Bert Hubert's writings
Bert Hubert's writings
Bert Hubert
Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist.
Latest Posts
Last year I wrote a post listing what I had been doing in 2018, because it turned out it was a lot, so much that it was useful to summarise it somewhat. This year there is less to report, but people have wondered what I’ve been up to....
What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more...
Note: This article covers a lot of well-trodden ground, although this post has the benefit of 1) being rather brief and 2) advancing slightly on from earlier work. Noam Chomsky wrote 39 dense pages of philosophy on this subject in...
Dear anonymous internet user, dear corporate employee hiding behind a gmail.com address, dear “GitHub account with a single issue”, Thank you for your interest in my free software, my project or the documentation I wrote for you. I am...
This page collects links to raw and live sources on how well the planet, including its vital infrastructure, is doing right now, potentially visualised attractively. But the key thing is, we want Real Data, from the most direct sources....
By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the...
By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl In this post I want to document some mostly non-technical aspects of the EU’s Galileo Satellite Navigation Network. I will also share some observations on how things are going, and perhaps how they...
The Netherlands is struggling with a shortage of primary school teachers, which as a nice side effect means that I get ample opportunities to do technical propaganda in the name of education. This is a quick writeup of a lesson on how...
Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. I also want to thank Job Snijders who was of great help in writing this article. How the Internet Leaks A few weeks ago large swathes of the internet stopped working around...
Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. This is a condensed and updated version of my earlier post On the pan-genome. Towards a multi-stranded genome Given that the completion of the human genome project was...
Over the holiday, I ran into this job advertisement from The Economist: The Economist is looking for a new Science and Technology correspondent. Knowledge of the field, an ability to write informatively, succinctly and wittily, and an...
By bert hubert bert@hubertnet.nl / @bert_hu_bert / https://galmon.eu/ Late July 2019, Galileo, “the European GPS” suffered from a week long outage. I’m a proud European, and I think we should have our own well-functioning navigation...
Hi everyone, As noted previously I’ve gone all in on GNSS monitoring. GNSS is the generic term for GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou satellites. Eventually a big blog post will come out, but meanwhile you can see the results on galmon.eu....
I’ve recently been spending quite some time on the EU’s Galileo Navigation Satellite System. In this post you’ll find some rough notes on things I’ve found out, both about how to receive data & how to understand the Galileo ephemeris...
In this post I want to shine a light on an important development within the world of DNA which shows how much DNA and the world of computing are now intertwined. It turns out we share important problems, like in this case: file formats....