I've always been fascinated by floppy disks from the crazy stories of Steve Wozniak designing the Disk II controller using a handful of logic chips and carefully-timed software to the amazing tricks to create - and break - copy protection recently popularised by 4am.

I'm going to be writing a few articles about data preservation and copy protection but first we need a short primer.

I've been using Nuxt2 quite a bit for my sites (including this one) and am now starting to use Nuxt3 for a few new ones and am finding the docs lacking in many places or confusing in others so hope to post a few more tips in the coming weeks.

Today we have the "reading time" popularised by sites like Medium.

I've been working on a system that heavily uses message queuing (RabbitMQ via MassTransit specifically) and occasionally the system needs to deal with large object graphs that need to be processed different - either broken into smaller pieces of work or serialized to an external source and a pointer put into the message instead.

The first idea was to serialize all messages to a MemoryStream but unfortunately this has some limitations, specifically:

Webfonts are now ubiquitous across the web to the point where most of the big players even have their own typefaces and the web looks a lot better for it.

Unfortunately the problem still exists that either the browser has to wait before it draws anything while it is getting the font or it renders without the font then re-renders the page again once the font is available. Neither is a great solution and Google's PageSpeed will hit you for either so what is an enterprising web developer to do?

OpenTracing is an interesting project that allows for the collection of various trace sources to be correlated together to provide a timeline of activity that can span services for reporting in a central system. They were competing with OpenCenus but have now merged to form OpenTelemetry.

I was recently brought in as a consultant to help migrate an existing system that used OpenTracing in .NET that recorded trace data into Jaeger so that they might migrate to the latest OpenTelemetry libraries. I thought it would be useful to document what I learnt as the migration process is not particularly clear.

A good SDK builds on the fundamentals of good software engineering but SDKs have additional requirements to consider.

When developing software as a team a level of familiarity is reached between the team members. Concepts, approaches, technologies, and terminology are shaped by the company and the goals are typically aligned.

Breaking changes are always work for your users. Work you are forcing them to do when they upgrade to your new version. They took a dependency on your library or software because it saved them time but now it's costing them time.

Every breaking change is a reason for them to stop and reconsider their options. If your library is paid-for or the preferred way for paying users to access your services then lost users can come with a real financial cost.

I'm often digging into old bitmap font and UX design out of curiosity - and someday hope to revive a lot of these fonts in more modern formats using a pipeline similar to that for ZX Origins so we can get all the usable fonts, screenshots etc. out of them.

One limitation I've run into is digging into old Macintosh fonts. While James Friend's PCE.js puts System 6 and System 7 at your fingertips when it comes to later MacOS 7.5, 8 or 9 releases the site doesn't have you covered as PCE doesn't support PowerPC emulation (it emulates Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086 processors).

As everybody who has read my blog before knows, I love LINQ and miss it when coding in other languages, so it's nice when I get a chance to use it again. When I come back to it with fresh eyes, I notice some things aren't as easy as they should be - and this time is no exception.

People often need to build up LINQ expressions at runtime based on filters or criteria a user has selected. Adding criteria is incredibly easy, as you can chain operations together on the IQueryable interface, e.g.

I've been a big fan of static site generation since I switched from WordPress to Jekyll back in 2018. I'm also a big fan of learning new technologies as they come along, and now GitHub Actions are out in the wild; I thought this would be an opportunity to see how I can port my existing custom CircleCI build to Jekyll.

A quick recap from part 5 - Hosting & Building, my CircleCI configuration was basically two jobs that have subsequently been tweaked since then. They are: