Mark Amery

Simple uses of quantifiers can make regexes take quadratic time unnecessarily

Suppose I want to extract all substrings of a text that consist of one-or-more letter as followed by a letter b. This is obviously both: 1. trivial to do with a single short regex 2. trivial to do in linear time but if you try to do it with a

CPS guidance misstates the law on defence of property?

[Disclaimer: I am a layman, NOT a qualified lawyer of any kind.] Something curious I noticed today: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/self-defence-and-prevention-crime currently claims that: Self defence and the prevention of crime originates from a number of different sources. Defence of the person is governed by the common

Spiked is talking nonsense about the Laurence Fox libel ruling

Spiked magazine have published an article by their chief political writer, Brendan O'Neill, about the ruling against Laurence Fox in his libel case. I've seen it shared by a bunch of Twitter users I follow and by the Free Speech Union. It's a bad article. Background The case is certainly

Don't trust the first item in the X-Forwarded-For header

Any security-related use of X-Forwarded-For (such as for rate limiting or IP-based access control) must only use IP addresses added by a trusted proxy. Using untrustworthy values can result in rate-limiter avoidance, access-control bypass, memory exhaustion, or other negative security or availability consequences. -- MDN's X-Forwarded-For article Short version: * Do

Diary - 2023-04-15

* I have way too many Chrome bookmarks. 555 of them, in fact, many of them not actionable. Time for a purge. I'll write down how many are left at the end of the day... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35539595, today, is a fun AOE2 bug involving floating point

I wrote up another Ghost setup bug

Here it is: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-CLI/issues/1760 That's as much as I'm going to do on this!

I found a tolerable workaround to Ghost's weird blockquote behaviour

Over at https://markamery.com/blog/i-set-up-a-blog-it-was-annoying/, I grumbled that: 3. Ghost's WYSIWYG editor should support headings inside quotes An annoyance I discovered in Ghost's editor: if you try to format some text as a heading inside a blockquote (either by selecting text and formatting as a heading via the

I wrote up the ghost-cli + MySQL bug

Over at https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-CLI/issues/1759, I carefully wrote up the bug in the current Ghost installation docs and suggested how to proceed. I sniffed around in the code a bit trying to figure out how to fix it, but the untyped and comment-light code at https:

MySQL docs bugs weren't really bugs

I went to report the MySQL docs issues I mentioned at https://markamery.com/ghost/#/editor/post/643564502f17df1693fb95be. Damn, it was obnoxious that I had to create an Oracle account to do this and that they demand my address, employer, and "work phone" (WTF? I'm a programmer, not a sales

My first diary post

Today I made this blog. I also made this post, to test out the "diary" feature.