improving […]

Despite a long round trip, and waiting a million years for some DNS settings to propagate themselves correctly, I’ve managed to migrate the blog to here, which is nice. Over the next few weeks there’ll be some formatting changes, as I start to build a website at http://www.simpleigh.com/. Aye!

They tell me that the latest phenomenon to hit the internet today is a blook. An online book. Not sure why the word book gains an ‘l’ – to me that implies that the word “blog” should be an online bog, which can’t be true… Nowadays you can go straight to Lulu and upload your blook. Anyone […]

The cheeky people at Blogger have been updating their engine, temporarily breaking the beast which is Windows Live Writer. No matter, a quick journey to the writer home page, a seamless install and we’re going again. They do tell me that it’s possible to blog from MS Word these days, though I’m quite happy with […]

The Question of the Week on B3ta at the moment is all about personal hygiene. It’s full of exciting stories about people who smell really bad. Unfortunately this seems to have coincided with an eczema flare up, and the great sage that is Wikipedia is advising: The first and primary recommendation is that people suffering […]

I enjoy reading student newspapers. Not only is there no real news in Cambridge worth writing about, but most of the writing is hilariously bad and over the top. I’ve seen plenty of apologies for erroneous and unbalanced reporting – most notably for an entire front-page spread in Varsity more recently. Most of the writing […]