Neil Hopcroft

Do geeks dream of electric maids? A review from jwz – “Shouldn’t your autonymous robo-maid be smart enough to clean up every monday at noon while you’re not home?”

Aside from spotting jwz pondering the viability of SimKafka, what have I been up to this week? For some reason I didn’t really get into The Calling on tuesday – the music wasn’t lively enough, or maybe I wasn’t lively enough. It wasn’t helped by the presence of someone who brought back a whole bunch […]

CODEX STAN 223-2001 “This Standard applies the product known as kimchi, as defined in Section 2 below, which is prepared with Chinese cabbage as a predominant ingredient and other vegetables which have been trimmed, cut, salted and seasoned before fermentation.”

“Hello, this is Comet home delivery, we went to your house but nobody was in so we’ve gone away again, please call us to arrange another day for delivery” Oh, ok, so this’ll be the 30 minutes notice I asked for. Having deleted the message in a fit of ‘I’m gonna cancel my order ‘cos […]

I forgot – yesterdays travels around the roads of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire seemed to have a lot of IBM adverts, though I’m not sure why they’d be sponsoring red warning triangle signs, its not their normal big-blue image….there also seemed to be a running total of fatalities for each stretch of road, suggesting a game […]

Unwrapping the Chrysalis “We used the commercial tool IDA (the Interactive DisAssembler) [4] to reverse-engineer the binary. About 300KiB of the binary was 32-bit ARM code, 500KiB high-entropy data with some fairly regular structure visible, and the remainder was blank.”

Yesterday I took a wander around the Cambridge Science Park, just over the other side of the A14 – there aren’t many places in this country that could sustain such a development, its certainly some kind of hub of biotech and electronics research, like a little outpost of silicon valley, which is why its called […]

Branded “Marketers looked at these companies and said they were succeeding because their brands were strong. In reality, the brands were strong because the companies were succeeding.”

A useful register of where to find caches of expensive equipment, if only it were easy to hack…

Someone pointed out this site – I’m assuming, given the context of the link, that they are a legal company. However, I can’t see from their website what they do. I guess the problem here is relying too much on brand awareness and not enough on clear statements of who you are or what you […]