This week, the work I’ve been doing for the past 6 months, and that PegaSys has been working on for the past 18 months or so was released into the world. Specifically we’ve released Pantheon 0.8.1, our new MainNet compatible, Apache 2 licensed, Java-based Ethereum client. And it’s open source.

I’m pretty excited about it on a few fronts. Firstly I think it’s a pretty important thing for the Ethereum community. To be a healthy ecosystem, Ethereum needs to have diversity in its clients to avoid a bug in one client taking out or accidentally hard forking the entire network. Currently though, Geth and Parity dominate the Ethereum client landscape. Pantheon clearly won’t change that in the short term, but it is backed by significant engineering resources to help it keep up with the ever changing Ethereum landscape and be a dependable option.

There’s an exceptionally valuable set of ethereum reference tests that are run by most or all of the different Ethereum clients to ensure they actually implement the specifications in a compatible way. They’re one of the most valuable resources for anyone developing an Ethereum client.

The Aleth project maintains the official test client called testeth but it’s a little cryptic to work out how to actually run things with it and then use that to debug failures happening in the client you’re actually developing. So this is what I’ve found useful:

There are a number of browser plugins which inject additional JavaScript APIs into the DOM so websites can take advantage of the plugin functionality.  One example of that is MetaMask which “brings Ethereum to your browser”. This allows any website the user visits to detect that the plugin is installed by checking for the presence of those APIs which may aid them in targeting attacks such as the recent spate of phishing attacks against MetaMask users. So there’s a proposal in place to require websites to get specific authorisation from the user before the APIs will be injected.  And since injecting an API to allow the website to request access would defeat the point, it uses window.postMessage:

Interesting review of the regulatory landscape around crypto-currencies. There are a lot of echo’s of issues with the over-the-counter nature of most FX trading, albeit with even less enforced regulation and uncertainty.

Bitcoin Redux explains what’s going wrong in the world of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin exchanges are developing into a shadow banking system, which do not give their customers actual bitcoin but rather display a “balance” and allow them to transact with others. However if Alice sends Bob a bitcoin, and they’re both customers of the same exchange, it just adjusts their balances rather than doing anything on the blockchain. This is an e-money service, according to European law, but is the law enforced? Not where it matters. We’ve been looking at the details. Source: Bitcoin Redux: crypto crime, and how to tackle it | Light Blue Touchpaper Also interesting to note is that most of the regulation required is already in place and just needs to be enforced. In most cases there isn’t any need for radical rethinking of laws, just apply the current laws about treating consumers fairly and Know-Your-Customer to this new technology.

A fun thing about programming is that most days, you make progress. Maybe you fix some issues, maybe you add a feature, maybe you build towards something bigger. Your code moves ever forward. Until it doesn’t. On occasion, you will hit a Bug. Not a mundane bug, some trifle you can fix in an hour, or even a day. This is a true Bug. One that defies reason. One that evokes a “that’s not possible,” a “how could this even happen?”, or most dreadfully, a “could there be a bug in the compiler?” Hold on kids, we’re going hunting. Source: The Great Bug Hunt – Allen Pike

Essentially, the Docker approach boils down to downloading an unsigned binary, running it, and hoping it doesn’t contain any backdoor into your companies network. Feels like downloading Windows shareware in the 90s to me. When will the first docker image appear which contains the Ask toolbar? The first internet worm spreading via flawed docker images? Source: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers There’s certainly some truth to that.  I’m not entirely sure that the compile-from-source approach was actually that much more secure as it was practically impossible to verify the source code anyway. At which point it makes little to no difference if you’re downloading random binaries off the internet or random source code – either way you’re implicitly trusting the source. Verifying signatures for the stuff you download would be a big improvement and many of the newer deployment approaches are very lacking in this area, but it still depends on having a trustworthy way of getting the signature to verify.

This is the second article on things I found particularly interesting in the Ethereum yellow paper.  The first is “What’s on the Blockchain?” and the same disclaimers apply: I’m no expert and you should go verify any claims I’m making before depending on them. Comments and corrections are most welcome either via email or @ajsutton on twitter.

One of the little details in the way Ethereum works is the idea of a “nonce” attached to each account and transaction. It’s a small but important detail.

To understand the details of how Ethereum works I’ve been working my way through the yellow paper. And since there’s no better way to really understand things than to explain them, I thought I’d write up my own explanation for some of the things that stood out to me.

Fair warning: I’m no expert, there’s guaranteed to be sloppy usage of terminology and a high likelihood of mistakes. If you’re just looking for an easier to read version of the yellow paper, try the beige paper, it’s had some actually knowledgable people look it over. Comments and corrections are most welcome either via email or @ajsutton on twitter.

After 7 years at LMAX, I’ll be winding up with them at the end of the month. It’s been a pretty remarkable journey and certainly not an easy decision to move on but ultimately another opportunity came up that I just couldn’t refuse.

I had intended to write up some reflections on the past 7 years at LMAX but I just can’t find the words. Suffice to say, it’s been an amazing journey full of wonderful people, big technical challenges and lots of innovative solutions. The early years in particular were just a fire hose of new knowledge to try and absorb. There have been many changes over the years, but it’s still an amazing place to work and leaving is sad.

Hapi 17 was released a while back with quite a few nice improvement – mostly centered around using promises instead of callbacks and thus fitting in with async/await well.  However, it’s a very significant change right across it’s APIs so it took quite a while for the various plugins that Moolah uses to be updated.

Eventually though they were all ready and then the actual upgrade of Moolah code was pretty straight forward.  Moolah had been using async handlers via a plugin all along so there were minor changes to how they were specified but very few changes to the control flow they then used.

I dropped out of the habit of writing about Moolah but it’s been ticking along doing what I need it to for a fair while with a few additions here and there. Recently I spent a chunk of time adding the ability to ‘earmark’ money for a particular use.

My main motivation is that we’re planning a family trip to Germany at the end of the year and I want to be able to set aside money through the year as we save for it. Various things will need to be paid upfront and those expense need to come out of the earmarked funds. I could track that with a new account for the savings, but since I’m not setting up a new bank account the balances wouldn’t match up and I’d spend a lot of time transferring money in and out of the holiday account.

I ran into an issue with Vuetify recently where the 1.0 betas were constantly utilising a CPU core when run in Safari. It turned out, I wasn’t alone and it had been reported as bug 2773.

There wasn’t a lot to go on – the problem only happened in Safari and the timeline showed it was constantly invalidating and recalculating the layout, apparently without any JavaScript executing.

First step was to create a simple reproduction case, which turned out to be a template with just: