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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: Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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Option Currency Symbol Reference
A reference guide for producing various currency symbols using the Option key. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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: Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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Rebinding Keys For Quickly Resolving Conflicts in GoLand
I’m dealing with a lot of conflicts today as I try to clear a backlog of Git rebases in my to-do pile. I’ve been using GoLand to do this, as my current Git “mergetool” is configured to Vimdiff for some reason1 and I’m not really bothered to find some other tool, at least not yet. GoLand does a pretty good job. Unfortunately, the default key-bindings for resolving conflicts in GoLand is far from good. Continue reading →
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Turning Off Shared Command History in Oh My Zsh
TL,DR: add “unsetopt share_history” to your .zshrc file I’ve been using Oh My Zsh at work for a few months. As far as terminal config managers go, this one works pretty well. But the default configuration does include something which I found quite annoying. First, a few words on how I use the terminal. I’m in the terminal constantly in my day to day. At the start of the day, I’m creating terminal tabs and running commands to do things like build the project I’m working on, start a testing session, etc. Continue reading →
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Kyneton Botanical Gardens
Went to Kyneton with Mum and Dad today. While they went off for a bike ride, I had the opportunity to go for a walk around the botanical gardens. This was my first time there, and although the gardens themselves were not very big, it was still a pleasant experience. Here are some photos I took of that visit. This was followed by lunch at Little Swallow Cafe. The place was quite busy — I suspect that their reputation is such that it would be busy most of the time — but the food was very nice. Continue reading →
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DynamoDB JSON Attribute Types Quick Reference
Because apparently it’s too difficult for AWS to provide an easy way to find this information. Atomic Types Type JSON Value Binary B String value containing the Base64-encoded binary data. Boolean BOOL Either true or false String S String value Number N String with the numerical value Null NULL Should always be true Collection Types Type JSON Value List L A JSON array, with each element being an attribute with a type. Continue reading →
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More Complaining About Autocorrect on MacOS
Earlier this morning: Me: (writing in my journal) Nonna, my 91 year-old grandmother… Autocorrect: Did you me “Donna”? Me: No, undo change. (continue writing) good news is that Nonna… Autocorrect: Did you me “Gonna”? I can forgive MacOS for considering nonna a spelling error, since it’s not an English word. But I do see why auto-correct on MacOS can be frustrating. Apart from the two completely random corrections it made for the same word, it also doesn’t seem to get the hint when I undo the change. Continue reading →
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Write It Down
I am feeling some very minor after-effects from the booster I took yesterday (nothing serious, just the expected cold-like symptoms). I was curious as to whether it was anything like I experienced in January, when I got my last booster. I went to my journal to see what I wrote about it. Unfortunately for me, there was nothing there. To be fair to my past self, there were some other events going on at the same time which I did write about. Continue reading →
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Newsletter Reminder Emails
I subscribe to a newsletter that sends “reminder” emails if I skip an issue. If I don’t open one of the email newsletters I receive, then a few days later, a copy will be sent with a forward of the form “looks like you skipped an issue. Here what you missed.” These reminder emails are bad, and here’s why: It gives the impression of hustling me. I appreicate the time you take to publish something that I see value in, but sending these reminders feels like your forcing your content onto me. Continue reading →
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The Feature Epic (Featuring the Epic Feature Branch)
Here’s what’s been happening at work with me recently. I write it here as an exercise in how I can learn from this. They say that writing can help in this respect so I’m going to put that logic to the test (in either case, just having this documented somewhere could prove useful). We’re working on a pretty large change to the billing service powering the SaaS product sold by the company I work at. Continue reading →
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Arriving Late
I’m going to have to tell my boss today that the stuff my squad has been working on is going to arrive late. To much needs to be fixed or reworked, and there is one or two things that have been missed alltogeather. I think the biggest problem is that the thing we’ve been working on got into testing far too late — only a few days before the deadline — meaning that there was no time left for fixing things. Continue reading →
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Wrong Number
Got called three times this morning by mistake from an old woman in NSW trying to contact her son who had a very similar phone number to mine. First time I ignored it as I didn’t recognised the number and thought it was spam. Second time I answered and after trying to understand what she was trying to say, I simply said “I think you got the wrong number, sorry” and hung up. Continue reading →
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Honour, Democracy, and Galati: A Day in Canberra
Since being in Canberra, I haven’t really done anything “touristy”. Given that today was a public holiday, I figured it was as good a time as ever to do so. So I decided to spend the day visiting a couple of national landmarks, plus something I’ve been planning to do since returning to Canberra. The War Memorial The first time I’ve ever been in Canberra was during Christmas holidays in 2007 my family. Continue reading →
