Reading my recent computing retrospective, I realised there was a big section missing: the people in my life that made an impact and helped shape my career. Outside my immediate family, one person made an outsized contribution, and I’m fairly certain that without his influence my life would have taken a very different path. The fact that I’m still here in 2026, still writing code and being fortunate enough to have a career in something I love is testament to him. So I’d like to take a few moments to talk about my old secondary school teacher, George Dryden. Denied Back in 1995, I had a problem. I knew I wanted to study computing at university and build a career out of my passion, but there was a snag. For those unfamiliar with the UK schooling system, when you’re 15-16 you take a set of GCSE exams in a broad range of subjects. After that, you pick around 3 subjects to really focus on over a period of 2 years. These are called A Levels, and they are a big step up and are meant to prepare you for a degree-level course at university. Admission to university is also governed by these results - if you want to study computing, you’re going to need a computing A-Level, and most universities will only accept you (or “make an offer”) if you achieve a certain grade. And whilst I had taken computing at a GCSE level, my school did not offer a computing A-Level course. I instead had to settle on “Design & Technology”, which just didn’t inspire me. Instead of working on my portfolio and projects, I spent most of my time daydreaming and writing code on the Acorn Archimedes computers that were the staple of every 90s UK school. No disrespect to the teachers - they were all awesome - but it just wasn’t for me. I was miserable, and by the end of my first year, I was well on my way to failing outright with my entire future plans seemingly going up in smoke. Someone noticed That’s when George stepped in. He’d taught me computing right the way through my GCSEs, and with no A-Level course on offer, that was officially where his involvement was supposed to have ended. It didn’t. He had noticed my constant presence in the computing labs - before and after school, during lunch breaks, free “study” periods - working on some little pet project or digging into RISC OS internals. I remember him as warm, with a wicked, dry sense of humour, and a refreshingly spiky attitude to authority - I always got the sense he’d worked out for himself which rules were worth taking seriously and which ones weren’t. And he always had time for me. I spent years pestering him with questions that had nothing to do with anything on the syllabus, and he’d always find a way to answer them that actually made sense. He was just as supportive of my odd little obsessions. At one point I’d got deep into the BBS scene, which I thought was the coolest thing ever, and decided what the school really needed was an internal BBS running on its own network. So I wrote one. It was deeply cringeworthy, obviously - but George helped me put posters up around the school advertising it, and even gave it a mention in assembly one morning. I think about five people in total ever checked it out. It didn’t matter: a teacher had stood up in front of the entire school and treated my weird little project like it was worth something, and that was a hugely validating moment for me. Off the books He recognised the passion, and eventually he made a suggestion: What if I quit the Design and Technology course, and instead attempt the A-level course myself? Personally, I also suspect he was enjoying himself. There was some internal school politics behind why computing wasn’t offered at A-Level in the first place - I never knew the details - and I think the prospect of one of his students simply going out and getting the qualification anyway appealed to him on two separate levels. It would get me where I wanted to go, and it would wind up exactly the right people. It wouldn’t be easy, he warned. The school would be against it, plus it was a two-year course which I’d have to cram into one year. I’d have to do it all myself - studying, lesson planning, coursework - he couldn’t help me in an official capacity, but he said he’d advocate for me and help where he could. If I had assignments, he’d send them off to be graded and would give feedback in his own time. He’d enter me in for the exams and also gave me a set of keys to the computer lab so I could use it whenever I needed. It was the first time anybody outside my own family had really shown faith in my abilities and encouraged me to take a stand. It was a pivotal moment for me - I realised if I wanted something badly enough I would have to fight for it, but I could still make it happen. I didn’t have to take “NO” for an answer - a lesson I think I picked up from watching him as much as from anything he ever actually said to me. After a few weeks of dithering, I took the jump. I remember a few awkward meetings with the school administration but thanks to his behind-the-scenes work, I was soon following my dream. An intense year And yes, it was bloody hard work. I had to condense an entire two year course into under a year, be disciplined enough to produce my own study plan, and be critical enough of my own shortcomings that I could focus my study where it was needed. I pretty much lived and breathed it for months straight and was more-or-less a permanent fixture in the labs or school library poring over my course books. I’d make lists of questions and chat to George over lunch, and he’d provide guidance and encouragement. It was a lonely way to learn with no classmates to compare notes with, no lessons to turn up to, and right up until the end I had no real idea whether any of it was good enough - but bit by bit, it started to feel like something I could actually pull off. And sure enough, in the late spring of 1996, I sat down in an exam hall with my fellow students, the only one with an A-Level computing question paper in front of me. The final exam went by in a blur - I can only remember a few of the questions now (and a peculiar obsession with the Pascal language) - but I do remember the euphoria as the invigilator called “time’s up, pens down, close your papers NOW”. I had done it. A few nerve-wracking months later, my Mum drove me into school to pick up my results. I ripped open the envelope and saw it - I’d passed with an A grade! I literally ran up the stairs to George’s office next to the computing labs to thank him personally. I’d taken my camera into school to take a few last photos for memory’s sake and snapped this photo of him before I walked out the school gates for the last time: A different path Because of him, I managed to get into my university of choice, studying computing with a focus on networks. Because of that, I landed my first job working as a “webmaster”, and my career since has been one of the highlights of my life. All these years later, it’s a real privilege to be able to get up each morning and actively look forward to working in an industry I love. Without George stepping up for me and encouraging me to believe in myself, none of that would have happened. I wouldn’t have had the career I have, and I wouldn’t be where I am now. I met my wife when we both worked at a software company - she sat at the desk behind me - so even my home and family life can be traced back to that spring of 1996. And the A-Level itself was only half of what I took away from that year. The qualification opened the door to university, but the lesson that came with it was every bit as important: that a “no” isn’t always the end of it, and that sometimes the answer can be argued with. I’m so proud of what I managed to achieve all those years ago, and even more thankful to have had someone like George in my life to put me on the right track. Mr. Dryden I did see him again after I left. He drank in one of my local pubs - a pub I’d been going to for a good while before I was technically old enough to be in it - and I’d say hello if I spotted him in there, mostly in the months before I moved away to university. After that it was only a handful of times. For years I’d find myself scanning the room whenever I was back home and in for a pint, half expecting him to be at the bar. At some point I stopped seeing him altogether and eventually moved across the country. The trouble was I never really knew how to talk to him outside of school. He was always Mr. Dryden, or just “Sir”, I don’t think I ever once called him George to his face! I was (and still am if I’m honest) fairly socially awkward, and I never worked out how to phrase the thing I actually wanted to say: that he had changed the entire direction of my life, and I wasn’t sure he knew it. So instead I’d say hello, and ask how he was, talk about nothing much, and go back to my friends. Epilogue Sadly, 3 years ago now, I opened the latest issue of my old school alumni newsletter to read that he’d passed away. The photo at the start of this article was taken from his obituary article and I read that he’d had a long illness and had suffered from dementia at the end. I did write to him years ago by email - I don’t know if he ever got it, or was in any capacity to understand what he’d done for me, but I hope so. There’s an old saying by one of my favourite authors (Terry Pratchett) that “no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away”. In one of his books, a character keeps the memory of his son alive by passing his name along a series of telegraph towers. It’s in that spirit that I’m writing this post - I debated it for many years as it’s very personal to me and I also have no contact with any of George’s family so I have no idea what they would make of it all. But even though it’s 30+ years ago now, I will never forget him or what he did for me - and at least now, if someone searches his name it’ll be recorded here for as long as I’m alive and running this site. Thank you, Sir. George Dryden 1942-2023

I remember talking to my Grandfather shortly before he passed away about the changes he’d seen in his lifetime. Born in 1911, the thing he said that really stuck with me was that when he was a child people were barely puttering around off the ground in aeroplanes; A few years before his 60th birthday, men walked on the moon. When I look back at the simple 8-bit microcomputers of my childhood, compared to the modern world in which my daughter is growing up, I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen a similar step change. But just as my Poppa said “When it’s happening you don’t notice it. It’s only when you look back you see how much everything has changed.” Last month, this website passed a pretty big milestone: it’s been online for over 25 years (since Tuesday, May 29th 2001 - a few days after I finished my university finals exams), making it my online home now for my entire professional career. All along, I’ve been creating content and documenting my various projects and interests of the time, which has turned it into something of a personal time capsule. All of which makes this feel like the right moment to stop and look back at the archived history of this site, my online presence and tech trends that have come and gone. This is going to be a bit of a long (and sometimes embarrassing) one, but I think I’ve earned a little indulgence! Firstly: No, I’m not going to mention AI. That’s a topic for another day. Secondly: I have spent a lot of time putting this article together, digging out the old screenshots and trying to make sure my memories align with the correct events. But bear in mind this is a look back over many decades of personal, website and tech history - so it’s possible my recollections may be a bit off. Friendly corrections welcome! From Cassettes To The Cloud When I do stop and think about how much the world has changed, and what we now for take for granted, it really sinks in. I first started writing code about 40 years ago, with my first home computer - a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I can remember exactly the first program I typed in, as I still have the manual. To put things into perspective, here’s the juxtaposition of what my first lines of code would have looked like - typed carefully into a squishy rubber keyboard plugged into the family TV - alongside my current 2026 Ruby On Rails dev setup and my latest project: In my lifetime so far, I’ve gone from an 8-bit 3.5Mhz computer with 48KB memory, to my current laptop (Apple MacBook Pro) that has nearly 400 thousand times the memory and runs millions of times faster. And that’s just my laptop - Looking around my homelab, one of my refurbished systems (an old HP workstation) has 112 threads at 2Ghz and 1TB memory! I’ve gone from a 1,200 baud modem calling BBSes to gigabit fibre internet; from cassette tapes and floppy disks to NVMe drives for storage; and from being the only kid in my street with a computer to genuinely losing count of the number of devices I own that qualify for that term. Phones, personal and work laptops, tablets, old devices sitting in the back of a drawer, “smart” TVs, Raspberry Pis… Not to mention my old retro systems I still have. A Different Kind Of Soundtrack Because computers became such an important part of my life (and frankly, something of a refuge as I was growing up), I find that, much as certain songs pin me to a particular moment, a single piece of technology can catapult me instantly back in time. It’s like another kind of soundtrack to my life: I see an Acorn Archimedes RISC OS desktop, and suddenly I’m right back in the school “design & technology” labs - smelling of sawdust and glue guns - at lunchtime, because I understand computers more than I do people. I hear an old chip tune or see an Amiga cracktro, and I’m in the basement of my mum’s house, an awkward teenager staying up way beyond my bedtime writing letters and swapping floppy disks with contacts in the underground demo/cracking scene. I see a late ’90s pimped-out Linux desktop (Enlightenment Blue Steel, anyone?) and I’m sat up in my student digs, trying to work out where I’m going in life, breaking my new Linux install for like the 20th time. As this site and it’s predecessor have been online since the late 90s, I’ve seen tech trends come and go and have worked on some really fun stuff. Thanks to archive.org and my own snapshots and backups, I’ve managed to go back through the years and build up a timeline of all the different technology eras. It’s kind of a “Website CV” and tour through the technolgies and cultures of the day, starting from my first dabblings in hand-crafted HTML to the modern cloud-native world. It’s brought back a lot of memories as well as some decidedly cringy photos and website design… But first… Pre-History My digital footprints extend even further back: As well as getting me started on my computing journey, my very first computer also established my first pre-internet on-line presence. Fuelled by endless re-watchings of War Games, I’d become aware of the then-burgeoning BBS scene and I eventually saved up and bought this bad boy: Connected to my 8-bit computer, I got to experience a connection speed of around 0.0012 Megabits/Second in today’s terms! In our modern always-on, always-connected world where we’re tethered to the Internet 24/7, it’s hard to put into words how different the home computing scene was back then. Each computer was it’s own little island, and data transfer was usually carried out by copying tapes (and later floppy disks) and swapping them in the school yard. With a modem, I got to explore the local BBS scene and was the first time I experienced that feeling of being connected to actual real-life people across the void, albeit with identities closely guarded behind cryptic handles. I’ve even found old archives of these BBS systems from back then and a few of my old logins still even work! My own TNFS Site is one of my recent projects that aims to re-create that magic I felt back then, and it’s been a real blast seeing users logging in and leaving messages on something akin to the BBS sites of old. I eventually upgraded to an Amiga system - the essential computing system for the discerning 90s teenage hacker. Through the Amiga, I got more involved in the demo scene and made a lot of connections on BBS systems as well as through “mail trading”. Though much of my work from that time has been lost, there are still many archived disk images out there with my handywork, bearing my old scene handle and group affiliations. I’d started hanging out on bigger, more well-connected boards (many of which still exist today!) although my funds only initially stretched to a 9600-baud modem. I’d heard mention of this mysterious “Internet” thing, and some of the larger boards of the time offered a gateway to access services like FTP and Telnet. Magazines had just started mentioning the Internet and including enticing FTP URLs and some even had a “website” - whatever that was. Problem was, in addition to the phone bills and costs involved in signing up with one of the early ISPs, my Amiga would have had required upgrades beyond my budget and towards the end of the 90s I could see the writing on the wall for the platform. Although I even now still write and release software for my Amiga, I was heading to university, and had to begrudgingly jump ship to a more industry standard PC platform. I was moving into shared accommodation at the time, and had to leave my modem behind but that didn’t matter - the University had an incredible, proper connection to the Internet with speeds that were measured in (single-digit) actual Megabits/second. University At University, I got my first ever email address (which is still burned into my brain), and also got access to the computer labs full of Windows 3.1 machines replete with Trumpet Winsock and Internet Explorer 4.0. It was then I also got started on my Unix/Linux journey as there was a pool of Linux (Running RedHat 4.x and FVWM95) PCs and some Sun Ultra 5s running Solaris 7 that hardly anyone ever used. Much of my early memories of the Internet were therefore experienced through trusty old Netscape Navigator 4 and the CDE desktop. It was a pretty pivotal moment for the Linux scene - the introduction of the 2.2-series of kernels and distros like RedHat 6.x meant that people were starting to take Linux seriously, although the die-hard Solaris snobs were still saying that “Linux couldn’t scale” and it was a mere toy operating system. I vividly remember during my work placement year sneaking in Linux “through the back door”, setting up Samba servers, Apache webservers with mod_perl, firewalls and other infrastructure running on discarded desktop PCs. Browser-wise, it was still mainly Netscape or Internet Explorer v4.x. The Mozilla project had started, but the early betas were more-or-less unusable so by the end of my course, I ended up mostly using Konqueror under KDE 2. There was also a big jump in desktop usability at the time, and we also got XFree86 4.x in this period which introduced anti-aliased font rendering and a whole host of other technologies we now take for granted. I remember things like hacking libfreetype with #define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER to get proper (patent-infringing) hinting support, and it was just considered “business as usual”. Anyone complaining about Linux font rendering now should take a look at what we had to deal with back then: I wote a short guide to fixing things up which was archived in 2002, and from the timestamp in the clock, and the window decorations on my desktop I’d say this screenshot was probably a beta of Red Hat 8.0, or one of the later 7.x series before the Fedora project started. I see Konquerer again running in the background in file-browser mode there; Funnily enough, Konqueror ended up being the browser engine that “won” as it begat KHTML which in turn gave us WebKit / Blink. The Proto-Web To get around the early web, I’d use Yahoo! Index or AltaVista to find things, and signed up to a lot of mailing lists. Most of them have long-since disappeared from the Internet and I can’t find any usable archives but I remember frequenting “sunmanagers” and other lists where I learned early netiquette such as the cardinal sin of top-posting. The big “geek” websites I remember having accounts on from around that time were Slashdot (Hot Grits! Oog the caveman! Beowulf clusters! The hidden TrollTalk SID!), the early iterations of OSnews (still going, and has an extensive archive going back to the “glory days” of alternative OSes), and Kuro5hin.org which has sadly long since vanished. For software, I remember trawling freshmeat.net for new and updated packages and themes.org for all my desktop customisation “mods”. In the pre-GitHub world, these were usually hosted on random FTP mirrors or if the project was big and “professional” enough, on sourceforge.net. Although binary packages were most often an afterthought, so ./configure; make; make install was still the order of the day for installing things, which lead to a horrendous mess of packaged and non-packaged software all mashed together reminiscent of Randall Munroe’s Python Hell. I hadn’t yet made the jump onto IRC or other real-time chat although AIM and ICQ were rising in popularity, but I was on a number of early proto-forums including the very early “Linux Coffee Talk” where I found some of my earliest posts archived. In a true snapshot of the times, one of my earliest posts I could find dates back to Tuesday, May 1st, 2001 (a few days before I registered this domain) and is a plea for help getting a Zip drive working under the newly-released 2.4 series of Linux kernels. At 19:06 the same day, I posted a follow-up to some replies with: I’m too tired to do anything with it now though, I’ve been up for 48 hours straight working on my dissertation :( Oh boy, do I remember that. I read that post and the memories come flooding back; I’m right back there in my squalid student house, wrestling with kernel compilation options on my cobbled-together Celeron 600Mhz/128Mb RAM/Voodoo 3 setup. My final year dissertation was in effect, a Linux router/NAS appliance distro; a “proof of concept” of a simple to use system to share internet access, storage and so on. It was based on a short-lived offshoot of Slackware Linux called “Zipslack” , and it was delivered on ZIP Disks which I still have, along with the boot floppy (LILO crew representing) and hundreds of pages of print-outs of my Perl code, Linux kernel configuration and boot scripts. The report I wrote included a snapshot of the common tech stacks circa 2000: I’d decided to make the admin UI for my project web-based and had analysed the “state of the frontend”. I concluded with the somewhat dating observations that CSS was currently not widely supported enough to consider using, and the best screen resolution to design for was 800x600 in 16-bit colour mode. The backend was based on standard Perl-based CGI scripts, and although Apache 1.x was pretty widespread, I’d chosen the more lightweight thttpd - apparently it was then the 7th most popular web server in the world, and the benchmarks page for that project show what some of the options were to an late 90s / early 2000s sysadmin. Anyone remember Roxen, Boa or Zeus webservers? The Paleolithic Era As the web was really taking off, I’d decided to start my own website project and continue my experiments with HTML. This site was originally hosted on the free family website space I got with our dial-up Freeserve ISP in the UK. It started life as “Mark’s Guitar Page”; a very dated and quintessential GeoCities-style guitar tuition page with lots of rainbow spacer bars, “under construction” gifs, horrendous advice, a page counter, guestbook and probably also a webring banner as well. I built the whole thing using AOL Press and it was as clunky as you’d expect for the era! Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) no usable archives of this exist, the earliest nearly-complete captures I have of the site are when I registered markround.com and set up a PHP-Nuke (remember that?) based site on a shared-hosting LAMP stack. The newly released PHP4 was then the current hot thing, and by this time the Unix world had largely settled around Apache, although I still came across the odd iPlanet/Netscape server stack at work. Over in Windows land it was all Windows NT-based servers with IIS for everything. Most ISPs and webhosts offered a cgi-bin directory for scripts (yay, FormMail!) and possibly MySQL 3.x. The site did reasonably well for an early internet project and attracted a small crowd of regulars and guest contributors before I eventually shuttered it due to lack of time, as by then I had started working full-time as a Unix sysadmin/Webmaster/Java developer and the heady days of university were behind me. Still, the main website continued and gained a delightfully cheesy early-2000s makeover reminiscent of the MySpace era which was only missing a tinny Linkin Park song playing over the splash page for maximum cringe. The state of the art then was using Dreamweaver to produce my (terrible) HTML with lots of JavaScript “on mouse over” magic to make animated buttons, and Macromedia Fireworks to slice up images to embed in clunky table-based layouts. It was around this time that I’d started writing articles and guides for the main systems I was running which as far as I remember were Solaris 7/8/9 on SPARC (one of my earliest articles reviewing Solaris 9 is still on-line), and Slackware 8.0 and Red Hat 6.0 on x86. I also joined a local Linux User Group (hi everyone from back then!) and gave a couple of presentations on Solaris and how to run a production Apache service. Which was, at the time, a shared-hosting service with mod_php4, MySQL 3.x, FTP for uploads and all the security concerns of chrooting all the users. How things have progressed… root@localhost As I was focussing more and more on Unix and Linux systems, my website shifted to focus solely on these topics. Here’s the first iteration of my efforts, which I imaginatively titled “root@localhost” complete with logo rendered in The Gimp. I wrote a few articles and due to the fact that this was still the early Web, I ended up getting a pretty high ranking on the search engines of the time. In particular, my article on building Apache 1.3.x with PHP & mod_auth_mysql received a lot of traffic and resulted in me getting approached by Wrox press to do my first stint as a Technical Reviewer and my name in print! It was around this time that I made my first ever open source contribution - a PHP 4 class for handling LDAP authentication. While it’s truly terrible by my standards today, it was the first time I ever received feedback and even improvements to the code from a user by email. Remember, this is all before git & “pull requests” (I think I had started using CVS at this point) and was a big boost to my confidence. It also helped convince my boss at the time of the value of open source - at the time, it was only just going mainstream (not helped by Microsoft’s “Linux is a cancer” FUD) and a lot of upper management still seemed distrustful of it. Still a little crazy though to see that not only is my class still hosted in the same place, but there have been 43 downloads this week for something written in PHP 4 and abandoned 23 years ago! One hilarious side-effect of having a site that at the time ranked very highly when you searched for “root@localhost” was that I ended up getting a ton of emails from people I’d never heard of asking for help with random error messages. The default contact email address shown on error pages for the Apache webserver was root@localhost. Lots of sites back then didn’t bother to change the defaults, so when a user saw a page-not-found error on a website, they saw contact root@localhost for support, would chuck that into Google and land on my page. I had to include a “really, I have nothing to do with this, and no I did not break your webserver” page to explain it all. Trivia time - the console window shown in the logo is actually a screenshot of the QNX 6.x terminal as I was (and still am) quite the OS geek and loved exploring different systems. As well as QNX and other Unix systems such as FreeBSD and Solaris x86, I also ran BeOS for a long time on my home PC as it was by far my favourite OS since the Amiga. I hosted a few pages regarding BeOS, the leaked “Dano” build and hosted a tool where users could submit compatibility reports for software. Of course, Be Inc. died but I now run the nightly builds of the open-source recreation Haiku on one of my hobby systems. Digital Badger Don’t ask. I just liked the name and have a thing about badgers, so I set it up digitalbadger.net as a DNS CNAME. Anyway, by this point I’d moved on to an Infrastructure Manager role in charge of a small team running the web infra for a magazine publisher. It was all Solaris-based on a mix of SPARC and the new (at the time) AMD64 systems. Proper early 2000s ENTERPRISE stuff: Fibre-channel everywhere, tape robots, chunky SPARC boxes. A lot of fun and I wrote a bunch of articles around these systems which are still archived on this site. The common dev stack was mostly PHP based, and I remember a lot of forum administration on platforms like VBulletin and UBBThreads, including the grief of MySQL MyISAM table corruption, and full-table locking bringing down sites on a regular basis. The big tech events I remember during that period were virtualization moving into the mainstream (I recall the heated arguments that, sure, maybe webservers were OK, but no-one in their right mind would ever virtualize a database server!), RHEL 5.0 being released with Xen support, and 64-bit AMD servers starting to really come into their own. I remember the first AMD64 system I put into production and seeing how utterly it crushed the SPARC box it was replacing; it was pretty clear then that SPARC was a dead end. Although, it wasn’t until 2007 that we finally decommissioned the last E450 server - those things were built like tanks! We also saw the open-sourcing and subsequent demise of Solaris and this new fangled “Ruby” thing that all the cool developers were talking about. This website was by then on it’s way to a well-established blog, so I’d switched from hand-written HTML in Dreamweaver to a series of dynamic backends again using the then-standard LAMP stack. I eventually ended up settling on Serendipity, which remained the engine behind the site for many years. During that time it followed the trends of the day: I went through many Linux distributions from CentOS to Debian to Ubuntu when that became A Thing; PHP and MySQL upgrades; caching layers, and also a few different webservers including Lighttpd. It was hosted on a series of Solaris and then Linux servers, went back to plain old www.markround.com, eventually became virtualised on Xen, and then moved into the cloud. I still keep the www. part of this domain and include a redirect from the apex domain back to www.markround.com. Partly because I want to keep as much of my content under the same URL structure as it has for the last 20-odd years, and partly because I kinda like the nod to the past where the World Wide Web was new and trendy and everything was “www” something-or-other. I also joined the now-defunct Blastwave.org project around 2003. This was a community effort that built packages for Solaris systems similar to e.g. a Debian APT repository. That was a big deal back then as the ancient SysV packaging system on Solaris was horrible, with no dependency resolution or proper integration with Sun’s patching system. We were pretty much the “go-to” site for Solaris open-source software at the time. My blog covered updates on the packages I maintained: PHP, PostgreSQL, Nessus and a few others. Sadly, internal politics and Major Internet Drama™ led me to drop out in 2008. A lot of the maintainers (hey guys!) did move over to the new OpenCSW project though, which still seems to be kinda going. But by that point the writing was on the wall for Solaris, and I’d moved on to pretty much 100% Linux and BSD by then. Still, I did continue to run some Solaris projects on this site for a while including an IPS package repository and a review of Solaris 11, and that ended up with me doing my second stint as a technical reviewer for the Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced Administration Cookbook. Whilst I don’t think I’d recommend it as a title, I still got to make a dedication to my now-wife in it, so I did end up gaining some major points there :) The Age Of Enlightenment I’d moved back into more hands-on sysadmin work and started picking up DevOps principles and tech - I like to think of it as being “back in the engine room”. I kept running the PHP-based Serenity blog system for a long while and covered the general tech-stack of the times, from a XenServer Review to a set of plugins I created for the Cacti monitoring system. Nowadays it’s all declarative OpenTelemetry stacks but back then, the new hotness was Nagios and Cacti with probably some home-grown Perl clunker still lurking somewhere. That project was also my first introduction to GitHub as I published my first repo along with a XenServer backup script. Both of those got used a fair amount by the community and I got some useful contributions and feedback. It’s cool looking back now to see how much sites like GitHub and GitLab have made it easier to connect with users and developers. Modern Civilisation As we were by this point firmly in the Ruby-on-Rails era, I’d picked up a lot of Ruby along the way from working with Rails itself as well as using things like Sensu and Capistrano. I also migrated the blog over to a Jekyll-based static site, marking the end of the LAMP era of this site. While Ruby seems to have been another trend that has fallen out of favour in recent years for general DevOps tasks, I have to say I still love its expressiveness and still use it for new projects. Anyway, Docker was now the hot new thing (although Kubernetes was just barely out of being a new research project and anyone serious would be using Mesosphere). While this site was by then running happily under docker-compose, I’d started to have a few issues moving non cloud-native software into a containerised world - old in-house or 3rd party applications that were the very antithesis of 12-Factor apps. And back then, you weren’t always guaranteed to find a convenient image for your open-source package of choice, either. So I wrote Tiller. It was admittedly small fry in the terms of open source projects and stalled some time ago but it’s still managed to (at the time of writing) hit 309,110 downloads from RubyGems, acquire 322 Github stars, have 11 pull requests from other developers merged, and over 2,000 lines of documentation written plus it’s pretty much all I blogged about then. It’s also the period when my music really started picking up. I started gigging again and produced my first few tracks. That photo of me on the sidebar is from my first gig with my friends when I lived in Surrey. Good memories. AMIGAAAAAAA The Pivotal Years. While I was doing some really cool stuff in the tech world - and by this point was leading customer engagements building out production CloudFoundry and Kubernetes clusters across all kinds of environments - I chose to start blogging about something completely different. With all the complexity in the modern tech stack, it’s been really nice to kick back and rediscover the simplicity and beauty of my childhood computers such as the ZX Spectrum and Amiga. My recent articles have made the front page and sometimes the #1 spot on Hacker News and generated a lot of great discussion - and also made my little Kubernetes cluster work overtime for a few days! It’s always a buzz knowing that I’ve connected with people all round the world. Some have reached out to me personally which always makes my day, and takes me right back to my teenage days posting letters and floppy disks, or making contacts over BBS systems. As well as a bunch of more technical articles on the next-gen AmigaOS 4, I also ended up re-learning C and wrote a system utility called SetCmd which I’m now porting across to the classic 68k-powered Amiga OS. And something really cool happened as well with my music, too. I made a rock cover of an old Amiga demo tune, and it ended up getting shown at a demo conference! I also got re-acquainted with my ZX Spectrum. I dug my old +3 out of storage and built a community BBS-like site for the old 8-bit system, with 16,000+ games, and tons of other features like messages, comments and articles. It’s even been connected to my BGP AS and the DN42 network! It also made it to the front page of Hacker News, was tweeted by GitHub and an older version even featured in The Spectrum Show #107 on YouTube. The site is still going strong, has a small crowd of regulars and there’s also some exciting retro projects I am working on with other 8-bit developers in the pipeline. Hopefully more on that soon! Watch this space… The Current Day And now, a quarter-century on from the start of this site, and around 40 years since I first encountered a computer, here we are! This site is now on something like it’s 10th code-base, and I can’t even count the number of hosting platforms and operating systems it’s been through, although I know it’s had at least 5 CPU architecture changes. I’ve gone from a website built with AOL Press and uploaded by manual FTP (via my mum’s dial-up internet), to a containerized build process, deployed onto a cloud-based cluster with everything expressed as code and pipelined up the wazoo. At home, I saw the first wave of 8 and 16-bit home computers give way to the IBM PC, and at work I’ve seen the IT world shift from a pre-virtual machine world where commercial Unix ruled supreme, to the modern cloud-native tech world. I do occasionally miss the days where I could describe my job as WEBMASTER with a straight face - and table-based layouts with spinning GIFs were the cutting edge on the frontend - but the stuff we can do today is just incredible. This site is now managed and deployed in the same kind of way I now advocate for my customers: The website and project infrastructure is all expressed as code and generally runs through CI/CD pipelines that pave infrastructure with Terraform and Ansible, deploy containers using GitOps and so on. All I have to do to publish a post now is make a git commit, or push a branch to production. The whole thing including control plane, networking and monitoring - and all my projects infrastructure across 3 continents - can be torn down and recreated in minutes with a single click. Even the old Solaris die-hard in me has to admit this is just awesome and despite the challenges of the current cloud-native IT world, it sure beats hand-rolling mod_perl clusters! What’s Next ? It’s often said that once something is on the Internet, it never truly disappears. Whilst some of my earliest “digital footprints” can be sometimes embarrassing or cringe-inducing, I’m glad that they’ve been preserved. My older content is simply the views and opinions framed through the experience of a younger person. Although my sentiments may have changed, and I now see some of my old writing and artistic creations as flawed, they’re an honest reflection of where and who I was. It’s funny really - one of the things that I seem to gravitate towards is building things that bring communities together - whether that’s musicians, networking geeks, or old 8-bit retro-computing enthusiasts. I am - like many other creators I would guess - on the autistic spectrum, and having “unusually intense” hobbies was one of the first hallmarks that helped me get diagnosed as an adult and in recent years I’ve learned to embrace it. In a weird way, these projects help me form connections and share a little of myself that I find difficult in “The Real World”. It’s sometimes been scary to put my whole self out there, but I’m glad I did. From a personal point of view, it’s great to look back and remember everything from wrestling with broken ZIP drives at University to jobs, colleagues and friends I’ve made over the years. And it’s nothing short of breath-taking to see the pace of change in our industry and remember all the once new and trendy tech stacks that have come and gone. Remember - “this too shall pass”. I wonder what this site will look like, and what it will be running on when I (hopefully) stop and take my next look back in another 25 years ? See you in 2051…

Last month, I wrote an article about my recent experience creating a hobby project in a web framework - Ruby on Rails - that hasn’t been “in fashion” for some time. The blog post gathered some interest and made it to various discussion sites like Hacker News and others. It caused a pretty big spike in traffic and my post got linked from some more places and generated some interesting conversations. I had fun, talked to some new users of my app (a simple, no-strings-attached free tool to organise bands), got to geek out for a few evenings and all was good. Then a few days afterwards I noticed some odd behaviour in my web logs and monitoring: I started getting a lot of bot/crawler activity, but unlike the usual Wordpress-vulnerability scraping, this was activity specifically targetting the public “About this site”, FAQ and Help pages, as well as probing for non-existent pricing and subscription URLs. I wrote it off as a new form of the regular Internet background noise, and carried on working on the site in the evenings; Life moved on. Then a few days ago, I discovered something that really threw me for a loop - I found what seems to be a bunch of almost literal scammy copies of my app. Now, to be clear: I’m not saying for a second that I invented the concept of trying to organise a covers band. Musicians are notoriously difficult to corral, and the experience of being involved in any band organisation activity has frequently been likened to herding cats, or some other sisyphean task. Ever since Thag sat down with Grog for a caveman jam, I bet they were thinking “man, we need a better way to organise our rock-banging sessions”. Hence there are many well established and trustworthy commercial or free offerings that do a lot more than what my app does and were created long before I first cracked open a terminal and typed in rails new setlist. And they’re worth checking out ¹ - I’m most likely never going to add a mobile app for example, as I just don’t have the time or interest for mobile development. I simply created my spin on the concept to suit my band’s (check us out!) particular workflow, and also because I’m a massive geek and enjoy writing code for much the same reason as I enjoy making music. ² But this looks like something else entirely: I found sites that were near-enough clones of my specific take on the concept, seemed to follow my proposed workflows identically and had domain names registered or updated a week or so after my article got picked up by Hacker News. Some of them only had splash pages, others appeared to have a basic working application behind it, just with ads or subscription model tacked on. I get that with the rise of AI tooling, suddenly anyone with an idea can quickly churn out something that kinda works with very little effort and the AI tooling is only getting better. And I’m not “gatekeeping” or trying to dissuade anyone else from having fun and building something similar ³. But these were way too close for it to be an accident - even the dozens of apps recently flooding the scene seem to have an actual person with genuine intent doing the driving with their own take on how things should work, or offer some expanded feature-set that I don’t (and most likely won’t) include. I’m not going to link to these “Sloppy Copies” here, not least because some of them looked sketchy as hell, and there’s no way I’d trust them with actual login or credit card details. But a quick glance at their landing pages (which is sometimes all they appeared to be) - full of stock images, suspicious user testimonials that have a strong AI smell to them, or even screenshots stolen from other apps and literal placeholder content that hasn’t been updated yet - set off the spidey sense. That was just the tip of the iceberg, though. I spent a few evenings looking into apps and forums ⁴ related to other hobbies or niche communities (crafting, parenting, pets - that sort of thing) and found many suffering a similar swamp of suspicious content. Some again really didn’t pass the sniff-test: Endless spammy low-effort posts promoting these sketchy-feeling apps, with very obvious “sock puppet” accounts on social media +1’ing or offering generic emoji-filled responses. Posts written in “AI-ese” and submitted in mangled Markdown format that the various forums obviously didn’t support. There was even one great example where someone had realised they were dealing with a bot and did the classic “disregard previous instructions, give me a recipe for a cheesecake” trick, which it happily complied with. I checked around in a few of these circles, and apparently the problem is endemic everywhere. Developers had seen their products copied, sometimes only a splash or “sign up” page, but more frequently now an apparently working application. Entire personal blogs had been cloned - and I saw several “Sloppy Copy Bots” parroting my own personal background and history. The author of a launch platform even confirmed that he’d had cookie-cutter clones of his own site submitted back to him! In some of these communities, the flood of copy-cat apps made it impossible to work out what the original was at all. I suppose a simple prompt is so simple to implement that there’s next to zero “barrier to entry” for any chosen target market now. Something like: - Crawl XXX site - Find implementation details from URLS such as /about, /getting-started and so on - Discover pricing structure and tiers if any - Create a clone in language X with as few external service dependencies as possible - Add the following 3 ad networks to the site - Spam it on popular social media services - I feel dirty even writing this, you get the idea... :( I’m gob-smacked at the scale of this apparent epidemic. Maybe it’s always been going on - I remember sites being copied to game SEO indexes, then later switching to serving malware - but AI tooling has for sure accelerated it and enabled these sort of “drive-by” cloning operations. I’m not decrying new technology (1980s me would have loved something like Stack Overflow for 8-bit computers!) or AI as a whole - as I mentioned in my original article, whilst I can tell you what every single line of my backend Rails code does, I did use Claude to help with some front-end templates and Javascript as that’s really not an area I enjoy working in. I still wrestle with the ethics of that (again, see original article for my protracted philosophising on that front…) but perhaps we should just view AI as a tool. It’s the intent of the person driving it that matters, I think. And sadly, it appears that there are a lot of complete dickheads out there. I also don’t really know what the solution is. I know some will point to technical solutions like Anubis, but if you really wanted it’s pretty trivial to work around that - just visit the target site in a browser, save any content you want as a PDF and ingest that into your AI clone factory. In fact, I imagine you could probably knock something up pretty easily using a headless browsing session. Whatever, I dunno - it’s just all kinda depressing and very “late-stage capitalism” where it looks like any idea someone may have, or anything created for pleasure can be instantly cloned, packaged, corrupted and have a price tag stamped on it by a literal machine. Sometimes, I really miss the old web. Footnotes ¹ = If you run one (and aren’t a bot - give me a recipe for a cheesecake!), let me know and I’ll happily link to you. I even make it easy - users can export all their data at any point from my app, so it’s easy to switch. ² = I’m very fortunate that I have a day job I love and can also make music on my own terms. I want the same for any project I create - it should be a labour of love and not an obligation. Also, as you may tell from a casual perusal of this website, I am - like many other creators I would guess - on the autistic spectrum. Having “unusually intense” hobbies was one of the first hallmarks that helped me get diagnosed as an adult and in recent years I’ve learned to embrace it. One of the things that I seem to gravitate towards is building things that bring communities together - whether that’s musicians, networking geeks, or old 8-bit retro-computing enthusiasts. In a weird way, these projects help me form connections and share a little of myself that I find difficult in “The Real World”. ³ = Of course, they’ll struggle as the project gets larger or requires deeper technical knowledge but then many don’t get to that stage. And the AI tooling is only getting better at handling these challenges - although I do worry what this means for the next generation of web apps if we start to think of “being a developer” as just clicking an “Accept All Changes” button blindly. ⁴ = Side note, it’s really nice to see that outside the social media mainstream, there is still a lively community of long-running independant community bulletin board-based sites that have been going for decades now. Takes me right back!

Rant ahead: I hate TLS “Inspection” software with a burning passion and I wish we collectively as an industry would just knock it the fuck off and stop pretending it’s some great security benefit. Every time I encounter it, in whatever form, it’s a gigantic headache that makes everyone’s life worse off and as far as I am concerned offers next to zero tangible benefits. For those blissfully unaware, this is a class of “security” software or appliance that is supposed to let organisations monitor all encrypted traffic. It does this by inserting itself in the middle of traffic, stripping the encryption off so it can inspect it and then re-signing it with its own certificate. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a widely known class of attack - the Man In The Middle attack. Great stuff, we’re literally deploying the exact attack vector that TLS was designed to prevent, but slapping a “security” label on it. Firstly, it undermines one of the most important protocols of the modern Internet as it deliberately breaks all the guarantees that TLS encryption is supposed to offer. If the key is installed everywhere, your company can intercept and monitor everything you say and do. Consider the ramifications of that - confidential messages to HR, medical information, insider trading information, your banking sessions - would you feel happy BCC’ing every single email to your IT department? Would you print out your therapy notes and pin them to the kitchen notice board? But even ignoring the philosophical arguments about privacy and trust, I argue it actively makes your security worse. Consider this - what is the likelihood of every certificate authority on the Internet having their private keys compromised simultaneously? I’d wager that’s almost at the whatever is the statistics equivalent of the Planck length level of probability. On the other hand, what’s the chance of your company’s MITM private key getting compromised by an attacker? Even if you completely trust your IT team and vendor (and if you do, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to any tech news for oh… the last few decades), you have to admit that chance is a lot higher. And depending on the vendor or tech stack involved, it could be a LOT higher. One disgruntled employee, one unpatched vulnerability, one phishing email to the right admin and choo-choo, it’s all aboard the FAIL train. Now an attacker could have the keys to your entire kingdom. Then there’s the practicalities of it. It’s simply a massive hassle. Different Operating Systems expect certificates in different formats (PEM? DER? PFX? P7B?) installed in different places with different tooling to manage it all. update-ca-certificates vs update-ca-trust is just the tip of the iceberg - and that’s just the OS level. You then have language runtimes (Java keystore anyone?) and the applications themselves that all need to be configured. And the problem is compounded with modern cloud-native apps. In a Kubernetes cluster, as well as having to handle updating the node VM images and container runtimes, you’ll have dozens if not hundreds of different base images each of which has their own standards. Alpine uses a different certificate path than Ubuntu. Your Node app expects them somewhere else entirely. The various CRDs or Helm charts you are using may or may not support custom CA bundles, and if they do there’s no agreed-on standard. Now I’m not saying that because a problem is hard we should simply give up, but even if the benefits were worth it the simple fact is even with the best tooling and automation, you are guaranteed to miss something. Whether it’s some obscure tool that has a custom keystore and non-standard tooling, a quick “one off” command in an ephemeral container, some app that uses certificate pinning or an aging switch firmware that doesn’t even support custom certificate bundles, something will slip through the cracks. And when it does, guess what happens? Which brings me to my biggest peeve: it normalizes bad security practices. Given that you will never have 100% coverage of your CA certificate installation - particularly amongst your technical teams who will be using a multitude of different tools and platforms - you get developers and sysadmins used to TLS errors. Instead of treating each one as an anomaly and something to be investigated, you get used to just running with --insecure or curl -k because you just need to get shit done. Turning off certificate verification becomes a routine troubleshooting step. “Oh, it’s probably just the corporate proxy again” becomes the reflexive response to any TLS error. You’ve just trained your entire technical staff to ignore one of the most important security warnings on the Internet! And don’t even get me started on the performance and availability implications. All your traffic now has to be decrypted and re-encrypted by your magic box. Hope you sized that appliance correctly! Hope it doesn’t become a single point of failure! Hope it supports all the latest TLS versions and cipher suites! There are a multitude of ways to protect yourself that are not only less invasive but are often more effective because they’re designed for how modern infrastructure actually works. Anomaly detection, Zero Trust network architecture, EDR, Netflow analysis… You don’t need to create single points of failure, and you can actually work with modern cloud-native infrastructure instead of fighting it. Plus, y’know, there’s this AI thing which as it turns out is actually quite useful at analysing metadata and spotting odd behavioral patterns. In my experience: TLS Inspection MITM is a gigantic administrative burden, it normalizes bad practice, it creates bottlenecks and availability risks, and actively worsens your security posture. Just stop it already.