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Moving from WordPress
A little while back I migrated this site from a full blown WordPress instance over onto Jekyll hosted on GitHub pages.
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API Days Helsinki - Virtual Conference
A slightly different speaking experiance as the world tries to contiue during COVID. I swapped Helsinki for my home office to provide content for the first virtual API Days event. The on-site conference has been re-scheduleded for September (which sadly I can’t attend). Prerecording the talk to an audience of one was odd but it did make it easier to respond to any questions in the chat during the talk.
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Retweet @mraible
RT @mraible: 11 security patterns for microservice architectures - all in one handy guide!
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Tweet
That moment when you run through a forgotten password flow and not only are you emailed the plaintext password but its the first x characters of the value in your password manager #facepalm
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After getting snowed out last year I needed to have another go at getting this photo and the sunrise didn't disappoint
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I'm back in Vegas, but the mountains beyond are calling...
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Tweet
Probably the most common query I get with @okta is how to manage change between different environments. Configuration as code, identity should be treated the same as any other component of your application. https://t.co/osXTm3J6jJ
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Instagram
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API Days – Paris
Presenting: Customers in the Crosshairs
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API Days - Paris - OAuth by Example Workshop
Presenting: OAuth by Example Workshop
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Tweet
I’m excited to be speaking at #APIDaysParis next week. Join me for our ‘OAuth by Example’ workshop on Monday as well as the CIAM focused ‘Customers in the Crosshairs’ on Tuesday.
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Instagram
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Instagram
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Instagram
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Tweet
Awesome summary on why blindly adopting agile practices doesn’t actually help your developers.
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eCrime Congress Abu Dhabi
Presenting: Customers in the Crosshairs
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Paris Identity Labs
Presenting: Identity as Code
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Instagram
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Instagram
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Instagram
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Instagram
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National DevOps Conference
Presenting: Identity as Code
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Tweet
Thank you to everyone who came to my talk at #nationaldevopsconf today. If you missed it don’t worry as I have been asked to repeat this session tomorrow. https://t.co/vP55BOIaSp
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Tweet
Heading to #nationaldevopsconf today, if you are attending come to see my talk on testing user identity at 11.30 to learn about handling users in your deployment pipeline
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Instagram
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Instagram
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Instagram
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Nuxt.js and Developer Relations
I’m proud to say my first article was recently published over at developer.okta.com guiding you through the process of creating a universal javascript applications with Nuxt.js.
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Instagram
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Tweet
Excited to be heading down to #AWSSummitLondon today. Come and discuss better digital identity at the @okta booth S12.
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Tweet
Happy to say my first article for @oktadev has gone live. Bit of weekend homework for you all 😁 https://t.co/KdKnr7BAbK
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This week can be summed up as planes, trains and automobiles
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Not the best morning to try for a sunrise photo
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That post Christmas slump
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Looking good San Francisco
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Covered 25 miles across San Francisco this weekend and found this awesome spot to watch the sun go down.
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Sometimes jet lag has its advantages, caught the sunrise today
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Autumn may be here but the garden is still going strong
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Spent my morning editing photos from a recent trip
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Went to check out the life of the brick exhibit in Ottawa today. This had the caption "sometimes a mind that wanders is not a bad thing"
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So that took a little longer than planned. Over a year after I brought the kit to do it my dome is finally finished....except the paving....and the planting. #domedone
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Spring has arrived when the Alliums are out
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Release Cycles - get on the bus
I’ve spent a lot of time recently looking at how to manage multiple supported code streams. One key question we’ve been discussing is how frequently do you patch a product depending on where in its lifecycle it is? One of the positions was that this discussion has to happen on an ad-hoc basis so that a release is made when sufficient changes have occurred to constitute a patch or an urgent release is needed. While this makes sense for products approaching end of life when changes are few and necessitated by the requests of existing customers, however patching this way for products under active development or even maintenance leads to problems with resource scheduling and awareness.
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Time spent with cats is never wasted
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On readable software
There is a great post circulating this week on the definition of readable code and one quote really stuck out at me:
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Nice little summer walk this morning
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There's always time for a walk in the woods
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Well earned brewdog after shifting 1.7 tonnes of soil #bankholidayweekend
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Blank Slates
This New Year, I wish you more blank slates. May you have more blank white pages sitting in front you with your favorite pen nearby and at the ready. May you have blank screens in your code editor with your absolutely favorite color syntax highlighting. May your garage work table be empty save for a single large piece of reclaimed redwood and a saw. - The Builder’s High
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Sunny riverside walk in the fens today #getoutside
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Ely Cathedral in the winter sun this morning
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Is that email important
Best email footer ever? From Protest:
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NDC London 2016
Once again in January I headed to the Excel centre in London to attend NDC. NDC (the conference formally known as Norweign Developers Conference) has been my conference of choice for the last few years, I feel it provides a great mix of technical and soft skills sessions, great networking and the best conference food going.
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Snoopers Charter
Yesterday saw a second defeat for the snoopers charter this time as a late set of amendments to a counter-terrorism bill. There is more detail from the EFF here and the Open Rights Group here. Yesterday’s session served as a reminder that why due process and debate is needed; while we saw points from lords with little understand of what they were trying to legislate such as Lord King we also saw solid counter argument for balance from others such as Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho.
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Where we're going, we don't need roads
One of my Christmas presents this year was the Lego kit of the DeLorean from Back to the Future (obviously because 2015 is when Marty McFly arrives in Back to the Future II). Last year when I built the Millennium Falcon I really regretted not getting a timelaspe of the build process. This year with a little preparation I did and it came out rather well.
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2015 and Google Photo TakeOut
Happy New Year.
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NDC London
A couple of weeks back I got the opportunity to attend NDC London organised by the team between the Norwegian Developers Conference. They’ve branded this event to “new DevelopersConference() London” as Norwegian Developers Conference obviously limits their reach a little bit (to steal a joke from @markrendle’s stand-up) . I went out to NDC Oslo last year to attend their dedicated security track and was really impressed by the quality of the event and the speakers they lined up so once the registration opened for their London event this year I knew I wanted to attend as much as I could.
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Salisbury Cathedral
Went down to Somerset for a short break last weekend, on the way back we stopped in at Salisbury as we seem to be rapidly working our way round the cathedrals of England (this was the second of the weekend).
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Moving Git
I’ve been spending some time over the last month or so migrating our git server at work. Our old environment was starting to show the signs of age and just was not suited to having multiple developers checking in on several large projects at a time meaning we frequently ran into file permissions problems needing one of the team to ssh to the server a manually chmod the directory.
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Getting back behind the gun
The other weekend a few old friends invited me down to our local paintball field, Campaign, to spend the day training with them. It was awesome to see the guys again and play some nice relaxed paintball. The new field Tony and his guys have built is truly impressive. For a few points we strapped the GoPro on to see how well it worked strapped to the barrel, other than showing just how much I need to practice the footage came out quite well.
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Site Refresh
For the last month or so I have been playing with WordPress themes and bootstrap with the intent of finally replacing the slightly tweaked standard theme that I’ve been running for the last four years or so. It’s finally at a point where I am happy to leave it up permanently, there is definitely a couple of bits I need to tweak but as a whole I’m happy with how it has turned out. Bootstrap made working with dynamic re-sizing an absolute breeze, go on scale it up and down a couple of times.
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Fixing C++ project load failure in Visual Studio 2012 Update 1
Visual Studio 2012 marks a change in cycle for the development tools team as they are changing pace to incorporate regular updates to the product rather than the big bang of a new release every couple of years. Update 1 came out back in November (read more about that here) and I had been running it in the RC without issue. However with my fresh install of Express I had forgotten this update, launching VS this morning to make a couple of changes I saw the update available reminder. Couple of quick clicks later the download is on its way. Code change done I fired off the update and all seems fine, progress bars, coffee, reboot. Reopen Visual Studio, open solution, none of the projects will load on hitting reload for a single project and you are greeted with an alert with the text:
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Absorbing books
I love reading. It’s that simple, I enjoy losing myself in a story or absorbing the experiences of someone else. However this year has been manic, between work, travel and restoring my new house I haven’t had many opportunities to just sit and read. However I realised the other day I have probably read more this last year than I have since I finished university. However the key to this is not always carving out time to dedicate to reading (though as I’m enjoying a week off as I write this I have grabbed a few hours of sitting with coffee and a book) it has been a change in how I absorb books. I’m using absorb in place of reading as not all my ‘reading’ has been purely looking at printed text.
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PBTrainer on GitHub
I was playing with Window Phone 7 development for a proof of concept today at work which got me thinking about the PBTrainer project I wrote last year. Having a quick look on create.msdn.com told me that it is nearing the 600 download mark, not bad for an abandoned application. However there were lots of things I wasn’t happy with in v1.1; no infinite repetition sessions, poor about/versioning info and pretty ropey tombstone handling.
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Olympic Twitter data mining
The London 2012 Olympics kicked off in style last night with a fantastic opening ceremony taking in the history of Britain, music and technology as well as the parade of the teams. This Olympics will be unprecedented in the amount of access the public gets to the athletes, Olympians have been sharing their training, their travel and will no doubt share their success and failure at events as well. But social media is allowing the public to be more involved than ever in spectacle events such as the Olympics, Twitter faced a heavy load last night as people tweeted their way through the opening ceremony giving an amazing back channel to the event.
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Experiences of an Windows Phone Developer
One of the main selling points to me for Windows Phone 7 was the opportunity to write mobile apps in a .NET environment. I thought I would summarize here my experiences over the last few months from signing up as a developer, writing and deploying for the first time and working with the Marketplace.
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Windows Phone 7 First Thoughts of an Android switcher
Well after waiting nearly a month with no end in sight for T-Mobile to finally get some stock of the Desire HD, I caved and cancelled my contract. What prompted this? The new Windows Phone 7. I’ve fled back to O2 to get the O2 exclusive HTC HD7 and I must say upfront i’m very happy.
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Firesheep, making Facebook hi-jacking even easier
There’s been a lot of press floating about today about a new Firefox extension called Firesheep. This extension sniffs networks for HTTP cookies for a number of popular social network services and captures them ready for one click session highjacks. Thanks to the publicly available APIs for these networks Firesheep performs a lookup to see exactly whose’s cookie you have allowing greater refinement of attack.
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Reading Entity gets Tanked
Have been meaning to post these up for a while but here they are at last, the 2011 Reading Entity jersey!
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Zune Software 4.2 and the case of disappearing functionality
Last week saw the push of the latest release of the Zune desktop software, normally a new release is the indicator of new functionality. Following the update there was a flurry of postings to the Zune community forums complaining about the mysterious disappearance of serveral parts of functionality, namely all of the social functionality and the recently introduced Smart DJ function. As these posts rolled a pattern emerged…they were all from international users.
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Not dead merely sleeping
…well damn its been a while since I’ve written a post on here. But life has been more than a little hectic over the last few months, exams, moving house, graduation and starting a new job.
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Dick Wall Open Lecture
Last December I was fortunate enough to attend the ‘Annual Centre of Excellence Distinguished Lecture’ from Dick Wall (of The Java Posse fame). At the time I was intending on writing a short post about it but it never quite materialised, however the other day while rummaging around the departments open-lecture series announcements I came across the recording from this lecture and I thought I would share it with you all. It is publicly available from the Kent Computer Science department here. Dick covered a range of very interesting topics including the progress of Computer Science in the last 20 years, the abundance of frameworks, open source, stateless computing and the Furby grid.
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ColonyFS an Introduction
Chris has written an interesting introduction to our final year group project on his blog. Our project has been an to implement a working secure peer-to-peer file system over the internet with anonymity as the key. I can honestly say it’s without a doubt one of the most enjoyable projects I have worked on in a long time. The core of my work has focused around the development of the Windows GUI and I’m working on a post about this, until then I highly recommend giving Chris’ introduction a read.
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Zune Social - Success at Last!
A while ago I wrote about my experiences with the Zune, my only complaint was the fact that the Zune social features are locked out if you live outside of the continental United states. Well this evening I returned to my attempts to get access, first I tried the FroxyProxy plug-in for FireFox I but could not find a usable US based proxy. However the delay caused in contacting the proxies did allow me to snag the URL for Zune.net’s sign-up page before it redirects to the region error that has been taunting me. After a few further searches I
came across a forum post proposing that for some reason Opera was allowing users outside the US past this redirect. I have an alpha build of Opera 10 installed so I gave it a try and …. it works! I’m not sure why exactly but it allows you to complete the sign-up process without a hitch. -
Get Meshed
I got a pretty good reaction to my post about DropBox so I thought I’d share my latest experiment with synchronisation software. Microsoft have released a new version of their Live Mesh software, I had a developer licence for this several months ago but never really had chance to use it in anger. I’ve just downloaded the latest build and I must say it has definitely improved.
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Mailing List Automation
How often are you at an event and join a mailing list? How often are you on the other side of that table trying to get people to join you mailing list?
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Amazon Music Store...unleashed on the UK at last!
Yesterday without any fanfare or spectacle Amazon threw open the doors to their music store for the first time outside of the United States.
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Update on the Zune and FOM
Just a quick update on what was mentioned by Dom in the comments of my previous post, I’ve just tried the region switch and still can’t access ‘the social’ elements of the Zune. It is asking for a confirmation of terms and conditions on the Zune website which appears to be doing an ip look up for my location. This might work once I’ve got an activated account, looks like i’m still going to need a poxy to do this. Thanks for your comment Dom and I’ll give this another try once I’ve proxied an account.
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Zune - Short Review
My tiny Creative Zen 4gb has been on its last legs for a while now so when it finally died the other day I was not massively surprised. I had been looking around for a new MP3 player for a while but nothing out there caught my fancy, Creative’s design team seems to be on some experimental type of drugs and iRiver has continued down the insane interface line a little too far for my liking…then there is the iPod. Every time I mention getting a new MP3 player the inevitable is mentioned…“just get an iPod” there is a simple reason i refuse to do this and that is iTunes. I hate iTunes and i’m pretty sure it hates me back, any time I install iTunes it attempts to purge my music collection. Then there is the DRM issue.
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The Search and Audible
Things have been a bit hectic since term has began in earnest so I my posts will be a bit sporadic but we’ll see how it goes. I’ve got to do quick shout out to my housemate Chris who is running his blog over at ChrisNolan.me.uk he’ll be blogging on various technologies he’s playing with at the moment including his BeagleBoard.
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Got DropBox?
I was lucky enough to get hold of a beta invite to DropBox several months ago and really enjoyed working with it. DropBox is a online synchronisation tool allowing files to be held in the cloud and accessed from their website or from the desktop using a client. While reinstalling my system before returning to uni I had overlooked DropBox it was this post from Joel on Software that sparked me to reinstall it. The now latest public build seems to be incredibly stable and much more performant than previous releases. Joel’s post presents the true power of such tools by combining the file system functionality of DropBox with PasswordSafe (or Password Gorilla for Mac and Linux) it is now possible to store all your passwords safely in the cloud allowing them to be pulled down and used on any terminal you can install DropBox to.
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Ubiquitous Bluetooth Guides
This morning I caught this article on the register, a group from the University of Michigan has developed a bluetooth based broadcasting system called Talking-Points, designed to relay information to mobile devices about the surrounding area. Bluetooth beacons are be placed throughout a location, when a bluetooth enabled device passes a beacon it receives the unique tag id of the beacon and connects to the project’s website for the message to be played. This message could be used to pass any kind of information to the user of the mobile device. The initial design appears to have been to alert the blind to hazards in their vicinity, however it appears to be expanding to allow store owners of proclaim their services. Projects like this really capture my interest, while I feel that there are several technical challenges that the team will need to overcome this project has great potential. If correctly implemented this technology would improve the lives of many with visual impairments. The project is being presented this week at the Accessible Design in the Digital World Conference in York.
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First Post!
Well it’s finally up! I’ve been playing with the idea of relaunching this site for a long time now. As I’ve had a bit of down time before going into my final year I’ve decided to get myself in gear and do something constructive. This site will mostly be used to work on little side projects I’ve been developing, also I’m sure I’ll end up posting updates on other things that occupy my time. If you want to find out a bit more about me hit the about link.
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