Long Form Posts

September 23, 2020 9:17am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

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. The potential prizes for doing so – the crushing of the virus, the ability to travel interstate again, the chance to eat at restaurants without fear of infection, the chance for a normalish Christmas and summer – are within reach. I know that’s easy for me to say as someone who has the ability to work from home, and I completely recognise those of us suffering right now being unable to work at all. But just like the darkest hour is before the dawn, so too will the sweet taste of victory and accomplishment be when we finally crush this virus and meet the rest of the country where they are. To rush this, to reopen too early, and see our effort thrown away would be upsetting.

September 17, 2020 10:05am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

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.

September 15, 2020 9:04am

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Leon Mika

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.

September 1, 2020 3:51pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

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:

1. First
2. Second
3. 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. Third

The one downside to this approach, unfortunately, is that there is no nice way to specify what the first ordinal should be. If I were to use 3. as the prefix of the first item, the generated ordered list will always begin at 1.

August 26, 2020 8:49am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

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.

July 21, 2020 10:04am

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Leon Mika

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.

July 14, 2020 8:43am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

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.

July 12, 2020 8:57am

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Leon Mika

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.

June 26, 2020 9:56am

Leon Mika

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 →

June 25, 2020 11:30am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

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.

Continue reading →

June 25, 2020 11:30am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

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:

March 22, 2020 11:00am

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Leon Mika

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.

February 29, 2020 9:00am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

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.

December 7, 2019 9:50pm

Leon Mika

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.

October 28, 2019 8:48pm

Leon Mika

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.