Hi! I'm bert hubert, and I am an entrepreneur & software developer. I sometimes contribute to science , I care a lot about Europe 🇪🇺, innovation, climate, biology & health. I'm a former shareholder of Open-Xchange , the parent company of PowerDNS which I founded in 1999. In 2020, I joined a government oversight board…
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A week ago, I finally got round to implementing an idea I’d been toying with for years: what if your computer made a little bit of noise every time it sent data to Google? From studying logs, I’d long known just how many sites send all your visits and clicks to (at least) Google, but a log that you have to manually…
Recently the Dutch Electoral Board (where I am also a very part time advisor) invited me to do a talk reflecting on their open source Abacus vote tabulation software. Much software is now provided as a service, and is typically deployed continuously (CD, continuous deployment), surrounded by enough automated testing…
Updates: 12th of September 2021: I’m writing a book on DNA! If you want to become a beta reader, or have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you! 8th of January 2021: This article has been revised and updated, scientifically and in terms of dead links. Revision made by Tomás Simões (@putadagravidade /…
Recently I was doing some work decoding the new Galileo High Accuracy Service data. In short, this new service will allow Galileo (“European GPS”) users to achieve decimeter-level accuracy, which is nice. This “HAS” data is transmitted highly redundantly by making good use of Reed-Solomon encoding. To work with this…
Some new minor leap second drama is coming up, and for once we can
All BNT162b2 vaccine data on this page is sourced from this World Health Organization document. This is a living page, shared already so people can get going! But check back frequently for updates. Translation: Français / 日本語 In short: the vaccine mRNA has been optimized by the manufacturer by changing bits of RNA…
Welcome to part 1 of Modern C++ for C Programmers, please see the introduction for the goals and context of this series. In this part we start with C++ features that you can use to spice up your code ’line by line’, without immediately having to use all 1400 pages of ‘The C++ Programming Language’. Various code…
So how hard could it be. As input we have something like Fri, 17 Jan 2025 06:07:07 in UTC, and we’d like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. Trying to figure this out led me to discover many ‘surprise features’ and otherwise…
First a round of thanks for the many people in industry and government who provided valuable links, background and insights! I could not have done this without your help! If you spot any mistakes, or have suggestions, please do contact me on bert@hubertnet.nl The EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act is admirable in its goal…
This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. The really short version: the…