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Articles by Chris Lamb
Johnson wanted the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but he’s got My Little Pony
A little over a year ago TCW Defending Freedom printed the first of my articles, ‘Johnson is riding a tiger and can’t get off’. The thrust was that even though the virus appeared to be more or less beaten, Johnson couldn’t roll back on the restrictions because he’d been so successful in terrifying the population that they wouldn’t stand for the pandemic being declared over and the restrictions being lifted.
I stood in the park for freedom – why don’t you? - The Conservative Woman
I WENT to a ‘Stand in the Park’ last Sunday morning for the first time. I’d seen one mentioned here on TCW several times, but it was 120 miles away in Bracknell and I thought: ‘It’s a good idea but I’m not going all that way just to stand in a park.’ It occurred to me, however, that there might be others. Google found me their website so I had a look to see if there were any closer.
Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains (2021)
Writing Projects About October 8th 2021 Ididn't blog about it at the time, but a paper I co-authored with Stefano Zacchiroli was accepted by IEEE Software in April of this year. Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains, the abstract of the paper is as follows: Although it is possible to increase confidence in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) by reviewing its source code, trusting code is not the same as trusting its executable counterparts.
Who’d be a lorry driver?
IT’S becoming increasing obvious that the UK is suffering from a severe shortage of HGV drivers. Quite a lot of the immediate problem is the ‘Brexit Effect’. It appears that something like one in seven UK lorries were being driven by Eastern Europeans. These drivers are going home, as they always planned to do having made some money here, but they can no longer be replaced by other Eastern Europeans due to Brexit.
On Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle
Colson Whitehead's latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, was always going to be widely reviewed, if only because his last two books won Pulitzer prizes. Still, after enjoying both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, I was certainly going to read his next book, regardless of what the critics were saying — indeed, it was actually quite agreeable to float above the manufactured energy of the book's launch. Saying that, I was encouraged to listen to an interview with the author by Ezra Klein.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: 40 Years On
"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away." The cinema was a rare and expensive treat in my youth, so I first came across Raiders of the Lost Ark by recording it from television onto a poor quality VHS. I only mention this as it meant I watched a slightly different film to the one intended, as my copy somehow missed off the first 10 minutes.
Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains
Loading [MathJax]/extensions/MathZoom.js Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore Skip to Main Content Abstract:Although it is possible to increase confidence in free and open source software by reviewing its source code, trusting code is not the same as trusting its executable cou...View more Metadata Abstract: Although it is possible to increase confidence in free and open source software by reviewing its source code,...
Free software activities in April 2021
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during April 2021 (previous month): Reviewed and merged two pull request from Michael K. to my django-slack library which provides a convenient wrapper between projects using the Django web development framework and the Slack chat platform. Michael's pull requests made Python 3.6+ a hard requirement (#102) and to run the tests against Python 3.9 (#103).
Free software activities in January 2021
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during January 2021 (previous month): As part of my duties of being on the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative, I attended its monthly meeting and participated in various licensing and other related discussions occurring on the internet. Unfortunately, I could not attend the parallel meeting for Software in the Public Interest this month.
OpenUK Influencer 2021
Writing Projects About January 1st 2021 After a turbulent 2020, I am very grateful to have been chosen in OpenUK's 2021 honours as one of the 100 top influencers in the UK's open technology community, which recognises contributions to open source software, open data and open hardware. Congratulations to all of the other open source heroes and heroines who were also listed — am looking forward to an exciting year together.
Free software activities in November 2020
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during November 2020 (previous month): Merged a pull request from Jens Nistler for django-slack (my library which provides a convenient wrapper between projects using the Django and the Slack chat platform) to make it compatible with Celery version 5. [...] Created a pull request for the Emscripten LLVM-to-WebAssembly compiler to make the Document Object Model codes reproducible.
Johnson is riding a tiger and can’t get off
I WAS a good boy. I accepted not being able to leave my flat except to exercise or to shop for food. I queued in the rain, two metres from everyone else of course, to get into Morrisons, and put up with the empty shelves. I tried to follow the labyrinthine one-way systems around the aisles. I put up with the total loss of my already limited social life as clubs ceased to meet, classic vehicle shows at which I exhibited my vehicle were cancelled, and I couldn’t meet my friends and family.
Charles’s rescue plan – wrong time, wrong planet | The Conservative Woman
IN his latest speech on the environment, Prince Charles suggests a ‘Marshall-like plan’ is needed to save the planet. By ‘Marshall’ he means a large-scale international effort to deal with a dire situation – a concept stemming from the original Marshall Plan by the US, launched in 1948 to help rebuild the economies and infrastructure of war-shattered Western European countries.
The Bringers of Beethoven
This is a curiously poignant work to me that I doubt I would ever be able to communicate in writing. I found it first about fifteen years ago with a friend who I am quite regrettably no longer in regular contact with, so there was some complicated nostalgia entangled with rediscovering it today. What might I say about it instead? One tell-tale sign of 'good' art is that you can find something new in it, or yourself, each time.
Free software activities in July 2020
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free and open source software world during July 2020 (previous month): Opened a pull request to make the build reproducible in PyERFA, a set of Python bindings for various astronomy-related utilities (#45), as well as one for PeachPy assembler to make the output of codecode/x86_64.py reproducible (#108). SPI is a non-profit corporation that acts as a fiscal sponsor for organisations that develop open source software and hardware.
Pop culture matters
Many people labour under the assumption that pop culture is trivial and useless while only 'high' art can grant us genuine and eternal knowledge about the world. Given that we have a finite time on this planet, we are all permitted to enjoy pop culture up to a certain point, but we should always minimise our interaction with it, and consume more moral and intellectual instruction wherever possible. Or so the theory goes.
The comedy is over
By now, everyone must have seen the versions of comedy shows with the laugh track edited out.
On the pleasure of hating
Lance (2020) People love to tell you that they "don't watch sport" but the story of Lance Armstrong offers a fascinating lens through which to observe our culture at large. For example, even granting all that he did and all the context in which he did it, why do these sports cheats act like a lightning rod for such an instinctive hatred?
Review: The "Trojan Room" coffee
I was recently invited to give a seminar at the Cambridge University's Department of Computer Science and Technology on the topic of Reproducible Builds.
Securing Embedded Systems
This article is featured in the new DZone Guide to Security: Defending Your Code. Get your free copy for more insightful articles, industry statistics, and more! Embedded systems come in a wide range of flavors and can be surprisingly complicated and difficult to secure. I'm going to look at three types of basic designs, describe why they're difficult to secure, and what you can do to secure these systems.
Favourite books of 2017
Whilst I managed to read just over fifty books in 2017 (down from sixty in 2016) here are ten of my favourites, in no particular order. Disappointments this year included Doug Stanhope's This Is Not Fame, a barely coherent collection of bar stories that felt especially weak after Digging Up Mother, but I might still listen to the audiobook as I would enjoy his extemporisation on a phone book. Ready Player One left me feeling contemptuous, as did Charles Stross' The Atrocity Archives.
The 12 Days of Content (Day 7): An Intro to Our Zone Leaders - DZone Writers'
An essential element to DZone's Editorial team, the Zone Leaders are our external band of devs and technical writers that regularly create fresh original articles and curate content from our large pool of MVBs. They are our allies in the quest to keep DZone filled with cool reads, help us find fresh bloggers, and all in all keep an eye on the site's functionality, helping us to improve it whenever possible.
Proactive Security: Apps, Environments, and Messaging
Although some believe Java is dying, developments such as the upcoming release of Java 9 and the strength of the Java community tell another story. New JVM-based languages like Kotlin and exciting changes in Java 9 such as Project Jigsaw, Streams API improvements, and JShell prove a bright future ahead. The 2017 Guide to Java explores upcoming features of Java 9, how to make your apps backwards-compatible, a look into whether Microservices are right for you, and using the Futures API in Java.
Librem 5 - A Security and Privacy Focused Phone
We believe phones should not track you nor exploit your digital life. We are in the middle of a digital rights revolution where you get to decide the future. We at Purism are building a phone that does not run Android nor iOS, but runs PureOS or any GNU/Linux distribution where all the source code is available. Note that the visual design of the phone is a work in progress and is subject to evolve based on technical requirements and people’s feedback.
Free software activities in September 2016
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previous month): Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most Linux distributions provide binary (or "compiled") packages to end users.
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