There are times that you're away from your machine - or you've got so many terminal sessions you've not seen a notification - to say that your agent is waiting for input. Although there are ways to get first-class support for this - for instance Claude Code's Remote Control (which only works if using a Claude Code subscription, i.e. Bedrock users don't get access to it) - I wanted to write a tiny bit of Go code today, and thought I'd hand-roll some notifications. Given the Notification hook,…

Ben Nadel demonstrates how to use "findAll" to disable multiple form buttons during the submission process in HTMX 4....

DerbyCon · Louisville, KY · 2017 · 20 min Player blocked? Watch it on YouTube. Burp is the tool most of us live in for web testing, but a lot of people never touch the Extender tab. This talk was my pitch for changing that: if you keep doing the same check by hand, Burp will let you write it once and have the scanner do it for you. What I covered Where extensions come from. The BApp Store, what the Pro-only flag means, and how to load your own JAR or script through Extender (and where its…

CircleCityCon · Indianapolis, IN · 2015 · 17 min Player blocked? Watch it on YouTube. The tagline on the first slide was “It’s not just for Python,” and that was the whole point. Python gets all the attention in security tooling, but a lot of the tools we use every day are written in Ruby, and the language is a good fit for the work. Why Ruby works for security It reads easily. empty?, times, each: you can hand a Ruby script to someone who doesn’t write Ruby and they’ll follow it. Batteries…

At the start of the month, developers at Capcom—the team behind one of my favorite video game engines—gave a talk about RE Engine's future. News began to swirl about slides, statements, and translations revolving around AI. Satoshi Ishida laid the foundation for what this new "RE neXt ENGINE," aka REX, is setting out to address. Here is Eurogamer's reporting on the talk, which was in Japanese and originally reported on gamebiz.jp: "Ishida pointed to three challenges driving the REX Project –…

I’ve made something today to help me use my phone less. It’s a little background for my lock screen. Here is how it looks. And boy, it’s effective! I tend to pick up my phone so often, to do simple searches or to read Mastodon, it’s ridiculous! I even do it when I have my laptop in my lap! I want to remind myself that I have better options than grabbing my phone for anything when I’m at home and my laptop is near. Funny thing is that on my phone I can easily lose myself in all the apps on it…

In case it’s not obvious from the title, this is mostly just a rant. For the longest time, I was a Mercurial holdout and used it for every personal project where the choice didn’t affect other people. After a long time, I finally switched when: git had won (GitHub etc.) and, Magit gave me a decent interface, better than the Mercurial CLI. But it is still awful. We can forget. I consult for a team of developers, and it involves people who are not software developers by trade who are learning to…

Consider the following C++ code snippet: static [[nodiscard]] int GetSomething() { return 64; } If you invoke this function e.g. inside main() like this: int main() { GetSomething(); } this code compiles successfully with MSVC! Even at warning level 4 (/W4, which I use on almost all my VC++ projects)! Why am I upset? Because in the above code I did discard the return value of GetSomething(), and even with the [[nodiscard]] attribute applied to the function, and compiling at /W4 (warning level…

Speaking of Backblaze and System Settings, though: this beauty is fresh of the presses in 27.0.1 – probably more Backblaze’s “fault” than Apple’s, given how extremely non-native their Java app is, but still. What a mess. The Backblaze preferences themselves also had this highlight: You might not even see it at first, but this window has tabs on top. Six of them, actually, each with a full word as title. When you click into this black hole of UI elements, they unfold and show up normally (until…

Kurzgesagt breakdowns — in their trademark plain language manner — the recent Hugging Face hack perpetrated by rogue AI agents developed by OpenAI. The fourth sentence in the narration is a doozy: Fully aware that they are acting unethically, they execute a sophisticated cyberattack Emphasis on the word aware is mine, but it makes you think. I lost count of the number of times I shook my head throughout. At twenty minutes in length, it’s slightly longer than the usual Kurzgesagt video, but well…

On the most recent episode of the Waveform podcast, the hosts talk about two new announcements in the MMORPG world (relevant bit starts at 1:21 and goes on for 14 minutes): The context is this: RuneScape launched in 2001, and World of WarCraft in 2004, each game already had a “relaunch”: RuneScape via Old School RuneScape in 2013, and World of WarCraft with its Classic edition in 2019 – both revisiting and perhaps straight replaying the respective original game, but with some new improvements.…

Like many others building software that communicates with servers on the Fediverse, I followed the How to make friends and verify requests tutorial that demonstrated how a server can easily verify a digital signature to accept a message from another server. It was good enough to get started! Meanwhile, an IETF working group was producing a standard for HTTP Message Signatures that became RFC 9421 and was published in February, 2024. In August, 2026, Mastodon 4.7 was released which began sending…

A CEO whose company I’ve followed for a while posted a thesis this week, and I’ve been turning it over since. Websites, he argued, are going the way of contact lenses. I’ll paraphrase his point below, but read it for yourself. I left a comment right away, and as I thought about it more, my comment became the rest of what is on this page. The first contact lenses were expensive and durable. You bought a pair, you cleaned them, you kept them in a case, and you expected them to last. The cost…

Table of Contents Writer Improvements Performance Improvements Footer Caching and Reuse Id-Based Access to Dictionary-Encoded Columns Also in This Release I’m happy to announce the release of Hardwood 1.1.0.Beta2! The latest version of the Hardwood open-source library for reading and writing Apache Parquet files brings new features for the writer, significantly improves performance for many different workloads, provides a new API for caching and reusing Parquet file footers, id-based dictionary…

A few days ago I posted about my experience playing around with TinyJS. This is a very light "web to desktop app" platform for - well - building desktop apps. Its simplicity and similarity to PhoneGap (at least for the desktop) has got me interested in seeing what I can build with the project. One of my ideas would be improved with a login system so I naturally looked into adding a "Login with Google" feature. While this was mostly straightforward, I ran into some oddities and figured I'd share…

The fifth part of a series about bare-metal programming for x86 PC-type computers, using Linux for development. This article is about handling files using EFI's Simple File Protocol.

Here's a question we see, especially from AI skeptics: if AI coding is so great, shouldn't we be seeing more new, good software by now? Here are some answers. As usual in this style of post, these are conjectural, candidate answers, and I would give some of them little weight. We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance. We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of more and better features in existing products. We are in fact seeing…

One can’t see the forest for the trees.

Kottke.org is one of those sites I have been following for a while now, and a while back Jason Kottke linked to John Hartnup’s Poster Prompts. John wanted to see what range of visual styles AI could produce (beyond the typical AI slop), and ended up creating prompts for a hundred different design styles for […] Source

I linked to his work before, and here’s The Art Of Storytelling with another interesting video – about what made Jobs such a good presenter: I’m not going to spoil the findings, which are presented well with good corroborating examples. But the most interesting thing to me was one short video snippet of Jobs being visibly nervous before a very early, 1978 presentation: It made me think about other examples of Jobs being off his presenting game. The most well-known one is likely the 2005…

There are lots of tool/model/skill changes listed below, but the biggest overarching change is simplicity. The models are changing faster than the tools. I am increasingly finding little long-term value in anything that tries to improve the model from the outside. So the last couple of months have seen the removal of many tools and a lot of skills. Instead, I am now focusing on improving my inputs and pushing the model to verify and prove the output.ModelsOpus and Fable are from Anthropic.…

Watching football and contrmplating the feasibility of a “Super Lewp”. Orchestration in T3 is really helpful.

Ben Nadel looks at an issue that the HTMX "HX-Redirect" header has when you try to redirect users back to the same page in ColdFusion....

tag(s): #yell-at-cloud #overblown-minor-annoyances I was going to write something like "silly", instead of the harsher "stupid", then remembered that this is a personal site and I don't need to hold back. Yay for having your own web space. [1] At work we use this product, a website with its corresponding phone app, to make desk reservations, since we use hoteling. Honestly, the site is pretty good. The best feature is how it can make recurring reservations on certain weekdays, and if the desk…

It definitely makes the size much smaller - we can all move faster with agents. The idea of a "pirate" and "architect" is interesting but boy are we going to burn a lot of tokens. Maybe that's ok for the speed gain?

New tools for writing, coding, and design, and a lot more AI.

I’m not sure I agree that this is “the best way” to use icons on the web, but there is some clever stuff worth reading about in the article.

Up until the 1960s, telephone calls were carried as analog signals. There was a great deal of frequency division multiplexing onto open wire, and sometimes coaxial cables, but in the post-war period buried multipair telephone cables began to dominate. While the network was surprisingly functional—long distance calls from coast to coast were still quite intelligible—there were fundamental limitations to analog carriers. The quality of the call would degrade with each step, a problem that was…

I remember working in digital prepress decades ago that .eps files were just kinda weird, and I didn’t love it when I had to deal with them. Like, what even made this? Why? I assumed it was some kind of antiquated software or practice, and I’d just deal with it, and eventually the world would improve. But here we are in 2026, and EPS is still here. How I come across EPS files is that it’s the download format from stock art sites that deliver vector artwork. It actually sorta makes sense: Stock…

Unplanned Ten Week HiatusI’m back! Well, technically I haven’t left my internet home; it’s just my weeknotes that went into intermission. It was likely triggered as a respite from Blaugust1 and also time spent on migrating my secondary site from WordPress to Quartz2. It feels like there has been a fair amount that happened in the last ten weeks. I have an inkling that the proverbial page in my life has turned—or perhaps even a new chapter has begun. The unrelenting heat and humidity has also…