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First encounters with GitHub (and Substack)
All these new Substack newsletters that I’m seeing reminds me of my first encounter with GitHub. Back in 2009, I was checking out the source code of an open-source library we were using. Clicking on the link to the source bought me to this strange, new code-hosting service that I’ve never seen before. As someone who was use to the heaviness that was SourceForge, or the boring uniformity that was Google Code, the experience felt very minimal and slightly unintuitive. Continue reading →
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A Quick Review of the Year
Here are a few words about the year gone by, and what I’m hoping to focus on the year ahead. It’s not a full “year in review” type post, although there’s a bit of that, and there’s no dramatic insight or anything of that nature. It’s more of a chance for reflection, plus a bit of a document for future me on what the year was like. Personally, as difficult as this past year was, I wouldn’t necessarily say 2020 was a bad year. Continue reading →
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Vivaldi - My Recommended Alternative to Chrome
I’m seeing a few people on Micro.blog post about how Chrome Is Bad. Instead of replying to each one with my recommendations, I figured it would be better just to post my story here. I became unhappy with Chrome about two years ago. I can’t remember exactly why, but I know it was because Google was doing something that I found distasteful. I was also getting concerned about how much data I was making available to Google in general. Continue reading →
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Revisiting the decision to build a CMS
It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my decision to write a CMS for a blog that I was planning. I figured it might be time for an update. In short, and for the second time this year, I’ve come to the conclusion that maintaining a CMS is not a good use of my time. The largest issue was the amount of effort that would have been needed in order to work on the things that don’t relate to content, such as styling. Continue reading →
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A Brief Look at Stimulus
Over the last several months, I’ve been doing a bit of development using Buffalo, which is a rapid web development framework in Go, similar to Ruby on Rails. Like Ruby on Rails, the front-end layer is very simple: server-side rendered HTML with a bit of jQuery augmenting the otherwise static web-pages. After a bit of time, I wanted to add a bit of dynamic flare to the frontend, like automatically fetch and update elements on the page. Continue reading →
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Some uninformed thoughts about Salesforce acquiring Slack
John Gruber raised an interesting point about the future of Slack after being purchased by Salesforce: First, my take presupposes that the point of Slack is to be a genuinely good service and experience. […] To succeed by appealing to people who care about quality. Slack, as a public company, has been under immense pressure to do whatever it takes to make its stock price go up in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Teams. Continue reading →
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Why I'm Considering Building A Blogging CMS
I’m planning to start a new blog about Go development and one of the things that I’m currently torn on is how to host it. The choice look to be either using a service like blot.im or micro.blog or some other hosting service, using a static site generation tool like Hugo, or building my own CMS for it. I know that one of the things people tell you about blogging is that building your CMS is not worth your time: I myself even described it as “second cardinal sin of programming” on my first post to micro. Continue reading →
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An anecdote regarding the removal of iSH from the App Store
Around April this year, my old Android Nexus 9 tablet was becoming unusable due to it’s age and I was considering which tablet to move to next. I have been a user of Android tablets since the Nexus 7 and I have been quite happy with them (yes, we do exist). However, it was becoming clear that Google’s was no longer interested in maintaining first-party support for Android on a tablet, and none of the other brands that were available were very inspiring. Continue reading →
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Tracking Down a Lost Album
Here’s a short story about my endeavours to find an album that seems to have disappeared from the face of the internet. I’m a bit of a sucker for original sound tracks, particularly instrumental ones. One that I remember being very good is the music from The Private Life of Plants, a documentary series from David Attenborough made in the mid 1990s. It was one of those sound tracks that occasionally popped into my mind, particularly when looking at lovely autumn leaves or other scenes from the show. Continue reading →
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Offical support for file embedding coming to Go
I’m excited to see, via Golang Weekly, that the official support for embedding static files in Go is being realised, with the final commit merged to the core a couple of days ago. This, along with the new file-system abstraction, will mean that it will be much easier to embed files in Go applications, and make use of them within the application itself. One of the features I like about coding is Go is that the build artefacts are statically linked executables that can be distributed without any additional dependencies. Continue reading →
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Advice to those working with annotations in Preview
For those of you using Preview in macOS for viewing an annotated PDF, if you need to move or delete the annotations in order to select the text, be sure to undo your changes prior to closing Preview. Otherwise your changes will be saved without asking you first.1 This just happened to me. I have a PDF annotated with edits made with the iPad pencil and I wanted to copy the actual text. Continue reading →
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Doughnut Day 2020
Good day today. From a high of 725 Covid-19 cases in August 25, Victoria has just had 24 hours of zero new cases and zero deaths. This is during a period of extensive testing in the north of the metropolitan, during a testing blitz in an attempt to contain an outbreak. Labs have been processing tests late into the night, with not a single one so far coming back positive. Continue reading →
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Reflections On Writing On The Web
I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole about writing and publishing online yesterday after reading this article from Preetam Nath and this article from James Clear. I’ve been thinking about creating and publishing on the web for a little while now, which is probably why these two articles resonated with me. These articles highlight the importance of creating and publishing regardless of what the topic is. There have been a few things that I’ve been wanting to share but I haven’t done so, probably because I worry about what other people think. Continue reading →
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Unit Tests and Verifying Mocks
I’m working with a unit test that uses mocks in which every method in the mock is verified after the method under test is called, even if it is not relevant to the test. Furthermore, the tear down method verifies that every dependent services has no more interactions, which means that removing a verification that is not relevant to the specific test case will cause the test to fail. Please do not do this. Continue reading →
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A Database Client Wishlist
I’ve recently started a new job so I’ve been spending a bit of time trying to become familiar with how the relational databases are structured. Usually when I’m doing any database work, I tend to use the CLI clients like mysql or pg_sql. I tend to prefer them, not only as they’re usually easy to use via SSH, but the REPL is a nice interaction model when querying data: you type a query, and the results appear directly below it. Continue reading →
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Sharing links to private podcast episodes
There have been times when I’ve wanted to share a link to an episode of a podcast that I pay for, but I’m hesitant to do so as the feed is private and unique to my account. The episode is also available in the public feed, but has been trimmed as an incentive for listeners to pay for the show. I can always find the episode in the public feed and share that, but I’m wondering if there’s a better way to handle this. Continue reading →
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Let's hold the line, Melbourne. We've got this.
Today is a good day. Melbourne’s 14 day daily Covid-19 case average is now 29.4, which is beyond the 30 to 50 band required to move to the next stage of reopening. Seeing the fruits of our collective sacrifice, bringing the daily case numbers from a peak of around 740 in August down to the 11 we saw on Monday, makes me proud to be a Melburnian. As much as I like for things to reopen sooner than planned, I think we should hold the line for as long as we possibly can. Continue reading →
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Getting screen capture working in Vivaldi on Fedora 32
Moving from a Mac Pro back to Linux for work, I’ve come to appreciate how well things just work out of the box in macOS. Things like Web RTC display capture, which is used for sharing the screen in browser-based video conferencing sites (and I think also in Slack, since it’s using Electron and, thus, the Blink rendering engine), work flawlessly in macOS, but proved to be a bit of trouble within Linux. Continue reading →
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First Foray Into Home Automation
After recently changing jobs, I’ve received a brand new Lenovo work laptop. As good as the laptop is, and it’s OK for a work laptop, it has one annoying feature. Whenever the laptop is plugged in and powered, there is a bright white LED that is always illuminated. Because I’m still working from home — and it is likely that after the pandemic I will be working from home at least a few days a week — and my desk is in my bedroom, having this white LED is no good for my sleep. Continue reading →
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On Ordered Lists in Markdown
One of the things I like about Markdown as a form of writing online, is that ordered lists can simply begin with the prefix 1., and there is no need to update the leading number in the subsequent items. To produce the following list: First Second Third One only needs to write: 1. First 1. Second 1. Third or: 1. First 2. Second 3. Third or even: 1. First 3. Second 2. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →