Leon Mika

I’m a little surprised I haven’t seen this sooner. Paper-looking sign with dynamic information on it? I think this is an eInk display. If so, it’s the first time I’ve seen it used this way.

Now that PTV and VicRoads are being merged into a single department, new signage with the Transport Victoria logo is starting to appear. Can’t say I’m loving it right now, but it took a while for me to like the PTV logo, and now I’ll be sad to see it go (if it does go).

Speaking of logos for government agencies, it looks like the State Electricity Service is coming back in some capacity, complete with its original logo. I haven’t seen the SES logo since the ’90s.

Thinking more about the writing of Ron Jeffries, I’m left to wonder: how does he do this? I’ve only tried doing something similar a few times but I find myself getting lost in the task. To context switch from IDE to your “lab notes” would mean a stilted form of progression. And when I do write notes, they tend to be bullet points, not the flowing prose we have here.

Is that what we’re seeing here? Someone constantly switching from code to notes ever few minutes? Or is there something I’m missing here? Maybe this is a full day’s worth of work. Maybe it was bullet points and Ron turned it into prose prior to publication. Or is narration and transcription software involved?

Either way, it would be interesting to know more about this. #

Cannot disagree more with the idea of merging all programming languages into one syntax. That’s like saying getting rid of all natural languages and have everyone speak Esperanto, getting rid of all styles of visual art and have everyone paint with Cubism, etc. Programming languages are more than just a means of computation, there are a means of expression steeped in a level of how abstract one wants to think. Assembly is required when you’re talking to the machine, but it would be a nightmare to work at that level when one is trying to write shell scripts. Likewise, a type system like Haskell’s is ideal when one is exploring types in general, but would be a huge pain when one needs to write a throw away script.

And you are forgetting people’s taste. One could argue the closest language we have to a “universal syntax” is JavaScript. But JavaScript sucks. Sorry, but I do not like that language. It inhabits that range of being used for everything and good at nothing. It’s a necessary evil in my books, nothing more.

I can’t see AI completely replacing coding jobs for a long while, probably during my career. I’m sure it’ll replace some manual work, but as long as people are involved, they will have their own preferences on how to program a computer. And that’s how it should be. You won’t find code listings it in a gallery, but it’s still an artefact of humans. #

🔗 Martin Hähnel: Write Like You’re Ron Jeffries

The meandering pace of solving a problem, of how ideas develop and how people create are not replaced by the slick surface of the perfect how-to in which everything seemed to have worked on the first try, was clear from the beginning. Jeffries’ texts […] document the doing in the making, learning in the making. It makes it obvious that that which is presented is very often not how it was derived.

It would be nice to do more of this style of writing. #

Interesting development in the world of Go: in 1.26, the new() function will now accept expressions, not just types. This returns a pointer to the value, which will be useful for those types that use pointers for their fields:

type User struct {
   Age *int
}

user := User{}
var age int = 10
user.Age = new(age)

It also works for literal values, so that temporary age variable is strictly not necessary, although the linked post does state that it requires some consideration for types. Having user.Age = new(10) will work without issue as new will return a *int; but if Age were a *uint, you’ll get a type error.

I go on about unnecessary pointer types in the past (and will probably continue to do so in the future). To me, it’s just one of those paper-cuts you encounter in your day to day that you know can be made easier. So I consider this a welcome change. It’s not going to same me a ton on code, but every little bit helps. #

🔗 Brandon’s Journal: Save Your Writing

Some good advice about saving your previous creations, even if you feel you’ll never look at it again. Maybe you won’t, but if it’s writing, what’s a couple of megabytes in this world swimming in storage? Move it out of sight if you must, but don’t delete it. #

Breakfast at St. Ali coffee, in South Melbourne.

Well it’s been a fun day slamming my head against the wall trying to get Kubernetes and AWS working, but I shouldn’t be hasty. I need to leave some head slamming for tomorrow.

“Get out more” goal for October achieved. ✅

Boardgames at the Melbourne Central Lion Hotel again. Tonight just Codewords. One of these days I’ll stay longer than 1.5 hours. #

Bit more on lifts in Godot today. Re-engineered how the whole thing works: now everything is driven by the stationary lift doors. Each door has a reference to a lift and a target door. This makes the lift carriage itself rather passive: it will continue to reparent the player as before, but it no longer needs to track activations or have animating doors of it’s own. The doors just tell it where and when to go.

This has got proper targeting working so that a lift can now move between a pair of doors. It also allows for the player to call for the lift when it’s not positioned at the doors already. There are a few more dependencies amongst the various entities, but I think it makes for a more robust system. #

🔗 Robert Birming: The world’s worst blogger

I moved my blog from Bear to Micro.blog because, as I put it, it “started to feel limited”. I had begun creating photo albums, a status log, and some other stuff. It became harder and harder to manage…

So I moved [to Micro.blog]. A place with great features for adding photo collections, logging books, writing both long posts and short ones without titles. All just a click away…

Now that I have all these possibilities, I can’t seem to do it. No matter how I try, it never feels right to mix things up. And when I tried running two blogs on the same platform, it just got confusing.

I can’t pretend to fully understand Robert’s feelings, but I that I’ve gone through similar feelings myself: wondering if this bit of content should be on this blog, or that one should be there, etc. And always looking at the next shiny thing glittering on the horizon: a new CMS I haven’t tried, a fresh theme. There’s always something else to look at.

And I think much of this is all a distraction from a worry that took me a while to acknowledge: is what I write of interest to anyone? If I were to write about this, will they get upset or board? Who am I to waste their time on writing about topics that are of no interest to my readers?

​I’m trying to get better at not worrying too much about this. Although I can’t fully know what others are thinking, I have at least one data point that can provide me an answer to this, which is being a reader of blogs myself. And I’m aware that not everything I get from my feeds is going to interest me. That’s fine, I’ll just skip over that one post and wait for the next one. I’d probably prefer that over someone splitting their posts across multiple feeds and knowing that I’m only getting part of what they’re writing.

So if I were to provide some advice to Robert, it’s to try and simplify. Have a single site that others can subscribe to and write everything there. The hassle of deciding where to write isn’t really worth the worry. Plus your simplifying things for your readers, who want to read stuff from you. That’s why they’ve subscribed.

Anyway, like I said, I can’t pretend to fully understand the feelings. I definitely don’t think Robert is the “world’s worst blogger.” I enjoy reading his posts and I look forward to seeing them pop up in my RSS reader. I just hope this helps in some way. And I know how much easier it is to give advice than to follow it yourself. Go through my archive where I’ve spun out topics into separate blogs/CMS myself. All in all, keeping things simple is probably good advice for both of us. #

A bit more work on my Godot game, mainly building out mechanic for world 3. Tonight it was building an old-style lift with a caged door that the player can use to travel between different heights. Turned out really well.

Animating the door was a slog, and if that was all I achieved this evening, I would’ve considered that a success. But I had a bit of time to code up the lift too. I was unsure of how to approach this at first: I knew I wanted to turn off player movement and collisions and move the player (and camera) along with the lift.

This turned out to be easier than I was anticipating. When the player enters the lift, all motion on the player is disabled (this was done by setting a “disable_motion” boolean which would break out of the players progress loop early if true) and the player node is reparented to the lift. The lift then moves to the target, taking the player with it. At the destination, the player’s original parent is restored and motion is enabled again, allowing the player to move freely. I also had to turn off camera motion smoothing before I reparented the player as it seems like some offset vectors were incorrect for a frame and it had the camera shoot to the right. This is done when the door closing animation plays, before the node is reparented which happens just before the lift moves.

There’s still work to do. The z-order seems to be messed up when the lift reaches it’s destination (the player appears in front of the doors as they open). And at the moment, the lift only goes in one direction. But I’m really happy with what was achieved tonight. #