abulman

Joined 16 years ago

Karma

122

Submissions

Member since

Dec 27

I'm a PHP/Symfony developer and LAMP-stack devops/scaling specialist, based in west London (but my internet connection and tech at home is quite possibly better than yours at the office - so I work remotely), that loves to keep up with technology and write some really elegant software code to help my sites handle large scale and many users.

I've got more than 25 years experience, developing database backed website applications and for SME, GOV.uk and blue-chip clients using the LAMP stack for back-end web applications and dynamic websites at scale (such as 20+Million all-PHP hits per day).

  https://github.com/alister
  https://alister.github.io/
  https://phpscaling.com/
  https://stackoverflow.com/users/6216/alister-bulman

Alister Bulman

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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 months ago

As I pointed out to the OP on Mastodon, I very much believe that it was a reference to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where they filmed a big door, and the original laser sequence from the first TRON movie.

LLL also made an in-house video when they were filming the original movie - https://www.spyculture.com/dept-energy-invent-making-video/

Comment · 5 months ago

you'd first have to program it to take the picture, and look back at the photographer's eye to get the reflection of the screen with the IP address on!

Comment · 5 months ago

Michael Sheen is apparently such a fan of TRON, that he might have been lucky to not negotiated himself down to a $0 pay packet - just in case someone else might have gotten the role :D

Comment · 2 years ago

Some of the views their cameras get are fantastic - and the tracking on the last flight test would quite possibly make NASA envious. Cameras on the beach and also just next to StarHopper are in harms way too, they've lost a couple of them. I'm not sure what the cost of repair was after a chunk of concrete from what used to be the pad took out the back of a car!

Comment · 2 years ago

I'll often spend a little time while watching the flight-tests (usually with Tim Dodd / EverydayAstronaut) just doing a search on YouTube for 'spacex live' and usually report 15-20 each time. They are very easy to spot when you've seen a few of them. I'll usually get a report of a few being shut down later in the day, and more over the next couple of days.

But, yes, they should be easy for YT to detect & block automatically - it's frustrating they (and other scams) get to stay online so long.

Comment · 2 years ago

They might do some minor optimisation in terms of when the fly to keep some coverage but ...

> As of May 2024, there are 6,078 Starlink satellites in orbit, of which 6,006 are working - https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html

Comment · 2 years ago

Agreed - I'm still using it everyday to view and do some minor editing (trimming and resizing pics). It, along with browsers, VLC, Putty, and SublimeText (and now also ObsidianMD) are the first things I will download to a new Windows PC.

Comment · 2 years ago

Maybe all the interns that were left in charge didn't properly do what the AI had said?

Comment · 2 years ago

wow, there. Lets not get crazy there. It's plenty enough to support multiple package managers, but what you are considering is just too much!

Comment · 2 years ago

I'm also using Obsidian daily notes, with all un-actioned items shown on a page with a dataview API[^1]:

    ```dataview
    TASK FROM "VaultName/Journal" WHERE !completed
    ```

Since at least 2012 I've also been using a text file format from http://todotxt.org/ and more recently I wrote a program that takes a crontab-like list[^2] to pre-generate entries on a daily, by-day-name (every Sunday for example), and I also pull in a list of holidays from gov.uk, so they are also populated.

[^1]: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview

[^2]: https://github.com/alister/alister-tools/blob/main/.todo.cro...

Comment · 2 years ago

Just don't use -O2 and -fe unless you want to end up with Rust.

Comment · 3 years ago

> "The Ocean," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to the ocean."

Comment · 3 years ago

Ever see the video of a guy walking past a Saturn V (lying in it's side), doing a piece to camera and pointing to the rocket behind him?

'Connections' (1978). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ

Comment · 3 years ago

"the way God and Robert Heinlein intended."

Comment · 3 years ago

I can assure you that as someone that has done a couple Gov-related public-sites, some developers do think about it, and use suitable tools to ensure there's no issues.

Before the last-and-stolen-passports site went live (that I spent most of 2014 getting live - not writing - but mostly trying to get deployed), we did have a conversation, and easily proved that people called Mr or Mrs Null and/or O'Brien would have no problems. That conversation was also somewhat prompted by the Dartford Crossing site that went live a little before us - which had 'some issues'.