Ian McDowall

@imcdowall
267 Followers
1,047 Following
691 Posts
Retired software engineer & cynical Brit. Interested in history and some art and games.
@cyberseckyle or a binary name in 1s and 0s
@cyberseckyle so the obvious ones include FBI, MI5 etc. names, maybe mentioning honeypot. But those are probably too obvious.
All your base?
Supa Secret WiFi?
Pick someone's name from IP or TCP specs
<Insert company or org name> guest, maybe NSA or GCHQ
@symbo1ics.bsky.social oh lord. I remember using CMM which was developed for (I think) this type of software. Definitely the opposite of vibes coding.
What could possibly go wrong 😱
@cthos @xgranade came here to suggest Gilgamesh.
In English, try Beowulf - do you fancy Grendel or Grendel's mother?
There must be some old Chinese ones - such as romance of three kingdoms
@crispius not the old CR / CR LF trick? I forgot about that one.
Or some other issue?

I'm a software developer and sysadmin who could really use being #fedihired.

What I'd really like to do is Rust, but once you ignore the dubious crypto and AI stuff, there seems to be nothing out there. Prove me wrong with a counterexample!

I've spent decades fixing Enterprise mudballs mostly written in #Perl. If you've got a crufty legacy system that everybody else is too scared to touch, I'm your man. I love fixing stuff like that.

I've also done commercial #Scala, #Python, #C/#C++, and although I don't usually admit it on my CV but these are now Trying Times when everything is on the table, even #PHP (the longest six months of my life).

Perl naturally leads into Unix system administration and infrastructure. I've built and maintained mail clusters, VoIP systems, network monitoring, DNS management platforms, that sort of thing. If it's non-sexy but something which needs to be done, I'm there.

Available immediately, for contract or permie, onsite in Amsterdam/Randstad or remote to anywhere.

Drop me a private mention or mail [email protected] if you have or know of something.

Restraining and sedating dementia patients ā€˜routine’ in hospitals in England, study finds

Patients experiencing raised bedside rails, doors and pathways blocked by furniture and physical interventions

The Guardian
Distributed Systems Design by Example: https://third-bit.com/2026/03/15/dsdx/ and https://third-bit.com/dsdx/. As the post says, I don't know if I'll ever finish this, but I hope what's there is useful.
The Third Bit: Distributed Systems Design by Example

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in:

mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached.

Every single time.

And every single time it happens,
the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!

—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/25/hackers-expose-the-massive-surveillance-stack-hiding-inside-your-age-verification-check/

Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your ā€œAge Verificationā€ Check

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitiv…

Techdirt

[EDIT: now sorted thank you SO MUCH!]

Heads up my dudes, my son needs to do work experience this summer and he's a programmer. Nearly 15, can do 3 decent languages, main in Java, been programming since 4. All he wants to do is be a developer. Anyone offer work experience these days? Two weeks in July. London or Dartford way or anywhere in between. Ta! Retoots appreciated!

#workexperience #help