Category: Uncategorized

HTTP compression and incremental rendering

TL;DR: HTTP compression can delay rendering of web resources HTTP permits content to be served with different encodings, some of which can be used to compress [1] the data volume transferred over the network, which has become a frequent suggestion [2] towards optimising websites for performance. It turns out that the deflation phase of the … Continue reading HTTP compression and incremental rendering →

Climbing the monolith

I love learning a term for a vague idea that has been with me for a while already; it gives the fuzzy cloud in my head a box to live in and a label to put under... not to mention convenient stowage when I need room for other things. One such illuminating moment was listening … Continue reading Climbing the monolith →

Unlocking a password-protected hard disk

TL;DR: Recovering data from a password-protected SATA hard disk that was locked by a Thinkpad I wish this post would be as generally valid as the title suggests; at this hour I'm just unspeakably glad to have unlocked a hard disk I didn't even know I had locked and can finally go to bed. What … Continue reading Unlocking a password-protected hard disk →

Off topic: the odds of being hit by space debris

ESA says [1] it's 106 times more likely to be hit by a lightning twice in the same year that to be hit by Tiangong 1's debris. There are 2 recorded incidents [2] of space debris that caused harm to people, the earliest recorded in 1979. According to [3], chances of being struck by lighting in … Continue reading Off topic: the odds of being hit by space debris →

Secure messaging in the browser

By observing news and public discussions I feel that there is a growing awareness of data privacy and an increasing demand for secure person-to-person communication. In order to address my communication needs, I plugged together a few Javascript libraries and started the Webencryption [1] project on Github. What is Webencryption? Webencryption is a rather crude … Continue reading Secure messaging in the browser →

A switching amplifier

In this off-topic post I'm picking up an old hobby of mine: electronics. I've built in the past quite a few analogue audio amplifiers, mostly based on pull-push [1] designs, but always wanted to build a pulsed/switching amplifier. Thus, for no good reason at all, in this post I'll describe the design I came up … Continue reading A switching amplifier →

Phantomjs not showing text

TL;DR if Phantomjs doesn't show any text/fonts, give it a Truetype web font. Despite Phantomjs' [1] development slowing down [2] it still brings most of the features I need for regression testing web applications. And, thanks to Docker, it should be possible to operate it for a long time to come. Installing and operating Phantomjs … Continue reading Phantomjs not showing text →

Eclipse freezes on Windows 10 creator’s update

Symptoms: Eclipse used to work fine under Windows 10, suddenly hangs short after start. Solution: uninstall Linux subsystem or don't use Git in Eclipse Explanation: the Eclipse egit plugin looks for bash, which normally doesn't exist on Windows. When the Windows subsystem for Linux is installed, bash does exist, but blocks with a message ("click … Continue reading Eclipse freezes on Windows 10 creator’s update →

Getting test coverage reports for integration test

I'm a vociferous supporter of integration tests with an embedded servlet container and in this post I'll show how to get test coverage for the classes touched in those integration tests. All test coverage gauging tools I know instrument code under test either at build time or run time through Java agents. Because the code … Continue reading Getting test coverage reports for integration test →