Hammy Goonan

Hammy Goonan

Sign in Subscribe

Fighting maths

The Founder of the encrypted messaging app Session has moved to Switzerland, reportedly, because of Australia's hostility to encryption. It's a pretty disappointing situation where Australian need to start actively choosing apps developer overseas because they are move secure. Apparently the Victorian police went to the apartment of an employee

Make the Internet Weird Again

Make the Internet Weird Again

Shall we start with a little AI Shitposting? Seek is now training AI models on user's data, after a minor terms and conditions updates and no ability to opt out. Companies obviously don't give a shit any more as their investors scream at them to do something, anything, with AI.

Disappointments

Disappointments

It's been 12 months since Australia voted against a constitutionally enshrined 'voice' to parliament for First Nations Peoples. It was a sad day in a long tragic history of racism, ongoing genocide and intergenerational trauma for the oldest living culture in the world. Many works have been dedicated to the

Superb Fairy Wren

Superb Fairy Wren

I was riding my bike along a bike path yesterday through a fairly industrial area. The bike path has been under development for at least the past 12 months and linked to the development of a free-way, but I'll take it. They've been planting a bunch of thick shrubs along

Going nuclear

In "is AI really worth it" news, Microsoft are looking to re-open the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to help fuel the AI hype machine. They will spend US$1.6b to refurbish the plant - imagine how many lives you could save much better you could make the

A Charitable War

A Charitable War

The Land Forces expo was met with protesters here in Melbourne last week, and rightly so in my opinion. What was most alarming to me was the police response to the protesters which included stun grenades, "hard foam baton rounds" which the ABC assures me is not, in fact, a

Bubbles and Technical Debt

Bubbles and Technical Debt

It's reasonable old news now, but the Auditor General is investigating the investment of nearly $1 billion in public money. Thank goodness, the whole thing has always stunk. This is a good time to remind everyone that, which an incredible feat of engineering, Quantum Computing is a bubble and still

Terry and Hammy both leaning on opposite sides of a counter, deep in discussion.

Valé Terry Johal

Some time in the early 2000, Terry and I were both eagerly blogging away to our audiences of tens of people when we came into each other's orbits. We had mutual friends through RMIT. He was a PhD student lecturing in communications. We had mutual friends and several had insisted

Cherish the Nostalgia

Cherish the Nostalgia

Last week I mentioned the President of the Signal Foundation, Meredith Whittaker. She popped up in my Podcast feed on the 404 Media Podcast this week which was pleasing. In case you are unaware, 404 Media is a newish, journalist-founded digital media company doing some fantastic reporting and filling a

Diary of a digital vegan

Somewhat inspired by Justin Warren's 100th edition of The Crux (a highly recommended newsletter) I thought I'd try my hand at a weekly posts on the topics that have caught my eye. It'll be an eclectic mix of politics and tech which will probably appeal to at least five people

Updating my 'resources' repo

At [PEXA](https://www.pexa.com.au/), I'm lucky enough to work with a bunch of really smart passionate people who really care about their craft. As a result I'm exposed to a huge amount of resources that I'm finding really useful at a point in my career where my

Signing a user up to your Cognito Pool using the AWS NodeJS SDK

Next-Auth [https://next-auth.js.org/] is wonderful, and I've been using it a lot lately. But it only handles the OAuth flow (ie the login / logout functionality) of Cognito. However you need to roll your own Sign Up functionality as that sits outside the OAuth flow. Digging through the documentation

Sentencing laws

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk decision to increase penalties [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-29/qld-more-severe-criminal-penalties-emma-lovell-stabbing/101814696] for violent crime is just going to leave more kids in gaol for longer making more career criminals. The vast majority of those kids will be Aboriginal or Torres Straight Islander and will

On AI

Update: don't read this, read [https://www.danmcquillan.org/chatgpt.html] much [https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/] more [https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/chatgpt-is-a-bullshit-generator-but] informed people than me. This ChatGPT thing is pretty crazy, hey. I've got to say that as a software engineer with a healthy dose

Optus data breach not a 'hack'

Please stop calling it a 'hack [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/24/afp-investigates-1m-ransom-demand-posted-online-for-allegedly-hacked-optus-data] '. Optus left an API endpoint with the data of millions of current and former customers exposed to the public internet with no authentication required. Then to make matters worse, they used sequential IDs so

What are your salary expectations?

No. What's your salary range? I don't want to waste anyone's time applying for a job that doesn't meet my salary expectations, so why not help us both out. If I was a little less generous of spirit, I'd have to assume you're not advertising it is so you can

Valé James Lovelock

I'm saddened by the news of the passing of James Lovelock [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/27/james-lovelock-creator-of-gaia-hypothesis-dies-on-103rd-birthday] . I remember first reading about the Gaia Hypotheses when I was doing my Masters degree. It spoke it me and really solidified a lot of my thinking about the environment

Connecting to host database from a Docker container

Generally speaking, in a production environment, you don't want things like Nginx and your database running in Docker containers. You want those services running on the host and your application(s) in a container. The tricky part here is that localhost in a container is the container's network, not the

When the Currawongs come down from the mountains

I love birds, always have. Not a hardcore twicher or anything, just facinated by them and pay attention. Enough to feel quite moved when I see a Wedge-tailed Eagle. Enough for them to give me a sense of place. I lived overseas between 2010 and 2016. I went to Princes

Towards Continuous Integration

I've been using Ansible [https://www.ansible.com/] for deployment automation for a little while now and it's working really well for me. It doesn't take long for a Django website behind a load balancer to take a while to complicate which is where it's really helpful. To deploy you'll

Hosting a static website in an S3 bucket with SSL gotchas

I recently deployed a static website to AWS using S3, CloudFront, Route 53 and the AWS Certificate manager. There we a few 'gotchas' in there so I thought I'd outline by process here for others: Certificate Manager Firstly, I created a free AWS SSL Certificate. It's pretty straight forward, just

Django 2 and Python 3

I just saw this [https://twitter.com/dstufft/status/917703274966536192] tweet which I actually found a little discouraging. As of March 2017, only 12% of PyPI downloads were initiated by Python3. As an avid user of Python3 this anti-Python3 attitude continues to baffle me. Hell, even Flask now recommends using

A simple Python3 Lambda function on AWS with an API Gateway

As will be apparent from my previous post [http://goonan.io/getting-lambda-to-run-python3-scripts-with-dependencies/] I've been playing around with AWS's Lambda service. I'm loving these 'serverless' offerings - they make simple sites just so cheap and easy to host and you don't have to be worried about an entire back-end system just

Getting Lambda to run Python3 scripts with dependencies

I'm currently rebuilding my Dad's website [https://dinnygoonan.com.au/] with the intent of adding an order form so he can sell his wine (it's not live yet though). I've taken the opportunity to try and get my head around VueJS [https://vuejs.org/] which is currently holding up very

Choosing a stack

I've been in a lot of discussions lately about 'stacks'. Agencies, for good reason, want to limit the stacks they use and for good reason. It means that projects are more predictable to work on and one can develop templates etc to move things in the right direction. I thought