Charged Vacuum Emboitement

I am pleasantly surprised to discover that this blog’s hosting service has already patched the PHP RCE CVEs (that’s enough abbreviations — Ed.) that have been melting down the internet today, and without so much as marketing email about it.

I haven’t seen anything attributing the discovery of these vulnerabilities to Mythos/Fable/Astra/whatever, but it’s hard to escape the sense that the long-promised exploit tidal wave may be breaking over us right about now.

In the words of Brian Wilson (and my beloved David Thomas): Surf’s up!

Resurrection

Ok, neoptolemus is back. Most of the lossage is reconstructed one way or another, and I have a new backup regime. Obviously it’s a work in progress, but at least it is in progress.

I’d like to think we’ll have no more of this nonsense, but who am I kidding?

Water Damage

Yesterday was definitely not ideal.

We needn’t go into the unfortunate confluence of circumstances that led to my MacBook getting doused between the first and second practical sessions, but the short term consequences were embarrassing — haplessly fumbling through lab 2 on a borrowed laptop — and the slightly longer term ones look bad for poor neoptolemus. He’ll be in the shop for weeks, probably, and it’s extremely unlikely any data will survive that. For the moment I’m back on pyrrhus — a lucky fallback to have, but sadly out of sync.

Most, though not quite all, of my work work is in the cloud or easily recreated from backups, but various side quests are not — in particular, the recently released versions of Vagabond, Frobulator and Quarterjack are all orphaned and need to be painstakingly reconstructed from earlier sources, which is tiresome in the extreme. In some ways the UCL exam template is even more annoying.

There’s a lesson here — I knew perfectly well that my backups were lacking — but mostly it’s just another weary sigh.

Tsk.

Demon Twink

Well, we’re back. JFC yesterday was exhausting. To give the same lecture twice looks suspiciously like carelessness.

In other news, how is it that I only learned today that Sam Altman is gay?

It’s not redemptive, don’t worry. I still abhor that freeze-dried weasel. But is it a coincidence that he’s literally the only even vaguely fuckable tech billionaire?

Frobbing Gristle

Another update, this time to Frobulator. Just bugfixes, but notable by virtue of being prompted by a report from someone at A Tasty Pixel. They’re the makers of Loopy, but more importantly also of long-retired framework The Amazing Audio Engine, which is what encouraged me to make Frobulator in the first place. Long, long ago.

In other news: AAAAARGH! It’s almost October! Teaching starts on Monday! Winter is coming!

I should post more. If only to get that one off the front page before any students accidentally google their way here. JFC.