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Leon Mika

Software Developer and occasional writer of music. Based in Melbourne, Australia.

Long Form Posts

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    If Google does this to the Pixel 4, just what do they expect for the Pixel 5?

    What is Google doing cancelling the Pixel 4 after 6 months? They spend $1.1 billion buying the HTC mobile division and state that they plan to start making their own mobile chips, giving the impression that they are serious about producing decent, flagship hardware for Android. And then go ahead with discontiuning their current flagship phone after 6 months?

    Look, I know from a purely economical perspective, the Pixel line makes little sense. Android is not iOS. They don’t hold the prestigious high-end of the market, with the margins that come from it. But that’s not Google’s business. They’re an advertising company first, and a search company second. So I can understanding that Android to them is more of a cost centre; the price of keeping access to their services open to mobile users.

    But I had the impression that they also recognised that there exists a market of Android users that appreciate good quality hardware and decent, stock-standard software stack with no shovelware, and are willing to pay a premium for it. It might not be a big market, that’s true. But if they’re serious about keeping Android around and want to keep these customers (you know, the one’s with disposable income that advertisers love), they should continue to be a player in it. I guess it’s possible that they simply offload this to another device manufacturer like Nokia, but then they’re giving up any leverage of ensuring good quality hardware which will attract these buyers.

    As a Pixel owner myself, this move really concerns me. It’s getting increasingly harder to recommend Pixel phones to anyone, and I’m starting to wonder whether it’s time to consider something else.

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    On Suppression vs. Elimination

    It was around the beginning of June, when the number of new Covid-19 cases for Victoria were around 10-20 a day, that there was a general feeling that suppression was working and that it was time to begin opening up. I will admit I took advantage of the looser restrictions, but I always wondered whether it would be better to remain closed for a little while longer and go for elimination. This was not the official strategy though: we have testing and tracing up and running and as long as we know where the virus is, we can continue to roll-back restrictions and achieve some semblance of normalcy.

    Fast-forward to today and the daily number of cases is higher than what it was back in March, Melbourne is back under Stage 3 restrictions and I’m shopping on-line for masks.

    It seems obvious to me that suppression as a strategy may not be enough. We may eventually (hopefully) get the virus tamped down once more, but it’s still out there and our efforts to keep it at bay are only as strong as our weakest link.

    I think it’s time we go for elimination. It won’t be easy, but there are three reasons why I reckon it’s worth a shot:

    • Most of the other states in the country have effectively achieved eliminated. Some of them have gone weeks without any new cases, and are cautiously in the process of opening up once again. However, this can only hold as long as the state borders remain close to Victorians (and possibly soon to the New South Welsh) and I don’t see these states willing throwing away their hard won achievement just because the official strategy is suppression. If Victoria (and NSW) go for elimination, we can meet the other states where they are, making it a no-brainer to open up interstate travel once again, not to mention the trans-Tasman bubble with New Zealand.
    • It seems more economically stable over the long term. Economic activity is tied to confidence: people will only go out and spend money if they believe it’s safe to do so. Even when restrictions are rolled-back, I’m doubtful people will be quick to flock to cafes and gyms if there’s a risk of another wave. Compare this with elimination: evidence from New Zealand shows that consumer spending is pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, despite going harder during the initial lock-down.
    • It may be a way to win back the public’s confidence in the government. The Victorian government has taken a hit in the polls due to the mistakes that caused the current round of lock-downs. I can see rallying the public around the goal of elimination a way to win them back. You can even use the current situation as a unique opportunity to achieve this, maybe by saying, “given that we’re already going through another round of lock-downs, let’s go for broke and remain locked down until we’ve eliminated this virus once and for all.” Now you have a something that people can work towards, and the feeling that their current sacrifice is not for nothing if (when?) another wave comes through.

    I’m aware that this a post written by someone who is in a position of relative privilege. I haven’t lost my job, and I remain relatively healthy and financially secure. I also know that it will be expensive and will cause a fair bit more suffering for those with small businesses that will need to shut their doors. So I recognised that I don’t have all the facts, and this may not be feasible at all. But I also question the feasibility of maintaining a long-term suppression strategy until treatments or a vaccine become available: this is a tricky virus to handle.

    In the end, I guess I’m just a bit disappointed by the lack of abition in attempting this as a goal. It seems advantageous, especially now, to seize the moment and go for making our second round of lock-downs our last.

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    Remarks on Go's Error Handling using Facebook's SDK Crashes As a Framing Device

    There are new reports of Facebook’s SDK crashing apps again due to server changes. The post above links to Bugsnag article which explores the underlying cause: that’s worth a read.

    I’m going to throw a shout-out to Go’s approach to error handling here. I’m not saying that this shows the superiority of Go over Objective C: these sorts of things can happen in any language. The difference I want to highlight is that Go treats error handling as part of the standard flow of the language, rather than the exceptional flow. This forces you to think about error conditions when you’re making calls to code that can fail.

    This does result in some annoying code of the form:

    result, err := doOperation()
if err != nil {
    return nil, err
}

result2, err := doSecondOperation(result)
if err != nil {
    return nil, err
}

// and so on

    and there’s nothing stopping your from completely ignoring the error.

    But there’s no way to call these two functions without dealing with the error in some way. That is, there’s no way to simply write doSecondOperation(doOperation()): you’re given an error and you have to do something with it. So you might as well handle it gracefully.

    P.S. I should probably state that I know very little about Objective C. I do know that a fair number of APIs in AppKit and UIKit make use of completion handlers which can provide an error value, although to me it seems a littler easier to ignore it vs. deailing with the error values in Go. I also know that Swift makes improvements here, forcing you to prefix calls that can fail with the try keyword. Again, this is not to rag on Objective C; rather it’s a comment on the idioms of error handling in Go and how these sort of events could prevent the app from crashing.

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    Signed Up To micro.blog

    I’ve signed up with micro.blog in an attempt to post to the blog more frequently than I have been. The last post I had on my existing blog was in March, and it felt to me like it was starting to become a bit negelected. I think the main reason for the delay is that I feel the need to publish long form articles, which involves a lot of work to write, review, etc. I will try to continue to do that, but I also want to start posting shorter articles more often.

    Interesting story: I had this idea for a while, since the start of June. Back then my blog was a simple Hugo site managed in Git, and hosted within Google Cloud’s object store. I had a few posts there — these have been migrated to this site — and I also had a few ideas for posts in the pipeline. I knew I wanted to write more often, but I was starting to get the sense of “overhead” involved in creating new posts. Writing doesn’t come naturally to me, and I think one of the barriers of posting was the amount of non-writing involved in doing so, things like checking out the latest copy, writing it, pushing the branch holding the draft, reviewing the PR (not that there was much to review), merging it, checking out master and runing “make” to generate and deploy it. Each step is not hard in itself, I do it many times a day at work. But it’s just more overhead making the actual act of posting just a little bit harder, and I was begining to realise that if I wanted to write more often, I needed a way to do so effortlessly.

    So I committed the second cardinal sin of programming and spent a few weeks making my own CMS (I was also close to committing the first cardinal sin of programming — making my own text editer — much earlier in my programming life, but luckly lost intrested after starting). The aim was to setup a service and workflow that would make it easier to post smaller articles, more often, and from any machine that I was currently on. I also got swepted away with hearing others discuss the techonologies of their own blogging engines, plus their approach to “owning the entire stack” as it was. Plus, I cannot resist starting a new project, epecially now when it’s difficult doing things outside or with other people around.

    However, as I got closer to “launch”, I was beginning to consider the amount of work involved in maintaining it and extending it to suppot things I want further down the line, things like extra pages, etc. This is a classic problem of mine. I get a sense of enthusiasm as I see the core features come togeather… and then I think about what work I need to do to support afterwards, and I completely loose interest. The project then begins to deterorate as additional hacks are added to support these things, and it just becomes less maintainable and fun to work on over time.

    It also serves as a great distraction: what better way to avoid writing, than to work on an application that would reduce the barriers that inhibit me to write.

    So, I’m doing the smart thing: I’ve stopped working on it and have moved to micro.blog. Being a subscriber to Martin Reece’s feed, I see the amount of effort and care he puts into this platform, something that I don’t see myself doing for my own CMS. I can only hope this would result in me publishing posts more frequently, we’ll see. But now I have no more excuses to actually write.

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    Features From Android In iOS 14, and The Enthusiasm Gap

    John Gruber on Daring Fireball, commenting on an article about features in iOS 14 that Android had first:

    Do you get the sense that Google, company-wide, is all that interested in Android? I don’t. Both as the steward of the software platform and as the maker of Pixel hardware, it seems like Google is losing interest in Android. Flagship Android hardware makers sure are interested in Android, but they can’t move the Android developer ecosystem — only Google can.

    Apple, institutionally, is as attentive to the iPhone and iOS as it has ever been. I think Google, institutionally, is bored with Android.

    As an Android user, and occasional dabbler in Android app development, this concerns me if it is true. I doubt Google will completely give up on Android, but given the recent shutdowns of Googles services over the years, it’s clear that there are very few things Google is “married” to in the long term.

    With Android’s success and it’s raison d’être, one could argue that Google has room to take a more relaxed attitude towards advancing Android as a platform, so long as cheap phones are still being bought and people are still using them. But I certantly hope that they do not completely abandon it.

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    YouTube Music and Uploaded Music Libraries

    Ron Amado, from Ars Technica:

    YouTube Music is really only for The Music Renter—someone who wants to pay $10 per month, every month, forever, for “Music Premium.” This fee is to buy a monthly streaming license for music you do not own, and I’d imagine a good portion of it goes to music companies. When you don’t pay this rental fee, YouTube Music feels like a demo app.

    I prefer to own my music, and I own a lot of independent music that wouldn’t be covered under this major-record-label-streaming-license anyway, so I have no interest in this service. The problem is YouTube Music also locks regular music-playback features behind this monthly rental fee, even for music you’ve uploaded to the service. The biggest offense is that you can’t use Google Cast without paying the rental fee, but when it’s music that I own and a speaker that I own, that’s really not OK. Google Music did not do this.

    These last couple of weeks I’ve actually been working on a personal music app that will playback music uploaded to S3. It was mainly for listening to music that I composed myself, although being able to listen to music that I’ve purchased and ripped to MP3 was a key motivating factor here as well. I was aware that such services existed so I occasionally wondered if my time could be better spent doing something else. Now, I feel like I’ve made the right choice here.

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    On Go’s Type Parameters Proposal

    The developers of Go have release a new draft proposal for type parameters. The biggest change is the replacing the concept of constraints, which complicated the proposal somewhat, and replaced it with interfaces to express the same thing. You can read the proposal here latest proposal here.

    I think they’re starting to reach a great balance between what currently exists in the language, and the features required to make a useful type parameter system. The use of interfaces to constrain the type, that is declare the operators that a type must implement in order to be used as a type parameter for a function or struct, makes total sense. It also makes moving to type parameters in some areas of the standard library trivial. For example, the sort.Sort function prototype:

    func Sort(data Interface)

    can simply be written as:

    func Sort(type T Interface)(data T)

    I do have some minor concerns though. The biggest one is the use of interfaces to express constraints related to operators, which are expressed as type lists. I think listing the types that a particular type parameter can instantiate makes sense. It dramatically simplifies the process of expressing a constraint based on the operators a particular type supports. However, using the concept of interfaces for this purpose seems a little strange, especially so when these interfaces cannot be used in areas other than type constraints. To be fair, it seems like they recognise this, and I’m suspecting that in practice these interfaces will be defined in a package that can simply be used, thereby not requiring us to deal with them directly unless we need to.

    But all in all, this looks promising. It is starting to feel like the design is coming together, with the rough edges starting to be smoothed out. I appreciate the level of careful consideration the core Go developers are exhibiting in this process. This is after all a large change to the language, and they only have one real chance at this. Sure we have to wait for it, but especially in language design, mistakes are forever.

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    Don't Get it Now

    It’s scary times at the moment. The Corona Virus (SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19) is raging through Europe at this moment, with hundreds of people dying in Italy, Spain and France and most of the those countries, along with the US, in lock-down. The hospital system is currently not equipped to be able to handle the peak number of patients that will require intensive care: doctors from Italy, France and New York are telling stories about how they have to choose who lives and dies, and I’m fearful that we may start hearing stories like that here. There is currently no cure, nor no treatment. There’s been models indicating that even if we take steps to suppress the virus now, there will be continuous surges in outbreaks until a vaccine is ready in 12 to 18 months, suggesting that we may need to be in a state of lock-down or at the very least, rigid social distancing until August 2021 at the latest. The WHO reckons that a majority of the worlds population will get infected over the next year.

    I’m not an doctor, nor an etymologist. I cannot begin to suggest what we should do as a society. But I’m going to give a few thoughts as to how I plan to weather this storm.

    I think at this current stage, our enemy, along with the virus, is time. I hope I don’t have to tell you that the virus is moving through the worlds population now, even as we speak. But humanity is not standing still either:

    So my mantra for the next few months is “don’t get it now.” Wait to get infected for as long as you can. The ideal case is not to catch it at all, but if we’re destine to get infected, best to get in infected later, when some of the points above have been addressed, instead of sooner when they have not. This will obviously mean sacrificing things like going to the gym, going out for coffee, or seeing friends and family. But I believe that this is a price worth paying, especially if the alternative is loosing someone you love, or potentially your own life.

    So that’s my current strategy at this time. I don’t know if it will work, and as things develop it may need refining. But after thinking about this for the previous few weeks, it’s the best strategy I can think of. And I think it will help me get through this.

    P.S. A lot of my thoughts on this came from reading this article by Tomas Pueyo. He’s obviously more knowledgeable about how we should act on this as a whole. It is worth your time reading this.

    P.P.S. I spoke quite abstractly about the health system, but it’s important to remember that these systems are made up of people: doctors, nurses and paramedics on the front line, along with the researchers, manufacturers and logistics who support them. At this time, they are giving their all, and then some, to help us through this crisis. Once this is over, I think we owe every single one of these individuals a beer.

    Update On 4th Dec 2022: Almost three years since writing this post, I tested positive for Covid-19 for the first time. My symptoms were that of a pretty rough cold which, given what the possibilities could have been when I wrote this post, meant that I weathered the disease pretty well. I finally caught it at a time when vaccines and treatments were wildly available and I was up to date with my inoculations. So all in all, I’m glad the whole “don’t get it now” worked in my favour.

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    Reflections On Virus Scanners on Windows

    I was listening to Episode 277 of The Talk Show in which John Gruber was discussing virus scanners on Apple Macs with John Moltz. The discussion turned briefly to the state of virus scanners on Windows, and how invasive these commercial scanners were compared to Windows Defender provided by Microsoft.

    Hearing this discussion brought memories of my experience with virus scanners back in the days of Windows XP and earlier. There was no Microsoft Defender back then so we had to have a license for one of the commercial scanners that were sold to home users at the time, such as Norton AntiVirus. Given how insecure Windows was back then, it was one of the first things we had to put on a fresh install of Windows. And these things certainly slowed Windows down. But we recognised that it was necessary and after a couple of weeks, we eventually got use to it.

    However, after setting up a new install, there was this brief period of time when we got to experience Windows without a virus scanner. And the difference in the user experience was significant. The boot processed was fast, the UI snappy, and the applications quick to launch. In fact it was so good, it felt strange and slightly uneasy, as the knowledge that there was no virus scanner protecting the system was evident. Only after the virus scanner was installed, with the resulting hit in performance, did it fell safe to use Windows again. It was not until I listened to this episode that I realised how perverted this feeling is.

    I cannot imagine how it must feel for those Microsoft developers who worked hard on providing a user experience that was responsive only to see it slowed down on almost every machine by a virus scanner. I’m sure they knew that, due to the prevalence of malware for Windows back then, it was necessary. Still, I could not imagine that they would have been thrilled about it.

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    New Home of Steve Yegge's Rant About Google Services

    I’ve always enjoyed this rant from Steve Yegge about how Google differed from Amazon in how they develop their services. Not sure if it’s applicable now but it was quite interesting to hear how the two companies differed in their approach in building and releasing products. After hearing that Google+ was being shutdown, I wondered what would happen with the rant, and whether it would be lost to time. It was fortunate that someone saved it.

    For those of you who haven’t read any of Steve’s other blogposts, please checkout his current blog, plus several of his other Drunken Blog Rants. They are well worth your time.

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    Five Common Data Stores and When to Use Them

    Very interesting post on the Shopify Engineering Blog on the difference between 5 types of data-stores available to developers, and under what circumstances they should be used.

    I find it tricky to decide on the best technology for storing data for a particular project. I guess the important thing to keep in mind is to try and figure out as best you can how the data is going to be used (i.e. queried). If you know that, the decision should be easy once you know what’s out there, and this blog post certainly helps in this regard. If you don’t, I guess the next best thing is to try to find the option that will give you the most flexibility with hopefully not too much loss in performance.

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