Martyn with a Y

A long time ago, The Stig, of Top Gear fame, used the entranceway at Memset (RIP) HQ at Dunsfold Park to shelter from the rain.

I started learning to drive not long after, and one day my instructor picked me up from Memset, and I drove back. On the way back, driving up to the Memset building, I passed a Bentley coming the other way, and the driver was none other than The Stig himself. He kept his helmet on at all times in public. That’s dedication.

The other photo is me in the audience at Top Gear. I left Memset to work for KPS, but I took a day off to see what all the fuss was about with Top Gear, since I’d never seen inside the studio despite working next door to them for several years.

The experience was interesting, even more so when you don’t drive (I gave up learning to drive after I failed my theory); there was a LOT of standing around and waiting. I got fed up and left after they took a break to set up a new scene/story (whatever you call it) in the studio.

“They’re taking the Hobbits to Isengard..”

When I got married, we honeymooned in Bora Bora and New Zealand. Not bad for somebody who had just been made redundant before he got married. But on this day, exactly 25 years ago, we arrived at the Church of the Good Shepherd on the scenic shores of Lake Tekapo/Takapō, before heading into the Mount Cook area. Like the rest of New Zealand, it was exceptionally impressive.

Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.
Here we go round the mulberry bush
On a cold and frosty morning (or So early in the morning)

Yes, I’m back on WordPress. Mainly because I think I have the technology equivalent of Stockholm syndrome, but also because I have had some excellent ideas I want to try, especially since I’ve found a new host with a UK server that’s cheaper than Hetzner.

I’m still keeping Pika for another project, but the duck’s landed here for the foreseeable future.

Here’s a palate cleanser after a week of chaos. Let’s go back to when I was six years old, and home computing was really starting to take off…

I’ve supported and administered PHP applications since at least 1998, when I started working for Net Communications Ltd. in Norwich.  Back then, it was a blossoming web language.  

It competed with CGI (Common Gateway Interface) systems, where Perl or Python applications were far more common (and often much slower).  Over the years, the way you called PHP has varied, but it’s certainly much easier now than ever to set up a web server running PHP and deploy any number of applications written for it.

Since I started my current job, I’ve learned to (re-)appreciate how good Apache is compared with nginx, which I’d used exclusively for at least 7-8 years.  Configuring a LAMP stack now is crazy easy.

But alas, as with everything, it is a never-ending cycle of patching and updating, especially when a critical vulnerability is discovered.   Ordinarily, you’d set aside time each week to patch servers and keep them up to date.   Except this week, someone discovered (through the magic of AI) a massive critical vulnerability in PHP that absolutely required a patch/update, since no configuration fully protected PHP from exploitation.  

Even if you were behind a WAF like Cloudflare with a mitigation in place for php2shell, it’s not unthinkable that attackers (who could also be using AI) could find new ways around it.  But it is better than nothing.  In most cases, pretty much everybody took their websites down until PHP could be patched, which was a more sensible form of protection until vendors rolled out patches.  I haven’t encountered too many situations like this in my almost 30-year career.  It’s certainly not the first, but when it happens, it’s still a bit of a shock.

What is interesting about Cloudflare, though, is that they had effectively made their mitigation rules available before the official announcements and vendors’ patches.  But WAFs, even very proactive ones, are never intended to replace a fully patched service.  For example, Red Hat didn’t start rolling out fixes until late that evening.  These fixes cover multiple PHP versions, depending on your distribution.

As cybersecurity and criminals increasingly use AI, the race to detect and patch vulnerabilities like this intensifies. It’s a cat-and-tweety-bird game.  And as a sysadmin, we’re going to have to get used to saying, “I tawt I taw a puddy tat!” “I did! I did tawa puddy tat!”.

Mild spoilers for season 5 follow.

I never watched the original, highly lauded Coen Brothers film Fargo until Noah Hawley’s television series of the same name first aired on Channel 4 here in the UK back in 2014.  I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the Coens, having already watched The Hardsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou previously.  Yet I hadn’t seen Fargo.

Having just come off Breaking Bad, I was looking for something to replace it – and Fargo, the TV series, certainly filled that gap.  Starring Martin Freeman, Billy Bob Thornton, Allison Tolman, and Colin Hanks, the show is set after the original movie’s events in Bemidji, Minnesota, as well as Duluth and Fargo, North Dakota.  It follows a meek salesman pushed to the edge by his domineering wife and a childhood bully.  While waiting at a local hospital, he encounters the malevolent drifter Lorne Malvo, who triggers a series of violent events.  Like the film, it plays on the Minnesota “nice” stereotype, which is characterised by extreme politeness, emotional restraint, mild-mannered friendliness, and an intense aversion to open conflict.

The first season was absolutely excellent.  It blended dark humour with drama, tension, and violence, making it very hard to stop watching.  Only after watching season one did I watch the movie, and I must say, I kicked myself for not watching it earlier.  I fully understood why Frances McDormand and her husband, Joel Cohen, won their respective Oscars for the film.  It is a masterpiece of storytelling, and it will delight, thrill and make you laugh in equal measure.

The television series spawned four other series.  I eagerly awaited and watched three of them religiously as soon as they were released on Channel 4, then moved to Netflix (and later Amazon Prime Video).  The other two series were very good, but the third, while good, struggled to find its voice.

The fifth season has been available for quite some time (since 2023), but I never really got around to it.  But since I get Amazon Prime at an educational discount, I sat down last weekend and watched all ten episodes.

And… bloody hell… is it one hell of a story.  The first episode alone packs so much into it, thanks to decent pacing, that you wonder how big things will get with nine more episodes to go!

Starring Juno Temple (Ted Lasso), John Hamm (Mad Men), Dave Foley (Kids in the Hall), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Single White Female), Lamorne Morris (Spider-Noir), amongst many others, this series follows Dorothy “Dot” Lyon (Temple), a seemingly cheerful homemaker who harbours a dark secret past which eventually catches up with her. 

In this series, Minnesota “nice” is heavily weaponised, or at least used as a guard – in this case, hiding extreme trauma as Dot hides her past from her family (and the authorities).  Plus, debt, both financial and moral, shapes the story, as almost every conflict centres on what people believed they were owed.  The story also deals with domestic violence and the trauma that comes with it, as well as toxic masculinity and religious beliefs that mask it.  It also includes a supernatural element: one of the characters may be considerably older than they look.

The story is exceptionally well told, and Juno Temple deserves recognition for her exceptional performance, one of the best I’ve seen in TV or film in a long time.  Kudos also goes to John Hamm for playing the main villain (you just know he’s the bad guy as soon as his character is introduced).  The series is dark, very violent, creepy, outrageous, very funny, and so much more.  The way it’s structured and how the story unfolds makes it some of the best television I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s hard to know if we’ll get more Fargo, as Noah Hawley is currently focusing on the excellent Alien Earth (I really enjoyed the first season), but if season five is the last, well, it’s gone out in the best possible way.

With the release of the Netflix game from Warner Bros. Games and Supermassive Games, I was keen to try it.  So I fired up the game. First, I noticed how gorgeous the visuals and audio are, and I’d expect nothing less from my former employers.  It is classic Supermassive Games.

But the biggest thing that puts me right off Netflix’s new gaming platform is using a mobile phone as a controller.  First, I don’t play many games on my iPhone, despite Apple pushing its processor as the best in the biz.  I find touchscreen controls awkward, and the lack of any tactile feedback is exceptionally off-putting.  

I’ve been a keyboard-and-mouse person for decades, and it’s served me well on PC, Mac, and occasional PS5 (when compatible keyboards and mice work, Sony needs to do better on compatibility; it feels like a lottery as to what works and what doesn’t).  But as I get back into PS5 Pro gaming (thanks to titles like Star Wars: Galactic Racing), I find the PS5 controller, with its force feedback and haptics, an exceptional experience.  My problem is remembering which button does what, but repeated play builds muscle memory.  If you tried playing Galactic Racer on a phone or tablet, the experience would be very different. When I first tried it on Amazon Luna’s cloud service on my Mac with a keyboard and mouse, the racing experience was fundamentally different from how it is on the PS5 Pro with the controller.  

I once tried the iOS version of Death Stranding and found it absolutely unplayable, even on a large phone screen (even on an iPhone XX Pro Max).  The Mac version was great, but the PS5 version is even better.  I keep reading about people porting iD Software’s classic Doom to bonkers electronics like washing machines and toothbrushes, but just because you can doesn’t make for a great gaming experience.  And that’s how I feel about mobile gaming. Unless the game makes good use of the touchscreen (like the Monument Valley series, e.g., puzzle games), you’ll need a third-party controller.  

Netflix has been experimenting with gaming for some time, initially licensing mobile games you can download to your device as part of your subscription.  Or “interactive” systems you control with your remote or through a web browser, making critical choices at specific times (see Black Mirror: Bandersnatch or Charlie Brooker’s Cat Burglar).  But they’ve pulled these from the system and replaced them with games you control on your mobile phone.

Before The Conjuring: Unspoken was released, I tried one of the games, a mini-golf game that uses Netflix IP like Squid Game, and the experience was just God-awful.  You’ll need to download another app to your phone, scan a QR code, and I found myself spending as much time looking down at my phone as I was on the screen.  The video quality and latency weren’t great, and I gave up after about two minutes.

Slightly different experience with The Conjuring: Unspoken.  First, I feel the controller setup needs to happen right at the start, not just after the cold open.  It needs a guide to using it.  It’s fairly obvious on the phone, but a little help wouldn’t go amiss.  Second, the controls are very linear; you can’t move diagonally or use multi-touch.  I also found myself looking down at my phone again.  With a dedicated controller, you don’t need to do this – you can feel the controls quickly and easily.

This is an interesting experiment, but for it to go any further, Netflix needs to add third-party controller support, which will be difficult given the breadth and depth of features across TVs and streaming devices.  Otherwise, I fear this gaming experience, like many Netflix shows, will get cancelled quickly (which is why I don’t subscribe to Netflix regularly; while it has a lot of good content, it’s the chaos monkey amongst all the streamers – I have no idea what they’re going to do, and that makes me nervous).

So my summary: a good, interesting take on an almost-everywhere gaming platform, but the control system seriously lets it down.