Simon Bisson

Come for the developer journalism, stay for the long running SFF review series, photographs of inner London birding, and well, the randomness of a crapaud in the big city. All this from an ex-engineer who found one of his cancelled projects in For All Mankind. And if you want to chat try Signal.

Recent Reads: Prophet - Earth War. The conclusion of Brandon Graham and Simon Roy's far future SF saga. The Earth Empire must fall, and various Prophet clones and their non-human allies arrive at a gateway to beyond, ready to do the deed. This is a weird future, fascinating and awful. A masterwork.

If you've been using Octopus' power saver scheme to save up free hours for use at weekends, and had (lke us) banked up more than you can use before November 1st, they've extended the scheme until February 2027.

TIL that there is a live arrangement of Brian Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois' Apollo Atmospheres and Soundtracks. It was recorded at the Science Museum in London by minimalist jazz group Icebreaker. tidal.com/album/111015...

Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #Branched — birds on thin branches. A blue tit takes a power stance in the garden. #birds #birding #wildlifephotography #putney #bluetit

Nearly finished Brandon Graham and Simon Roy's take on Image's Prophet character as far future clone avatar of a hive-like Earth Empire. Deeply weird and alien, reminiscent of a rebellion against the inexorable humanity of Walter Jon Williams' novellette Dinosaurs. It should have been a contender.

A melanistic pigeon hiding in one of the pediments of the Roman temple Maison Carrée in Nîmes. #birds #birding #wildlifephotography #nimes #pigeon

Not only are older GPUs not getting scrapped faster (a suggestion that was doing the rounds last year); so many teams at Microsoft who aren't working on frontier models have ideas to use them that there's internal competition, which may gate availability of database acceleration. Definitely demand

www.kickstarter.com/projects/boo...

A while back we went to a jazz club in Twickenham to see The Pete Roth Trio, a modern jazz group that was Yes and King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford's return to the stage. They were excellent, and now they've released their first album, Group Chat. It too is excellent. tidal.com/album/541879...

Recent Reads: Fold Catastrophes. Peter Watts' latest collection of short fiction is a powerful indictment of humanity's inhumanity. His futures are dark and strange, and only a couple of steps from our todays, grounded in science and society. One thing connects them: all are powerful and compelling.

Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #OnOneLeg, birds balancing on one leg. A heron stands on a metal chair frame that's been dumped in the Wandle delta. #birds #birding #wildlifephotography #wandle #heron

Zipping through Peter Watts’ latest collection Fold Catastrophes. Putting the dark into grimdark with an added touch of grim. But as always excellently thought-provoking. Plus there’s a new (to me) Sunflower story, so that’s always a win.

Recent Reads: Some Desperate Glory. Emily Tesh's not-a-space-opera subverts expectations at every turn. Kyr is not a hero, instead groomed from birth into a revenge weapon, only to be betrayed by those she trusts. With nothing left, a loose cannon tears up the facade of her world. A memorable book.

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme is #BrownBirds; any bird with mostly brown plumage. That most quintessential of brown birds, a sparrow, sits in a bamboo thicket. #birds #birding #wildlifephotography #sparrow #putney

TIL about Gizmodrome, Stewart Copeland, Adrian Belew, and Mark King’s prog rock collaboration. Level 42 meets Discipline-era King Crimson via Oingo Boingo. They were definitely having fun during the sessions. tidal.com/album/772423...

Today's #BirdOfTheDay is #LMNO, any bird whose name starts with one of those letters. L: Little Egret, rockpooling on Jersey. M: A sleeping Mallard on the Spit. N: A line of Northern Gannets near Ortac. O: An osprey overhead on the Florida Gulf Coast. #birds #birding #wildlifephotography

Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #Juveniles, any juvenile bird. The Alt theme is #Green. A juvenile ring-necked parakeet gives us a sneaky twofer, as it noisily waits to be fed. #birds #birding #wildlifephotography #putney #parrot

This morning I got the exercise bike to use a digit it had never used in the 30 plus years we have had it… (I’ve been using it consistently since the end of January…)

Probably the hardest part of explaining the impact of the eMudhra certificate kerfuffle was working out exactly how many things an enterprise has to update when the chain of trust stops being trustworthy; second hardest was keeping up with eMudhra's explanations and in the end, they just gave up

Found uncredited on Threads. If you know, you know. If you don't, there's always the alt text.

Microsoft's new tooling to quickly configure *any* Windows PC as a development workstation is more than likely why it's sunsetting its Dev Box cloud PC project. Why have a separate SKU when any Windows 365 PC can be a Dev Box? www.infoworld.com/article/4188...

Sometimes it's more than worth drilling down into familiar tools that have been around as long as we've been building Windows code, because it turns out there's a lot of interesting infrastructure under the hood of tools like MS Build. www.infoworld.com/article/4222...

Microsoft has internally made Rust a tier-1 development language. That means it's been getting a (for now internal only) set of tools to build into Microsoft's build tooling, using the Visual C++ compiler tools. www.infoworld.com/article/4227...

A couple of weeks ago I went to the community-run Fabcon EU event in Barcelona, where I took the opportunity to explore the new Rayfin data application SDK and its agent-based development options. Using JS decorators to build in guardrails makes a lot of sense. www.infoworld.com/article/4233...

A red-veined darter dragonfly rests by the side of a fountain on a sunny October morning in Nîmes. #wildlifephotography #nimes #dragonfly

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme is #Seasonal; any shot from Autumn/fall/whatever season you have now. The alt is #Corvids; any crow species. From November 2025, one of the Wandsworth Park crows flies down the Thames for a twofer. #birds #birding #wildlfephotography #thames #crow

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme is #Black&White; any bird with black & white plumage. The alt is #Colourful; any bird with 3 or more colours. I'd argue that a magpie in full-on iridescent mode gives us a twofer. #birds #birding #wildlifephotography #putney #magpie

Dear Adobe Acrobat. If you offer a "share by default email" feature, it should open my email client and attach the document to a blank email. It should not simply sit there and do nothing. No love, Me.

New DLR, who dis?

Sticker at an AI event I was at today…

Why I do my Recent Reads posts: short reviews of everything I read.

One thing about having to get up this early, at least there are plenty of seats on the Tube…

Toms from the roof.

FYI! Tor has put up the whole first five chapters of my lesbian winter soldier book CALL ME TRAITOR for free here: us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

For a movement that's all about being biblical, it's clear that US evangelicals are skipping out on their mandatory bible study.

Not sure why @cloudflare.social is investing in tsrs for an 8x compilation speed up, when Microsoft's own Go rewrite of the TypeScript compiler is a) open source and b) 10x faster. www.infoworld.com/article/3849...

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme is #LittleLegs. Swallows and swifts have the tiniest legs, as shown by this bird clinging to an electric cable in southern Oregon. #bids #birding #wildlifephotography #oregon #swallow

There's such a thing as too on the nose. Or is there?

Using most of my machines at the same time in order to compare dotnetup on Windows, macOS, and Linux for a big piece I am working on...

Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #Reflection. A gadwall is itself reflected as it glides through a river of reflected leaves. #birds #birding #wandle #wildlifephotography #gadwall

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme is #Larus: any species of Gull. "Squawk loudly and carry a big stick." A juvenile herring gull flies up the Thames at Point Pleasant, carrying a long yellow stick. #birds #birding #wildlifephotography #thames #gull

Today’s project: a redesign of the cats’ feeding station, adding bracing to stop @onlyphrynes.com pulling the feeder apart. How long will it last with two Maines in the house?

While doing some DIY (putting the cat feeder in a wooden brace to try and protect it from the cats we tipped over the kitchen junk pot and I picked up what I thought was my grandmother’s silver propelling pencil and chat, it is my grandmother’s shiv!

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme from is #Dawn, any bird captured at sunrise. It's way back into the archives, for sunrise on the day of friends' wedding on the beach at Long Beach Island in New Jersey, and a slow pelican heading up the coast. #birds #birding #wildlifephotography #newjersey #pelican