Mudlarking - 26 - Eyeball

Jul. 1st, 2025 08:59 pm
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
Low tide and lunch time coincided so I headed towards Custom House.

The tide was out enough that the foreshore was a good size, but there was quite a lot of broken glass in the left direction and some sinking mud furthest to the right, but in between, there were pebbles and bits of Bartmann jugs and tiles and other wonders.

I also saw a few bits of seaweed.

It was a very hot and sunny day and as I walked along the foreshore, I thought about how the day was just spectacular and how happy I was to be there by the river.

Later that evening, the tide was up and the steps at Blackfriars already had water on them but a man not wearing a shirt stood in the water, throwing stones.

I looked at my finds when I got home and was convinced that what I had previously thought was a clay marble was actually an eyeball. It looked sort of white with a pupil and with red veins, and for a while I didn't want to touch it, before I convinced myself again that it really is a marble.

I found some interesting sherds of pottery on the foreshore - nice raised patterns from Bartmann jugs, a pipe that has initials, Westerwald stoneware fragments, another piece of flint, and some Metropolitan Slipware.

Mudlarking finds - 26
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
A goose waddled up to me, inquisitively. The other geese, mostly Canada geese and a few goslings, lay on the beach, and I tried to avoid going close to them. The swans also loomed large. It was as if the swans and geese were guarding a patch of foreshore. When the tide went out a bit, I cautiously moved between them and the foreshore, not wanting to scare them away. “It's okay,” I told one goose, ”it's okay”.

One man, who I thought must be a pro mudlarker, quickly reached the third beach along when the tide was still fairly up, but it seemed that when he got there, he just took his top off and sunbathed on his own private beach, and I'm not sure he was mudlarking at all. A second man tried to get to the third beach along but wasn't paying enough attention to the boats and the waves splashed at him and he ran back.

I saw an ant.

The Canada geese swam away in a line and I watched as they floated past on the waves.

A white butterfly fluttered around the foreshore.

People were paddling in the Thames.

I was picking up pottery sherds.

A man said, “hello”, but I wasn’t sure if it was to me, as my back was to him and the sound of the waves splashing on the shore was loud at that point, and I didn't look around.

I found a lot at Limehouse:

A button, a cowrie shell, a stone that says “oy”, the most squiggly piece of combware I’ve found so far, a sherd that would have said “Staffordshire England” and another sherd that says “pottery”.

I like the colours of the pottery and glass I find in Limehouse - the sherds that are pale pinks and blues and yellows, and the glass that is light blue.

Mudlarking finds - 25.1

Mudlarking finds - 25.2

Mudlarking finds - 25.3

1SE for June 2025

Jun. 30th, 2025 10:04 pm
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila


I can't quite believe how much has happened this month. At least 60 days of stuff were packed into June's 30. And now we're halfway through the year. Dear Time, Please slow down, Love, Me.

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Joint Union Statement

Jun. 30th, 2025 05:53 pm
lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)
[personal profile] lnr

We did finally meet with the university senior management on 10th June, over a month after we originally requested a meeting. It wasn't a complete success, but we did come out of it with assurance that the existing policy on gender reassignment was still in place, and trans people can continue to use the toilets that match their lived gender, that no-one should be challenging people in the toilets, and that any changes to the policy would not happen until after the EHRC guidance is published in the autumn, and would involve a proper consultation, and a full Equality Impact Assessment of the changes

We asked them to respond to the EHRC consultation as an institution, and gave them a deadline of 20th June to communicate the above facts with all members of staff, including information on how to seek advice and support (other than just the staff counselling service!)

Instead they published a statement on Sharepoint on Tuesday (24th June), which did not meet our requests. The unions have put out a joint statement today (drafted last week, but it took a while to get it online) as a result:

https://www.ucu.cam.ac.uk/joint-trade-union-statement-on-the-supreme-court-ruling-on-the-equality-act/

EHRC Consultation

Jun. 30th, 2025 05:49 pm
lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)
[personal profile] lnr

Finished my response and submitted at 11:30 last night, having had to start from scratch on Sunday because a browser refresh had lost my previous attempt. I copied and pasted my responses into a document before submitting, as I'd been warned it wouldn't save them or send them to me. Tired now, and too hot today too, but glad I got it done.

Not sharing it all here, but from the final question:

Overall, as a trans inclusive feminist woman, I find this Code of Practice to be incredibly upsetting. I want to be able to include trans people in my life. I want to accept them in their lived gender. I'm happier with women's places which include trans people than I am with ones which exclude them. I want to have advice on how I can do this, and it's completely lacking here.

The Code is unclear in many places not just on how trans inclusive policies can work, but also on how the suggested trans *exclusive* policies can work in practice. It relies too much on the idea that you can always tell which people are trans and which people are not, and it seems willing to change existing practice significantly even where this will disadvantage trans people.

I don't think this is what the ruling in the Supreme Court was trying to achieve. The changes here are so incredibly broad, and so much at odds with other legislation, that they seem to go far beyond what is necessary, and it feels like an ideological stance to exclude trans people. If this is not the intention than it needs re-writing considerably.

The Friday Five for 27 June 2025

Jun. 26th, 2025 06:25 pm
anais_pf: (Default)
[personal profile] anais_pf posting in [community profile] thefridayfive
This week's questions were suggested by [livejournal.com profile] bindyree

1. Who was your favorite teacher?

2. Why was that teacher so special?

3. Do you think teachers get paid enough?

4. Do you have a favorite year of school?

5. If you could travel back in time and tell yourself something now that would have helped you get through school, what would you say?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

Mudlarking 24 - Trick or treat

Jun. 25th, 2025 09:21 pm
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
It was nice to walk by the river on a hot day and the foreshore at Blackfriars was entirely mine to start with, but then it suddenly got busy with people: children picking up stones and throwing them into the river, people taking photos, people sitting on the beach, and so on.

I did not pick up the blue Croc that is still at the top of the Pile, nor the coat-hanger, nor the bricks that say Starworks on them, which it seems are from Glenboig in Scotland.

I did pick up a sticker that says “trick or treat” and a star that was also probably once a sticker, and my first Lego brick! It's a little blue one.

I also found a cute piece of combware, and two larger pieces of misshapen greenish sherds that look like they may once have been part of the same thing. At first I thought one of them was a crab.

Mudlarking finds - 24

It's June challenge time again

Jun. 25th, 2025 02:58 pm
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
[personal profile] spiralsheep posting in [community profile] flaneurs
Anybody else planning to squeeze in a June challenge attempt before the end of this month? Or later? Or perhaps you calmly and coolly thought ahead and have already completed a flan that you can't wait to share with us?
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
My plans for mudlarking on Saturday were thwarted when all my trains were cancelled. It took me three hours to get to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where I was going for a picnic so I didn't have time to mudlark as well.

On Sunday, I broke a bowl, dropped it on the floor and it smashed, and I held up a triangular sherd and wondered whether people would find the sherd from my bowl in the future, with a peri-peri flavour. I wondered if I should take it to the foreshore.

On the Sunday though, the trains were running again, so I headed to Blackfriars. The blue Croc was still there that I saw on Friday. I walked along a wooden plank that had washed up. It was a hot day but at that time I was the only one on the foreshore.

I picked up more small black tiles, but one had the corner damaged.

I heard music from a busker by the station.

I was no longer feeling how I used to when I started mudlarking, no feeling of Flow, no clearing of the mind. I wondered if I'd grown bored of it and should play more Ingress.

I seem to have trained my eyes to spot pottery sherds but I would like to find other things more as I have a lot of sherds now.

I found a cork and when I got it home I realised it said “Kylie Minogue” on it. I hadn't realised Kylie Minogue wine existed and you can buy it at Sainsbury's.

I found a red piece that could be a bit of brick or tile that looks like it says “Taylor” on it.

I found some glass that looked like it said “ord” on it. Ordinary?

I found a sherd that says “don” and presumably once said “London”.

Mudlarking finds - 22A

--
I headed to Wapping after that, as the tide got lower.

While I had been to the Prospect of Whitby (the Pelican Stairs) before I hadn't been to the other bit of Wapping - accessed through the New Crane Stairs.

The steps there were missing at the bottom, replaced with boulders, so I used the green slimy wall for balance.

I thought I was alone there on the foreshore until I noticed the people fishing, with their lines cutting off part of the shore. I walked in the opposite direction and walked along the foreshore to Wapping Pier.

I saw Canada Geese and goslings lying on the foreshore.

I passed one set of stairs that had been removed - Wapping Dock Stairs. There were a few concrete steps to start with but the metal stairs that were once there were no longer.

King Henry's Stairs at Execution Dock, near to Wapping Pier were actually just a metal ladder.

I walked back to the New Crane Stairs.

I saw a duck with five ducklings following, moving fast across the foreshore.

I saw a man in the Thames, water up to his shorts, spear fishing.

I enjoyed Wapping as it was somewhere new - maybe that was the problem earlier, lack of novelty at Blackfriars. It also felt vast and quieter without all the tourists walking past.

I found a lot of pottery sherds in Wapping - I am collecting blue and white ones currently for a mosaic, but there was one that looked almost like a nose, one with a letter ‘E’ and various pieces with patterns I haven't seen before. There was also some glass that had degraded and looked so pretty.

Mudlarking finds - 22B
[personal profile] mjg59
Single signon is a pretty vital part of modern enterprise security. You have users who need access to a bewildering array of services, and you want to be able to avoid the fallout of one of those services being compromised and your users having to change their passwords everywhere (because they're clearly going to be using the same password everywhere), or you want to be able to enforce some reasonable MFA policy without needing to configure it in 300 different places, or you want to be able to disable all user access in one place when someone leaves the company, or, well, all of the above. There's any number of providers for this, ranging from it being integrated with a more general app service platform (eg, Microsoft or Google) or a third party vendor (Okta, Ping, any number of bizarre companies). And, in general, they'll offer a straightforward mechanism to either issue OIDC tokens or manage SAML login flows, requiring users present whatever set of authentication mechanisms you've configured.

This is largely optimised for web authentication, which doesn't seem like a huge deal - if I'm logging into Workday then being bounced to another site for auth seems entirely reasonable. The problem is when you're trying to gate access to a non-web app, at which point consistency in login flow is usually achieved by spawning a browser and somehow managing submitting the result back to the remote server. And this makes some degree of sense - browsers are where webauthn token support tends to live, and it also ensures the user always has the same experience.

But it works poorly for CLI-based setups. There's basically two options - you can use the device code authorisation flow, where you perform authentication on what is nominally a separate machine to the one requesting it (but in this case is actually the same) and as a result end up with a straightforward mechanism to have your users socially engineered into giving Johnny Badman a valid auth token despite webauthn nominally being unphisable (as described years ago), or you reduce that risk somewhat by spawning a local server and POSTing the token back to it - which works locally but doesn't work well if you're dealing with trying to auth on a remote device. The user experience for both scenarios sucks, and it reduces a bunch of the worthwhile security properties that modern MFA supposedly gives us.

There's a third approach, which is in some ways the obviously good approach and in other ways is obviously a screaming nightmare. All the browser is doing is sending a bunch of requests to a remote service and handling the response locally. Why don't we just do the same? Okta, for instance, has an API for auth. We just need to submit the username and password to that and see what answer comes back. This is great until you enable any kind of MFA, at which point the additional authz step is something that's only supported via the browser. And basically everyone else is the same.

Of course, when we say "That's only supported via the browser", the browser is still just running some code of some form and we can figure out what it's doing and do the same. Which is how you end up scraping constants out of Javascript embedded in the API response in order to submit that data back in the appropriate way. This is all possible but it's incredibly annoying and fragile - the contract with the identity provider is that a browser is pointed at a URL, not that any of the internal implementation remains consistent.

I've done this. I've implemented code to scrape an identity provider's auth responses to extract the webauthn challenges and feed those to a local security token without using a browser. I've also written support for forwarding those challenges over the SSH agent protocol to make this work with remote systems that aren't running a GUI. This week I'm working on doing the same again, because every identity provider does all of this differently.

There's no fundamental reason all of this needs to be custom. It could be a straightforward "POST username and password, receive list of UUIDs describing MFA mechanisms, define how those MFA mechanisms work". That even gives space for custom auth factors (I'm looking at you, Okta Fastpass). But instead I'm left scraping JSON blobs out of Javascript and hoping nobody renames a field, even though I only care about extremely standard MFA mechanisms that shouldn't differ across different identity providers.

Someone, please, write a spec for this. Please don't make it be me.

The Friday Five on a Sunday

Jun. 22nd, 2025 04:13 pm
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila
  1. If you were a fruit, which would you be and why?

    I would like to be a guava. They are a tropical fruit that does not export well, and are almost as tetchy as avocados. Unripe, unripe, unripe, unripe, unripe, RIPE AND SUCCULENT, hahaha you missed the 10-minute window when I was perfect and now I shall rot secretly on the inside so you won't be able to anticipate your disappointment.

    When you do manage to catch them at the right moment, they are sooooo delicious.

  2. If you wake up and smell smoke, and you have to get everybody (pets included) out of the house safely, but you have time to grab one item, what would you grab?

    My phone. No question. Once upon a time it would have been passport or driving licence or some such, but we do everything on our phones now, so I can think of nothing more essential than that. Yes, the documents are a faff to replace, but how are you going to get online to do it without your phone?

  3. If you were stuck on an island, who would be the one person you would want with you and why?

    I hate it in films (and in fact in real life) when people are ordered to choose between beloved family members. I would want my partner AND my children with me, or else I would refuse to choose.

  4. If you could change one thing about your physical appearance, what would it be?

    I'm not sure changing one thing would make much of a difference.

  5. If you could spend the day with one famous person, dead or alive, who would you choose?

    I'd quite like to have a chat with Jaron Lanier.

I am a dog

Jun. 22nd, 2025 11:04 am
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
I attended an Ambient Lit workshop at Voidspace and we were asked to take a walk and take notes and photos. I took a random card and it said “dog” on it.



I am a dog.

I walk through a puddle.

I sniff a bag of rubbish with a coffee cup in.

I am curious about a traffic cone.

I am looking at the road and pavement a lot. There's an intriguing drain cover, I look at the bottom of a bollard.

Another bag of rubbish I sniff at.

I see people waving their arms about and wonder about barking at them.

I walk past a flower on the pavement.

I am lingering longer.

I go up a narrow alleyway and end up at a dead end, so turn around.

I haven't seen any other dogs. I hope to.

St Pancras Ironwork Co Engineers

An interesting Ironworks sign on the pavement.

A drain cover clonks as I walk over it.

There are no balls to chase.

I bark at some pigeons.

I sniff something on the ground.

I chase pigeons

I want to bark at the policemen.

Shallow

The ground says Shallow.

Fountain

I think I've found another dog! Woof! Woof!

I run away from my owner to get back to the theatre on time.

Tolkien lecture

Jun. 22nd, 2025 10:43 am
qian: Tiny pink head of a Katamari character (Default)
[personal profile] qian
My talk for the Tolkien lecture series hosted by Pembroke College, Oxford is up on YouTube: The Uses of Fantasy. I really enjoyed doing it, though I'm now out of the one idea I had for a Guest of Honour/whatever speech lolol. I have used it up!!
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
It was a hot day and I went to Cousin Lane Stairs to start with and took my hiking pole this time to get over the boulders, which worked well, but I am still wary of the tide there as I haven't spent enough time there to know how long it's safe for.

The Banker pub just at the top of the stairs was busy with people enjoying the sunshine and their beers. One or two people sat on the foreshore for a bit, but I was the only person on the foreshore across the boulder, past Cannon Street railway bridge.

The first thing I found was a plastic card that had a sticker saying “Billy Hicks”.

I also found what looks like the top of a teapot, a few other sherds, and a little yellow bit, which was probably once part of a brick and is now perhaps a Thames potato.

Mudlarking finds - 21A

My second location was near the Millennium Bridge and there were a few mudlarkers there. I watched a cormorant enjoying the water.

I picked up an oyster shell with a circular hole in it. I don’t usually pick up shells but I recently read that they may have been used as tiles.

I found a white sherd with a lion mark on it, a sherd with colourful flowers, and a yellow piece with a pie crust edge. I also found another brown star to go with my brown star collection.

“Have you found anything good?” I was asked as I reached the top of the stairs.

Mudlarking finds - 21B

My third location was back to Blackfriars and it felt cooler as I walked across the bridge. There was a nice breeze and also some shade under the bridge.

It was nice to just walk along by the river, but then the thoughts came, too many thoughts. I guess that’s the thing with mudlarking - sometimes it clears my mind and I can just focus on the foreshore, and other times as I can’t distract myself by looking at a phone or anything, the thoughts pile on in.

On the top of the pile of bones was a plastic blue shoe, a Croc.

I found a piece of glass that says “PER” on it, which could perhaps once have said “SUPERIOR”.

Mudlarking finds - 21C - PER

I found a nice piece of combed slipware, that has a red outline.

I found some nice pebbles and another small black tile to go with my collection.

Mudlarking finds - 21C

Queenhithe

Jun. 20th, 2025 10:41 am
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
Wednesday involved no mudlarking, as the tide was too high, but I did walk along the river past Queenhithe, where you are definitely not allowed to mudlark. It is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and has the remains of an old dock there. There are signs beside it and a mosaic, but although I’d read the signs previously, I'd never paid too much attention to it.

I could see sherds and pipes and oyster shells on the foreshore from standing on the path beside it though.

The PLA map has Queenhithe marked in red, but intriguingly on their map, it looks like you could mudlark just to the side of it, or in front of it, if the tide was out enough. I would worry though that I wouldn't know where the line was between allowed and definitely not.

My a11y journey

Jun. 20th, 2025 01:11 am
[personal profile] mjg59
23 years ago I was in a bad place. I'd quit my first attempt at a PhD for various reasons that were, with hindsight, bad, and I was suddenly entirely aimless. I lucked into picking up a sysadmin role back at TCM where I'd spent a summer a year before, but that's not really what I wanted in my life. And then Hanna mentioned that her PhD supervisor was looking for someone familiar with Linux to work on making Dasher, one of the group's research projects, more usable on Linux. I jumped.

The timing was fortuitous. Sun were pumping money and developer effort into accessibility support, and the Inference Group had just received a grant from the Gatsy Foundation that involved working with the ACE Centre to provide additional accessibility support. And I was suddenly hacking on code that was largely ignored by most developers, supporting use cases that were irrelevant to most developers. Being in a relatively green field space sounds refreshing, until you realise that you're catering to actual humans who are potentially going to rely on your software to be able to communicate. That's somewhat focusing.

This was, uh, something of an on the job learning experience. I had to catch up with a lot of new technologies very quickly, but that wasn't the hard bit - what was difficult was realising I had to cater to people who were dealing with use cases that I had no experience of whatsoever. Dasher was extended to allow text entry into applications without needing to cut and paste. We added support for introspection of the current applications UI so menus could be exposed via the Dasher interface, allowing people to fly through menu hierarchies and pop open file dialogs. Text-to-speech was incorporated so people could rapidly enter sentences and have them spoke out loud.

But what sticks with me isn't the tech, or even the opportunities it gave me to meet other people working on the Linux desktop and forge friendships that still exist. It was the cases where I had the opportunity to work with people who could use Dasher as a tool to increase their ability to communicate with the outside world, whose lives were transformed for the better because of what we'd produced. Watching someone use your code and realising that you could write a three line patch that had a significant impact on the speed they could talk to other people is an incomparable experience. It's been decades and in many ways that was the most impact I've ever had as a developer.

I left after a year to work on fruitflies and get my PhD, and my career since then hasn't involved a lot of accessibility work. But it's stuck with me - every improvement in that space is something that has a direct impact on the quality of life of more people than you expect, but is also something that goes almost unrecognised. The people working on accessibility are heroes. They're making all the technology everyone else produces available to people who would otherwise be blocked from it. They deserve recognition, and they deserve a lot more support than they have.

But when we deal with technology, we deal with transitions. A lot of the Linux accessibility support depended on X11 behaviour that is now widely regarded as a set of misfeatures. It's not actually good to be able to inject arbitrary input into an arbitrary window, and it's not good to be able to arbitrarily scrape out its contents. X11 never had a model to permit this for accessibility tooling while blocking it for other code. Wayland does, but suffers from the surrounding infrastructure not being well developed yet. We're seeing that happen now, though - Gnome has been performing a great deal of work in this respect, and KDE is picking that up as well. There isn't a full correspondence between X11-based Linux accessibility support and Wayland, but for many users the Wayland accessibility infrastructure is already better than with X11.

That's going to continue improving, and it'll improve faster with broader support. We've somehow ended up with the bizarre politicisation of Wayland as being some sort of woke thing while X11 represents the Roman Empire or some such bullshit, but the reality is that there is no story for improving accessibility support under X11 and sticking to X11 is going to end up reducing the accessibility of a platform.

When you read anything about Linux accessibility, ask yourself whether you're reading something written by either a user of the accessibility features, or a developer of them. If they're neither, ask yourself why they actually care and what they're doing to make the future better.

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 2nd, 2025 01:20 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios