Interesting review of the regulatory landscape around crypto-currencies. There are a lot of echo’s of issues with the over-the-counter nature of most FX trading, albeit with even less enforced regulation and uncertainty. Bitcoin Redux explains what’s going wrong in the world of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin exchanges are developing into a shadow banking system, which do not give their customers actual bitcoin but rather display a “balance” and allow them to transact with others.

A fun thing about programming is that most days, you make progress. Maybe you fix some issues, maybe you add a feature, maybe you build towards something bigger. Your code moves ever forward. Until it doesn’t. On occasion, you will hit a Bug. Not a mundane bug, some trifle you can fix in an hour, or even a day. This is a true Bug. One that defies reason. One that evokes a “that’s not possible,” a “how could this even happen?

Essentially, the Docker approach boils down to downloading an unsigned binary, running it, and hoping it doesn’t contain any backdoor into your companies network. Feels like downloading Windows shareware in the 90s to me. When will the first docker image appear which contains the Ask toolbar? The first internet worm spreading via flawed docker images? Source: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers There’s certainly some truth to that.

This is the second article on things I found particularly interesting in the Ethereum yellow paper. The first is “What’s on the Blockchain?” and the same disclaimers apply: I’m no expert and you should go verify any claims I’m making before depending on them. Comments and corrections are most welcome either via email or @ajsutton on twitter. One of the little details in the way Ethereum works is the idea of a “nonce” attached to each account and transaction.

To understand the details of how Ethereum works I’ve been working my way through the yellow paper. And since there’s no better way to really understand things than to explain them, I thought I’d write up my own explanation for some of the things that stood out to me. Fair warning: I’m no expert, there’s guaranteed to be sloppy usage of terminology and a high likelihood of mistakes. If you’re just looking for an easier to read version of the yellow paper, try the beige paper, it’s had some actually knowledgable people look it over.

After 7 years at LMAX, I’ll be winding up with them at the end of the month. It’s been a pretty remarkable journey and certainly not an easy decision to move on but ultimately another opportunity came up that I just couldn’t refuse. I had intended to write up some reflections on the past 7 years at LMAX but I just can’t find the words. Suffice to say, it’s been an amazing journey full of wonderful people, big technical challenges and lots of innovative solutions.

Hapi 17 was released a while back with quite a few nice improvement – mostly centered around using promises instead of callbacks and thus fitting in with async/await well. However, it’s a very significant change right across it’s APIs so it took quite a while for the various plugins that Moolah uses to be updated. Eventually though they were all ready and then the actual upgrade of Moolah code was pretty straight forward.

I dropped out of the habit of writing about Moolah but it’s been ticking along doing what I need it to for a fair while with a few additions here and there. Recently I spent a chunk of time adding the ability to ‘earmark’ money for a particular use. My main motivation is that we’re planning a family trip to Germany at the end of the year and I want to be able to set aside money through the year as we save for it.

I ran into an issue with Vuetify recently where the 1.0 betas were constantly utilising a CPU core when run in Safari. It turned out, I wasn’t alone and it had been reported as bug 2773. There wasn’t a lot to go on – the problem only happened in Safari and the timeline showed it was constantly invalidating and recalculating the layout, apparently without any JavaScript executing. First step was to create a simple reproduction case, which turned out to be a template with just:

At LMAX, we’ve been using Vue.js for all our new JavaScript work very successfully for a while now. Our existing products used Vue.js for the logic but continued to use bootstrap as the component library to ensure the UI remained consistent. For anything new though, we started using Vuetify to give us better UIs much more easily. Vuetify is close to reaching it’s 1.0 release now and we’ve been using it for a while so when we first started with it, the vast majority of development and support was being done by the project founder, John Leider in his spare time.

The internet is full of forum posts with various questions, tips and suggestions for IPv6 on EdgeRouters as people struggle to get it working. The challenge is that the fix you actually need depends on which version of EdgeOS you’re running (ubnt are continuing to flesh out the IPv6 configuration support) and the setup of your ISP. So here’s the magic steps I needed for an ERX running EdgeOS 1.9.7+hotfix.3 with SkyMesh NBN over HFC (cable).

As Vue gradually spreads through our JavaScript, it’s reached the point where we need to support internationalisation. We already have a system for localising numbers and dates that we can reuse easily enough with Vue filters. We also have an existing system for translations, but it’s tied into the mustache templates we’ve used to date so we’ll need to adapt or change it somehow to work with Vue. In mustache we simply wrap any strings to be translated with {{#i18n}}…{{/i18n}} markers and a webpack loader takes care of providing a translation function as the i18n property of the state for the compiled template.