Leon Mika Profile Photo

Leon Mika

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

Long Form Posts

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    Froth and Bubble

    Woke up in the early morning with this poem in my head:

    In this world of froth and bubble,
    Two things stand like stone;
    Kindness in other peoples’ trouble,
    Courage in your own.

    I first read this in a young adults novel some good 25 years ago, and over the years it’s come back to me several times. I guess you can say it resonates.

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    Hammers, Nails, and Hugo

    Going through my hammer and nail phase with Hugo. Trying it out on my personal knowledge base to see if it could replace the tool I wrote to generate the site from a set of Markdown files.

    Hey, if you were to squint, that tool kinda looks like a pale imitation of Hugo. How about that.

    Such as it is with things like this. I first tried out Hugo a few years ago and did the bare minimum to get a few sites off the ground. Then I coasted on that knowledge for a while, using Hugo’s basic features, and doing only cursory explorations of the more advance stuff like layouts, short-codes, and taxonomies. When it came to the personal knowledge base, I knew in principal that I could use Hugo, but since I didn’t have a lot of experience in these advanced features, I decided to just hack this tool up.

    I guess that occasional explorations worked eventually, since I came to a point where everything “click” together. That happened last Saturday as I was trying out the largest amount layout changes I’ve attempted so far. And now, I can see how Hugo can be used several other things as well.1

    If I had all this knowledge before, I probably wouldn’t have hacked together that static site generation tool. I probably would have made it work with Hugo, seeing that they are so similar.

    Now I’m not going to beat myself up too badly over this. One characteristic I’ve noticed about myself is the need to go from an idea to something that works as quickly as I possibly can. If I don’t, the idea will die on the vine (I’ve lost many draft blog posts this way). I guess the trick is trying to balance that against that other characteristic I have, which is rushing to a solution using the knowledge I already have, before spending a bit of time looking at the alternatives.

    Hey, if you were to squint, the cognitive bias of that characteristic might the same one that I’m worthing through now. How about that.

    P.S. This is the second time in three days that I work up at 5 AM with the need to do something. This doesn’t normally happen to me, and I’m not sure how keen I am for this to become a habit, but I guess sometimes you just gotta feed that beast.

    1. One other thing favouring Hugo here was that I was facing some largish changes to this hacked up tool which I wasn’t too keen on doing. And yeah, these are changes I can theoretically do using Hugo layouts. ↩︎

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    On Posting Here Daily

    I sometimes struggle with the idea of trying to post here at least once a day. While perusing my archive I find days where my posts are cringeworthy or just not good, and part of me wonders whether it’s better to wait for a post to meet a certain level of quality before publishing it.

    I have also seen this argument from other bloggers as well. They post the rules they have that include things like “it should start a conversation” or it should be “distinctive”. I remember reading tweets from one who shuns the idea of posting on a schedule in favour of only publishing something that’s “good”. From looking at their site, there’s probably only a single new post every two years on average1.

    But reflecting on it now, I don’t think this works for me. Maybe it could if I was a journalist or a professional writer, but for me and this blog, I don’t see how holding back could help.

    For one thing, it will mean a lot less posts. Of course the response to this is that’s the whole point: “quality over quantity” after all. But I think if I did this, the post frequency will probably drop to the point where I’d be in danger of abandoning this blog together. I tried the minimum-level-of-quality approach when I first started this blog, and I think I got a total of 5 or 6 posts in the first 8 months. And they weren’t good posts anyway: the minimum level of quality I was shooting for was just getting something out there at all.

    That’s the reason why I joined Micro.blog2: writing smaller things more often. If I were to abandon this, I’d just be falling into old habits.

    And if that isn’t enough, there are plenty of anecdotes in how quantity leads to quality. You can spend a day, week or month trying to come up with the perfect blog post and not publishing anything at all, or publishing something that is mediocre at best. Publishing regularly forces you to practice: sure what you write today may not be considered “good”, but you’d be force to write it, publish it, and judge it with a critical eye. That can only force you to write better, even if the improvements are small like checking your spelling, or reading it once through before publishing. I can tell by personal experience that this practice has helped me.

    And let’s not even discuss the feeling of being accountable from publishing frequently. You know how often I read the blog of that person I mentioned earlier? Never. Why would I if I know there won’t be any new content for a year? When they do post something, it’s usually tens of thousands of words that feels so heavy to read. I set it aside for “later”, which usually means never.

    The blogs I do read regularly? The ones that post daily, or weekly, or even a few times a month, with updates that range from a few sentences to several paragraphs in length. And the quality of the writing or the topic really doesn’t matter to me. It was good just to get an update on what they’re thinking.

    And if this piece hasn’t convinced me yet, I’ll end it this way. If you want to keep a record of your days, or improve the clarity of your thinking, you’ll need to write. There aren’t many ways around that. And if you want to improve you’re writing, you need to practice. And to keep you honest, you need accountability, even if it’s just being accountable to yourself, and the best way to be accountable is to write in public.

    So that’s why I’m sticking with writing daily. If that’s not enough of a reason to maintain this goal, I don’t know what is.

    1. No, it’s not hypercritical.co. ↩︎

    2. Well that, and the social aspect. ↩︎

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    2022 Year In Review

    I’ll be honest: these year in review posts feel like going to the dentist. I generally hate doing them, but I know that it can be good exercise to reflect on the past year. I think one thing in my favour is that I’ve actually kept my blogging — and to a lesser extent, my journalling — up to date so I’ve actually got something that I can refer back to.

    So here’s a brief summary of how my year went.

    Career

    I’m a little bit disappointed on this front. It feels like I’m in a bit of a rut, and lately things have been a little boring. I have been promoted to a squad lead, which I guess is some form of progression. But just like other times I’ve been asked to lead a team, it’s not something I feel I’m good at or like doing. And yet, I really cannot see any progression here other than leading bigger teams (apart from changing jobs).

    That said, a few good things have happened. The project I was working on went live earlier in the year, and while it was a stressful couple of weeks (around Easter time as well), it was generally well received and no major issues came up. Plus, I got to learn a lot about Stripe, which has been on my goals list for a while.

    Family And Friends

    Sadly, there’ve been a couple of deaths this year. My grandfather passed away in March, after suffering from a spate of aliments like stomach cancer and emphysema. This was obviously quite sad, but I take solace in the feeling that he’s finally found some peace and relief from his suffering. The second was in February, when a friend of the family that my Mum was very close to passed away. Neither of these felt like they came too soon, which is some consolidation, but it was not a great start to the year.

    Oh, and in December, after 2 years and 9 months since March 2020, I got Covid-19 for the first time. I just glad that I was up to date with my vaccination: I couldn’t imagine how worse it could have been if I wasn’t.

    Projects

    One new project this year that I actually managed to release: Dynamo-Browse. I’m actually quite happy that this tool exists. It’s been on my wish-list for a couple of years and the moment came around to finally bite the bullet and work on it. I’m also quite please that I put some effort into the finish of it, so that I wouldn’t be completely embarrassed to share it with others.

    For a while I was working on another project called Broadtail which downloaded YouTube videos and made them available in my Plex server. This was before I got YouTube premium, and as soon as I did, this project fell to the wayside. It’s still around and I’ve modified it to download WWDC videos, so I may dust it off come next June.

    There were various other things here or there that aren’t really worth any comment. Again, I’m wondering if I’m focusing on too much and only half-finishing things.

    Travel

    Wow, after a few years of not travelling at all (this is not just because of the pandemic), there was a fair bit of it this year.

    If there was one destination that was top of list this year, it was Canberra. We went once as a family during Easter to see my sister’s house, and her new cockatiels. I’ve returned to Canberra three other times this year to look after them while she was overseas for work. The whole work from home revolution has made this possible, and I’m glad I was able to do this.

    The other location of note was travelling to Las Vegas to attend AWS re:Invent, and although I became ill during the trip, and was generally overwhelmed by the size of the conference, it was still good to be able to travel overseas again. Good thing I got my passport renewed.

    By the end of the year, the amount of travelling I was doing was exhausting. 2023 is shaping up to be a big travel year as well, and I’m a little concerned it may be too much for me. I guess we’ll see this time next year.

    Apps

    Not much on this front.

    This was the year I really got into Obsidian. I started the year trying to carry around a paper notebook, and although I used it a few times to write notes, it was a little uncomfortable in my pocket. Later in the year, I gave Obsidian another try and since they’ve now got mobile apps, it’s become my go-to place for all my notes.

    Another good app discovered this year was Numi. This has been very useful during sprint planning sessions, when I need to calculate velocity and projected capacity. If there is one feature I wish I could add to this, it’s the ability to turn off iCloud syncing. I don’t like seeing my work stuff showing up on my personal desktop.

    Writing And Online Presence

    I think this is the first year where I end up with less domains than I started with. There were a bunch that I bought in 2020 and 2021 which I never used for anything, and they were just sitting there, taunting me. It’s good to see them expire out.

    It’s also the year when I fell into a bit of a writing streak. This was a good one to have happened, and it drove me to write at least one blog post or journal entry every day. I like to continue this, and maybe refine it further by attempting to write at-least one blog post per day here.

    One thing that didn’t work for me was banking posts: writing posts days earlier in anticipation of days where I couldn’t think of anything to say. I got the idea from Seth Godin, and I tried it for a bit, but the Drafts section just piled up with half-finished posts that eventually grew too stale to publish. I guess the need to publish things as soon as I’ve started work on them is something I’ve learnt about myself.

    I’ve also settled on a CMS for my side-project work journal and have started a check-in blog. Both of them are hosted on Micro.blog and although I’m still working on the writing workflow, it seems to be working well for me so far.

    The not-using-Twitter streak has continued, and given the current direction of the platform, it’s very unlikely that I will return. I have started browsing around Mastodon a lot more, especially since Adam has launched social.lol. Mastodon felt like a bit of a ghost-town at first, but things are improving after many of those I used to follow on Twitter started posting there. I’m trying to avoid making the same mistake that drove me away from Twitter, so I continue to be very careful about who I follow and will not hesitate to hide boost from those that make me anxious. I’m also adhering to the idea of POSSE so most of my writing will continue to originate here.

    Books And Media

    I’m combining them in a single section because I really did not get a lot of reading done. I’d like to say that I’d like to change this, but I’m honestly not sure if I would be serious. Anyway, here are some moments:

    A lot of reading about creativity and self improvement this year. This includes The Dip by Seth Goden, and Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod. Both of these I discovered after reading Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece.

    The books that I’ve started reading, but didn’t finished, were The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth by Tony Fadell, and 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. There’s a bit of irony in not finishing the last one.

    Things I’ve watched this year:

    • Severance: I didn’t watch this when this first came out but I eventually got to it and enjoyed this quite a lot. It was good to finally get all the Lumon references.
    • The Orville: I was expecting this to be a bit more satirical than it actually was, but in the end I found it to be quite a good watch. I haven’t got around to S3 yet.
    • Hamilton: I finally got to see this in person. I’ve watched the Broadway performance before, and I was familiar with the soundtrack, so I wasn’t going into it cold. But it’s a much different experience watching this on the real stage.

    I also made my podcast debut by being a guest on Martin’s Feld excellent podcast series Really Specific Stories. Honestly, if you’re interested in tech podcasts at all, you should absolutely be listening to this show. And I’m not just saying that because I was a guest. Feel free to skip the episode I was on, but make sure you listen to all the others.

    The 2022 Word

    The word for 2022 was finisher. The general goal was to stop splitting my focus and start following through on things all the way to the end. As I mentioned when I was talking about Dynamo-Browse, I think I’m improving on that front. It will be something that I’ll need to work on going forward, but the improvements are there.

    So overall, a pretty decent year. Probably one of the more eventful ones than the last few, but I’m pretty happy with this one.

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    2022 Song Of The Year

    For the past twelve years or so, I’ve been invited to play the organ at the children’s Christmas Eve mass at a local(ish) primary school. During the collection, while people are getting wallets or purses out, I usually play some soft, nondescript music on a muted organ with only a few soft pipes opened. It doesn’t matter what I play during this time so I usually take this opportunity to play a song that I felt was a favourite of mine throughout the year. I unofficially consider this my song of the year.

    For a song to be considered, it needs to meet these criteria:

    1. It must be a song that I’ve discovered during the year. A song that I’ve been listening to before Christmas Day the previous cannot be considered. This forces me to keep discovering new music, instead of falling into the rut of listening to the same thing over and over again. This doesn’t mean it needs to be released during the year. In fact, many of the songs I grow to like have been released decades ago.
    2. It must be a song that’s found it’s way into my general rotation. I need to have listened to it more than a few times, which generally means I need to like it enough to listen to it regularly.
    3. It must be a song that I can play softly on an organ. I can usually slow things down so this doesn’t mean that fast songs or songs with vocals are out of the running. But it needs to sounds good slowed down on a muted organ, which doesn’t apply to all songs I listen to.

    This Year’s Nominees and Winner

    Here are this years nominees. You will be surprised to know that not all of them are from Mike Oldfield (well, one isn’t at least… which is not all of them 😉).

    • The Tunic Soundtrack by Lifeformed × Janice Kwan. This was an early discovery and is now positively associated with Canberra, a place I’ve been to more than a few times this year. Favourite tracks are To Far Shores, Ocean Glaze and Mirror Moon.
    • Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield. Discovered after watching this video on progressive rock albums. I linked to the 2010 one but I must note that I prefer the original 1974 release, so if you can find a version of that, listen to that one.
    • Voyager by Mike Oldfield. I’ve been listening to a few tracks of this before 2022, but this year I actually started liking the rest of the album.

    And the winner for this year is: Part One, from Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield. 👏

    Hergest Ridge 1974 album cover. Copyright owned by Virgin records

    Well, I should say the first 10 minutes of Part One. Things seem to turn a bit near the end in the original 1974 release, where it becomes a bit of a rock song, then immediately turns on a dime back into the traditional progressive soft stuff with tubular bells (or maybe that’s just the version I’m listening on). But even so, Bravo! You have won the coveted privilege of being peformed on a small pipe organ in a Melbourne suburban church.

    Honourable Mentions

    These are the songs that I consider worthy of the title, but didn’t meet all the criteria (usually point 3). For this year, they are:

    • PPPPPP by Magnus Pålsson. The soundtrack to VVVVVV. An enjoyable listen, especially if you like the type of soundtracks play on the audio chips of retro 80’s hardware.
    • Retro Grooves Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 by Anders Enger Jensen. Much like Voyager, I’ve been listening to DiscoVision before 2022 but I started poking through the back catalogue of these two albums and they’ve been really good.

    Past Winners

    This might be the first year I’ve written about this little tradition but it isn’t the first year I’ve selected a song. The past winners, with the associated years if I could remember them, are:

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    RSS And Tumblr's Quote-Style Posts

    Tumblr needs to improve how they generate RSS items. Quote-style posts — in which the post consists of a quote from someone else, followed by a reply by the blog author — show up in my RSS reader with titles consisting of the “quote part” of the post. If the quote is more than just a handful of words, the title dominates the actual body of the item. An example:

    How quote-style posts look like in Feedbin

    I don’t know why Tumblr is generating RSS items this way. I can only imagine that it’s something to do with the mistaken belief that RSS items require titles. But even if that’s the case, has it not cross their minds just how ugly these posts would look in a feed-reader if the quote is more than a sentence long? Could they have done something like truncate the title? Or is it not a priority to them?

    In any case, if they do decided to fix this, may I suggest simply adding the quote part within a <blockquote> at the start of the RSS item, while leaving the title unset.

    An example of how these quote-style posts can be improved

    An arguably better reading experience for your RSS audience. Or at the very least, it would look closer to what the post would look like in Tumblr itself.

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    Half Measures

    I’m coming to realise that one of my shortcomings is not completely following through on a task. I’ve got a habit of only doing enough to get it done quickly, knowing that the work has cracks in it and just hoping that things won’t fall through them. There are a few reasons for this and there the one’s that you expect: laziness, boredom, pressure to get something finished, wanting to move onto something else, etc.

    As you can expect, I get burned by this. And over the last several months it got to the point where it was starting to becoming a noticeable problem. So, I adopted the following rule: “no more half measures”1. If I’ve got a task to do, the I do the whole task.

    I broke that rule a few days ago. With the pressure to get something out the door, I finished the work knowing that there existed a case where it wouldn’t work properly. I was hoping to address this over the next week or so, and was not expecting (or hoping, to be more accurate) that this shortcoming will show up.

    Well, today it did. Fortunately it was just in testing but sure enough the shortcut came back to bite me, and now I’ll need to fix it.

    I guess it’s a good opportunity to reset and take this rule seriously once again.

    1. HT to Hank in Breaking Bad. ↩︎

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    Day Trip: Macedon And Trentham

    I had the pleasure of taking the day off today and going for a few walks around Macedon and Trentham. Being someone that’s really into keeping with a routine, I try to do these walks at least once a year. It’s been somewhat delayed this year, due to work commitments, but with the public holiday tomorrow, I thought I was a perfect time to get outside and do them before summer rolls around.

    Below are some photos of each of the walk.

    Macedon

    The first walk was along the borders of the Macedon Regional Park, following a self-plotted course, more-or-less, along the Bendigo railway line. It’s a little difficult at times, maybe bordering on dangerous (and possibly not super legal either), so I’d probably wouldn’t recommend this. But since it follows the rail line pretty much the entire time, it’s a good opportunity to catch up on some train spotting.

    I realised today that it’s been 10 years since I first walk this particular trail. I’m wondering if it might be time to retire it. As nice as it is, there are certain aspects of it that are getting a little tiresome. Plus it’s always boggy, even during the height of summer, meaning that you’ll usually get your socks wet and your pants dirty when you walk it. Even so, walking it is always a pleasure.

    Trentham

    Following a brief lunch in Kynteon, it was time for the second walk: The Domino Trail in Trentham. This is a rail trail that travels through some really nice forest. Last time I did this, more than a year ago, the path was closed as a severe storm brought down a number of trees and I was unable to do the entire path. Fortunately the trees were cleared and the path reopened.

    I caught the rain a few times and much of the track was quite boggy given the decent amount of rain we’ve received, but overall, it was a nice day out.

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    Opinionated Tips for New Micro Bloggers Coming From Twitter

    or, How I Use Micro.blog

    To all new-comers from Twitter, welcome to Micro.blog!

    No doubt you’ve received the welcome message from Jean with links on how Micro.blog is different from Twitter, but you’re probably still wondering how to get the most out of Micro.blog. And while I’m not claiming to have all the answers, I’ve put together a few tips for how I get value from writing here.

    First, the thing that took me a while to appreciate is that Micro.blog’s not so much a social media platform, at least not in the traditional sense. I mean, it certainly can be described as one, and if your goal is to connect with others online, it works just as well as any other. But in essence, it’s closer to a blogging platform, albeit one with social aspects tied to it. When you write a post, not only would it appear in the timeline of those that follow you, it will also appear on your own blog. So an option before you is to lean into this. Treat your blog as your own space on the web. Get a domain name and share it with others. Style your blog as much or as little as you want. Take a look at the plugins to see what you can add to your site. You don’t have to do this right away, but it’s well worth considering if you hope to get the most out of writing here.

    Second, write naturally. You’re not feeding an algorithm here. There’s nothing like trending topics or recommendations that takes what you write and throws it around the network. Instead, you’ll get something better: real humans reading and replying to your post. So write for humans. If a post needs to be longer than 280 characters, then it can be: no need for threads here. Also, adding hashes in front of words does nothing other than make what you write harder for others to read.

    Finally, write for yourself. The cheap endorphin rush you use to get from likes and retweets will never come, so you’ll need another way to get pleasure from writing here. What works for me is to write for myself. If I write something, I do so with the expectation that no-one else will see it. Of course, you’re writing on the open web so others can certainly see it: try not to be too much of a jerk. But even if no-one else does, as long as I get something out of what I write, that’s all I ever need.

    Of course, how and why you use Micro.blog is ultimately up to you. After all, you are the one paying $5.00 to use the service (and yes, in this case, you are the customer here, not the product). So make sure you use it in a way that works for you. And it may take a while before you find the utility you’re looking for. I’d advise patience here. You will not find the short-term rush you’ll get from Twitter. Before you is a slower path. But it’s one that can lead you towards a much better and fulfilling experience of writing online.

    Happy blogging.

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    Technical Knowledge Management Update

    Finished the first pass of moving all my technical knowledge into static Markdown files. I’ve got all the files now in a Git repository hosted on Github. They’re also published as a website called TecKnow Space (pronounced “techno space”)1.

    The way I’ve done this is by writing a tool I which will checkout the source Git repository, iterate over all the source Markdown files, render them as HTML, and push them to another Git repository which is being served using GitHub pages. The tool, which is currently not open-source, was written in Go and uses go-git for the Git client, and BlackFriday as the Markdown renderer.

    The output is just a directory tree of HTML files. I did consider Hugo for a brief moment, but I wanted to avoid the complexity of including a base Hugo site here, especially given that the main reason for using Hugo is for the themes. That did mean that I had to write a tool to do this, but my thinking is that if I decided to move to Hugo, I still need something to iterate over all the Markdown files anyway, since they’re stored in a different structure than the content of a Hugo site. And some small modifications to the tool would could be made to make that happen.

    At the moment, I need to run the tool manually to regenerate the site. But, ultimately, I’d like to setup Github’s CI/CD to re-render the source files when I push changes to main. That, plus styling and optimising how I organise this information, will probably be the next step I tackle.

    1. One of those names that worked off the bat, and I grin whenever I say it. ↩︎

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    Some Links To Motivational Posts That Help Me

    This post contains a bunch of links to posts and articles that motivate me in some way, either with blogging or working in public. Sometimes I feel down or self-conscious about the types of posts I make, or not posting anything at all, and I like to revisit these occasionally to help me keep it up.

    Many of these come from members of Micro.blog. To those that shared it, thank you!

    About blogging

    About development

    About working in public

    About persistence

    About other things

    I’ll update this post with any more I find along the way.

    ∞

    Option Currency Symbol Reference

    A small, incomplete reference of the various currency symbols that can be produced using the Option key. Here because I always forget these, and I’ve been needing to produce these quite often lately.

    Currency Symbol Key
    Dollar $ $
    Cent ¢ Opt4
    Pound £ Opt3
    Euro € ShiftOpt2
    Yen ¥ Opty
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    An Alternative To The Reply All Idea For Micro.blog

    Just thinking about Micro.blog conversations and the discussion about having a way to reply all. I wonder if a better alternative is to be able to “follow” conversations, with new replies from anyone showing up in the timeline. This can be completely opt-in per conversation — including for posts that are made by you — so that those that want the old way to continue working as is don’t loose anything.

    It has one other advantage: I’ve seen conversations in Micro.blog that I had no real interest in participating in (usually because I have nothing to add) but I was interested in following along. Usually these are people asking for recommendations, and others post theirs as replies. Being able to “subscribe to new replies” would allow me to get updates to these as they come in, rather than have me check-in on the conversation thread every hour or so.

    Anyway, that’s the idea. Let me know what you think.

    ∞

    The (Annoying) Way To Get the Current MacOS Appearance Scheme From the Command Line

    Ok, here’s something bizarre.

    I’m trying to get the current MacOS appearance scheme — either light or dark mode — from the terminal. The way to do this is by running this command (source):

    defaults read -g AppleInterfaceStyle

    If MacOS is in dark mode, this will print Dark. But if MacOS is in light mode, the command will print… an error:

    2022-10-04 09:15:18.058 defaults[35844:466643] 
The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleInterfaceStyle) does not exist

    Running defaults read -g confirms what the error message says: the AppleInterfaceStyle key is not set when MacOS is in light mode.

    Why was this chosen as the way to do things? Now I need to capture and parse stderr just confirm that the reason an error occurred was because MacOS is in light mode; as oppose to some other, possibly legitimate, reason.

    A tad annoying I must say.

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    Photos of Lake Tuggeranong

    This morning I went to Tuggeranong, south of Canberra. After a cafe breakfast I took a walk around the lake. It was a lovely spring morning for it: cloudy, mild but slightly on the cool side. It was also quite a decent walk: probably took an hour and 20 minutes, and I didn’t even cover the entire lake. All in all, a nice way to begin the day.

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    The Australian Republic Question

    With the passing of Queen Elisabeth II, the talk of whether Australia should become a republic will probably start making the rounds once more. I don’t consider myself a royalist, and when the last referendum on the issue came around, I voted in favour of becoming a republic. The idea of having the British Royal Family as the head of state of a country halfway around the world seem anachronistic to me, and I was disappointed when the referendum failed.

    Since then, my position has been become slightly more nuanced. I still believe in the ideals of becoming a republic — in being a country that is more-or-less completely self governing. But after reading this article from Vox.com, I’ve come to see some benefits of having a head of state that is removed from the day-to-day politics of government. Sure, the stability from such a figurehead may not have been wholly constant, but that “lack [of] semblance of legitimacy” that comes from the royals being the head of state does provide some reassurance. One less divisive thing for people to think about when that position changes hands.

    So if the referendum was held today, which way would I go? I’d probably still vote “yes”, but it would have a “can we make it such that the office is not in any way marred in the politics of the day?” qualifier attached to it.

    Then again, I talking about the terms of a theoretical referendum where the proposed system is more than just replace-the-monarchy-with-a-president. Such concerns regarding the division of power might already be settled within the constitution. I really don’t know: might be worth looking up if the question were to come up again.

    Either way, we’ll see which way the winds blow.

    ∞

    Detecting When GetItem On DynamoDB Returns Nothing

    I was trying to remember how best to detect when a GetItem call to DynamoDB returns no values. That is, when there’s no item with that key in the table. This is in a project that is using v2 of the Go AWS SDK.

    After poking through some old code that did this, it looks like the way to do so is to check that the returned Item field is nil:

    out, err := p.client.GetItem(ctx, &dynamodb.GetItemInput{
    Key:       key,
    TableName: tableName,
})
if err != nil {
    // Error getting the item
    return nil, err
} else if out.Item == nil {
    // No item found
    return nil, nil
}

// Do the thing with out.Item

    Ok, I can live with this approach. I’m kinda happy that I don’t need to check the error message, since doing so using the Go AWS SDK is a bit of a pain.

    ∞

    Some Photos of The Yarra Trail

    Went for a very short walk of the Yarra Trail around Heidelberg on Saturday. The evening light was really lovely so I though I’d take some photos.

    ∞

    Milestone

    For a while, I’ve been trying to maintain a writing streak. I need to write at least one blog post or journal entry a day. Today that streak has been maintained for a full year.

    I will admit that the streak was not completely continuous: I had to go back a few times and retroactively add a post. But even so, I’m quite please with reaching this milestone. Onward to the next one.

    ∞

    Some Things I Found Out While Browsing a Substack Newsletter in The Wayback Machine

    I did a quick search for that blog post in the the Wayback Machine. I couldn’t find the post but the Substack newsletter was there. I guess Substack does allows archiving of newsletters with the “substack.com” domain after all (if it’s something that they can even control).

    Anyway, here are a few things I’ve found out while browsing through a Substack newsletter in the Wayback Machine:

    • Clicking “Let me read it first” works: it slides away and the most recent posts show up. Guess it’s just a simple HTML overlay blocking the home page.
    • Open all links in a new tab. Just clicking them will run some JavaScript which, I guess, tries to load the post directly from Substack, resulting in an error if the newsletter is taken offline. Opening the link in a new tab will get the post directly from the Wayback Machine.
    • Clicking the archive tab seems to bring up the blog archive briefly, but then some JavaScript — which I guess is trying to load the archive from Substack? — replaces it with an error (why does everything need to be JavaScript?!) I’m guessing that the actual HTML is still there so it might be possible to get it if you disable JavaScript. I haven’t tried this though, so this is only a hypothesis.

    As for the post itself, it turns out that it was in my Feedbin archive all along, so the search in Wayback Machine wasn’t actually necessary. Now the trick is to find a way to prevent Feedbin from purging old posts. 😳

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