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Found this sticker for Yarra Valley Aviation on, of all things, a sign at Flinders St. Station. That’s where I took a few pilot lessons. There were people there who really did love flying.
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Unboxed my new Macbook Air today, which I hope to take on my trip. Christened “Raven” which, true, doesn’t really fit my naming convention, but it’s one I like, and I think suitable for this machine.
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This cheeky little bugger has been eyeing my sandwich all lunch. Almost had an opportunity to help itself when I went to retrieve my napkin after the wind took it.
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My upcoming trip sort of creeped up on me. Airline has started emailing me. Flight has started showing up in my calendar. This time next fortnight…
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Oof! I probably should do something about my leaky tap. This was how much was lost after 12 hours, about 750 ml. It was transferred to the kettle.
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I don’t know what’s wrong with modern text editors, but none of them do code-completion well. Seems like whenever I type a dot to dereference something, they get confused and either throw up nothing, or suggestions of seemingly random things. Code-completion peaked in the frickin’ 2000s.
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It’s kind of incredible that we once coded software with the assumption that you’d BYO database. I guess this was back when enterprises bought a single DB to run the whole company. And also before Docker came about and testing with something prod ready became easy. I’m glad those days are behind us.
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It doesn’t matter that Samsung and Google and a bunch of Chinese companies have made foldable Android phones for a decade. Almost nobody cares. The Duo is a fucking iPhone. That makes people care.
He’s not wrong. Foldables never got mentioned at work before last week, when everyone started talking about the Duo and the new version of iOS. I do wonder if sales will be a little slow, as those talking about it stopped short of saying they’ll buy one. But I feel Apple’s got a real winner on it’s hands here.
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I’m kind of excited to hear that Apple might enter the server space again. Their hardware is decent, but hardly data centre calibre. But it could also lead to a MacOS that assumes headless workloads without a human operator being present. In other words: less nuisance OS permission prompts.
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A bunch of bloomin’ bottlebrush. This was for the cockatiels.
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Comparing the “default” aesthetics the agents use for a vibe-coded Golang Wails GUI app is quite interesting. Claude seems to be a real minimalist here: you get the developer UI and that’s it. GPT seems to forget it’s building a GUI app, and adds unnecessary page banners everywhere.
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And no, I don’t consider YAML a good syntax for imperative DSLs. It kills me that this config language has become the de-facto standard for all CI/CD runners worldwide. We couldn’t come up with anything better?
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In principal the idea of Temporal is sound: workflows written in a “real” coding language. But there are so many hidden pitfalls and unwritten rules that are not expressible in the language that I wonder if it’s actually an improvement. Wouldn’t a DSL that abstracts this all out for you be better?
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New Web Tool: Queued Pastes
A small utility to queue up a block of text that is to be copied one line at a time. Continue reading →
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Someone at work recommended the terminal multiplexer Heardr. I’ve been trying it this evening and it’s not bad. Having a muxer with mouse controls is surprisingly useful. I just need to get over using Ctrl+B as the prefix key (I’m use to Screen’s Ctrl+A).
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🔗 MacRumors: Apple's Weirdest iTunes Walk-Back Turns 12 Today
On September 9, 2014, at Apple’s iPhone 6 event, Tim Cook revealed that “Songs of Innocence” would be given to every iTunes customer for nothing. The album was directly linked to accounts, and devices set to “download automatically” got it without asking. Complaints quickly followed.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but earlier this year someone made a reference to a company’s (not Apple) faux pas as so-and-so’s “Songs of Innocents” event. Clearly an event that has lived on in infamy.
Via: Lex on Tech
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I consider myself lucky I stayed away from all these short-form video platforms like TikTok and Reels.
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It’s kinda strange seeing corellas in the middle of the city, in this case on the roof of Flinders St. Station. Not that it’s unusual, but that it happens at all.
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Also, just for the hell of it, I had a go at recreating the ’90s theme for the ABC Education for Schools segment in Logic Pro. This is what I came up with:
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The 90's Intro And Bumpers of the ABC Education Segment
Revisiting the intro and bumpers of the ABC Education segment that was broadcasted on weekday mornings. Continue reading →
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Authentication needs to be secure, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. The complications arise not from the technology, but from the business requirements. Think reporting lines, division, etc. Layer on acquisitions that don’t fully migrate systems and you’re left with a very sad layer cake.
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Went to a cafe and ordered a pulled pork toastie. It came with pear, which was a little surprising. What’s even more surprising is that it worked. The toastie was good. It helped that the pear wasn’t super sweet.
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Ivy’s fallen asleep on my arm. She prefers to tuck her beak into her left wing when she’s perched like this. I can’t recall seeing her use her right. Wonder if that’s just her preferred way to sleep.
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📗 Vibelog
UCL Build
A bit of fun using Astra to make a Make-clone that uses UCL as the receipt syntax. Continue reading →
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On Autosave In Desktop Apps
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🔗 Unsung: Fingers don’t look around:
You might press ⌘S twice in a row. Or after an undo to an already saved state. […] Or after just sitting down to an open document that’s already saved. […] The beautiful raw power of ⌘S as a citizen of motor memory is that it’s automatic, mindless, habitual.
That’s why ⌘S here needs to be both deterministic and idempotent – if there is nothing to save, don’t let it fall back to the browser, don’t show an error message, don’t beep at the user. Just ignore the keystroke altogether.
Wiki software makers, please take note.
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Finished work for the day so going for a walk. It’s an exceptionally nice day today. Although, the Box Hill skyline was a little hazy.
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I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but it’s still quite baffling to see how undercooked MacOS Settings are. And it’s the basic things, like clicking on the label to select what looks like a text field, or all that unnecessary whitespace to the left of the radio button. It’s just so amateur.
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One Hit Wonder #3 — got it in one (17 seconds, 1,283 points)
🟨🟨🟨🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩Ties me at rank 16, which I’m pretty happy with.
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Ooh, the iPhone Duo looks pretty remarkable. It’s not for me (should screens fold? 😬) but those I know that have foldables love them so it’s definitely for someone. And kudos to Apple for doing something different, and one might say, slightly risky.
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📘 Devlog
Dequoter - Plugins
Trying out, and documenting some details of, UCL plugins in Dequoter. Continue reading →
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Oof! The bad night sleep I had caught up with me at work this afternoon. Good thing today was busy. Not sure I would’ve made it if it had been quiet. 😴
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Saw someone paste a JSON string with a JSON object into ChatGPT today, sans instructions. The model return an unescaped, pretty-printed version of that JSON object. I wonder how he managed to do that. I tried it myself, and the model simply asked me what I wanted to do with this string.
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📘 Devlog
UCL - Bytes Slices
Adding support for byte slices to UCL to deal with hashing algorithms and encoding things to Base64. Continue reading →
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Interesting to gauge how Northern Hemisphere heavy my media diet currently is. Things have been slow for a little while. Then September rolls around and bam! Suddenly everyone’s found the publish button again. 😄
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I read Nate’s post about writing a short story in five sentences (via Robb Knight) and I thought about giving it a try. Here’s my attempt, which doesn’t have a title. It isn’t exactly five sentences either, although I tried to keep it as close to the beats recommended by Nate:
The hastily constructed campfire illuminated Jacob bemused face as he watched Mark rummages through his rucksack with increasing desperation.
“You may have thought that this unscheduled delay here would help you,” Mark snapped. “But just you wait. By morning I would’ve found my map, we’d be out of this forest, and you’ll be back in custody by noon.”
Jacob smiled; and with a calmness that only a serial killer coulds muster, said to Mark, “What good would it do you, a man with your years of experience behind a desk? Without me, you’d have less chance than an ember in snow surviving up here. That map was more useful to me in the end.”
“What are you talking about,” Mark retorted. “Your only contribution to this camp was lighting the fire. How could the map help…”
He froze mid-sentence, realisation striking him of further speech. All he could do is look on at Jacob’s sinister grin as the light of crackling fire began to fade.
And fin. I must admit this took me a while, almost an hour. Much of it was trying to come up with interesting problems and motivations that could last more than a sentence. But hey, it’s something different this evening.
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🔗 Simon Willison: There’s No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
I have nothing really to add to this other than yeah, this has been my experience with rewrites too. Legacy systems die hard.
I’m a little nervous actually, as my team’s currently going through something similar at the moment. And the hallmarks of it ending like this are present.
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I wonder, in lieu of code reviews, we start doing more “spec reviews,” where the (human) developer would write up their proposed changes before coding them. I’m less concerned about the specifics of a code change over knowing whether the dev knows why we’re making the changes in the first place, and whether their approach is the right one. Once reviewed, they’re free to call on the agents to make the change.
It’s no secret that I dislike code reviews, and the sooner we can be rid of them, the better. But I think some means of making sure a developer demonstrates understanding the problem is still important. Over the last month I’ve had decent success in making sure I write down something, anything, before I actually start a coding task. It could be a Jira ticket or an Obsidian note. Lately it’s been a Slack Canvas that I can get others to review, just to make sure the problem is clear to myself and others. Given my role as a senior dev, this is not unexpected. But it isn’t traditionally expected of juniors. Maybe it’s time for that to change.
