Automagical port allocation for tests

Ceri Storey wrote “It’s quite common to want to test a net­work ser­vice from the out­side, as if it was being ac­cessed from a cli­ent. Quite of­ten, people will pick a “well-­known” port to use, eg: port 8080 or 8888 for a HTTP ser­vice. But that means that if you leave a stray service process lying around, you’ll need to hunt it…”

How intelligent is artificial intelligence?

Ayoub Bessasso wrote “Perhaps we should start with asking ourselves, has AI lived up to our expectations? From the general public’s point of view, the answer would be a resounding ‘no’. This is not new; frustrations with AI, and its apparent lack of ability to ‘just do what it’s supposed to do’, go as far back as its inception. The general perception of AI, and it what regard it is held by the general public, and researchers and developers alike, has always fluctuated. The answer to the question posed earlier would probably be quite different if we had a better understanding of what artificial intelligence is, and subsequently more realistic expectations of its capabilities.”

Tailgate: calendar data for books

Tom Parker wrote “I’ve had an idea for a while, but like many good ideas it has the problem “but where do we get the data from?”. The idea in a nutshell: Songkick, but for authors. Songkick, for those who don’t use it, is a service that lets you track bands and get told when they announce new…”

Adding flexibility to build processes

Ceri Storey wrote “Or “Knowing where to break the (build) chains” One of the ways we can im­prove a build, re­lease and de­ploy pro­cess is chan­ging where in the chain we make use of de­pend­en­cies.”

Die-hard Statefully

Ceri Storey wrote “After reading Solving the Water Jug Problem from Die Hard 3 with TLA+ and Hy­po­thesis, I figured it’d be amusing to re­pro­duce it in Rust as diehard-rs, along with its quickcheck lib­rary.”

How to actually secure IoT devices

Tom Parker wrote “Every day it feels like there’s some new Internet of Things (IoT) story, telling us how these new devices in our homes and offices are causing more and more havoc. On the other hand, we really like the new and shiny things doing funky things for us, and that doesn’t look like it’s slowing down…”

Extending Splitwise’s currency conversion

Tom Parker wrote “I’m rather fond of Splitwise, which is an app/website for recording money owed between multiple people. Myself and my partner use it a lot for various expenses, and it’s really useful when you’ve got many different payments, and you need to keep track over time. We’ve got one repeated payment however that’s been in US…”

Argot: a lightweight composable test framework for Go

Matthew Sackman wrote “In a current project we’re writing a number of fairly small REST HTTP servers. There are probably going to be around 10 of these in total so I guess that makes these ‘deci-services’. As part of the testing approach, we wanted to be able to write some end-to-end tests and soak tests, and so went…”

Programming a word at a time

Irene Papakonstantinou wrote “There is an improv game called one-word-at-a-time. It goes like this: two (or more) people collaboratively compose a story, each adding just one word at a time. It sounds easy, but actually humans can be pretty bad at this game! Some of the rules of improv are “be obvious” and “accept offers”. In the context…”

Photo library wrangling

James Uther wrote “Imagine if you will that I take quite a few photos, but don’t manage them well. Mistakes may have been made. Like, I’ve discovered that when you ask apple photos “don’t import duplicates” it’s not completely foolproof. And if, in a fit of stupidity, you tried to recombine a google photos’ (re-compressed) library with your…”