Generally, it’s good to know that you’re needed at work. But sometimes, it’s just as good to know that you won’t be needed at work (at least for a time).
Table sub_mapping has more than one primary key, you say? Ok, you might be on to something.
CREATE TABLE sub_mapping (
subscription_id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
customer_id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
local_subscription_id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
user_id TEXT PRIMARY KEY
);
So apparently I can add a wifi network to MacOS whenever one is advertised but I can’t remove it unless I enter the admin password. That’s a strange security model.
📺 Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
Just to add one point of anecdata to Ben’s experience: I’ve never been happy with the performance of the mobile radio of Pixel phones. You can be in the middle of the CBD and still experience weird dropouts while using mobile data. It’s quite frustrating.
“Geographically-determined relevance deprivation syndrome” is going to be the noun-phrase of the day. 🙌
For no other reason that it’s a great phrase, and also that it’s real.
Via ABC News (CW: US politics)
The next train announcements at suburban stations were always made a couple of minutes before the train arrived. They’ve started making them every 10 minutes before departure time too. I’m sure there’s a good reason for this but it’ll take some time for that tinge of urgency to wear off.
As an aside: is it possible for me to have any new experience without being nervous? I once lost points at a scale playing competition because I said I was nervous. It offended me so much that I never participated again.
Best of luck for Tuesday, America. Go earn those democracy sausages.
🔗 Thinking About Recipe Formats More Than Anyone Should
Just looking at the formats in the post, it’s a bit of a shame that they’re little more than lists of ingredients and instructions. But I’m not sure there’s much that can be done about that, given how varied recipes can be.
The one exception, Cooklang, looks interesting. It seems a bit limited in the types of recipes it could be used for. But sometimes the best languages are the ones with a small, yet deep, focus on a problem space.
And of-course there’s an XML version. I opened this post expecting there to be an XML version. 😄
I have my doubts about this future being realised. Or it’s probably more accurate to say I rather that this future isn’t realised.
⚡
Day trip, but a lot closer to home. Took a train to Hurstbridge and walked the trail alongside the creek to Eltham, around 12.5 km in total. Also took a small break at the tram cafe. 🌲
Oof! Forgotten how sparse the off-peak train frequency is. 40 minute wait between trains going to Hurstbridge. ⏳
WeblogPoMo AMA #3: Best Music Experience
I’m on a roll with these, but I must warn you, this streak may end at any time. Anyway, todays question is from Hiro who asked it to Gabz, and discovered via Robb:
@gabz What’s the best music-related experience of your life so far?
Despite attending only a hand-full of concerts in my life — live music is not really my jam — I’ve had some pretty wonderful music-related experiences in my life, both through listing to it or by performing it. Probably my most memorial experience was playing in the pit orchestra for our Year 10 production of Pippin. This was during the last few weeks before the show opened and we attended a music camp for a weekend to do full day rehearsals with the music director. The director had a reputation of being a bit of a hard man, prone to getting a bit angry, and not afraid to raise his voice. It was intimidating to me at the time, but in hindsight I can appreciate that he was trying to get the best from us. And with us being a group of teenage boys who were prone to loosing focus, I think we were deserving of his wrath.
One evening, we were rehearsing late, and the director was spending a lot of time going through some aspect of the music. I can’t remember what was being discussed but it was one of those times where everyone was tired, yet each knew what they were meant to be doing and was still happy to be working. You feel something special during those moments, when the group was doing their best, not out of coercion but because we were trying to “get the work done”.
Probably a very close second was discovering Mike Oldfield for the first time. This was probably when I was 11 or 12, and I wasn’t a bit music listener back then (I mean, we did have a home stereo but I wasn’t listening to a walkman or anything like that). Dad was working one night and I came up to him. He then started playing track 1 of Tubular Bells II, thinking that I would appreciate it. I was more intrigued at first, as it wasn’t the type of music I was use to at the time: long, instrumental pieces. Yet I found it to be decent, and something I could see myself liking the future1. He then played track 7, and I was absolutely hooked after that.
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In my experience, the tracks that take some time to grow to like turn out to be the best ones to listen to. ↩︎
Weekly Update - 3 Nov 2024
I probably should stop calling these “weekly updates,” seeing that they come up a lot less frequently than once a week. Maybe I should switch to something like “Sunday updates,” or maybe something closer to what this is, which is an excuse to procrastinate by writing about what I’ve been working on, rather than just working on it.
But I’m sure you’re not interested in my willowing about the frequency of these updates, so let’s just get straight to the meat of it.
Cyber Burger
All the logic, graphics, and sound-effects for power-up/power-downs are now finished. They now spawn in randomly, with a frequency and specific types dictated by the current stage. I also added the notion of a “milkshake bonus” which awards the player a bonus multiplier for a short amount of time.
I’ve also made a few balancing changes around demerits. Based on my own testing, I was pretty blasé about loosing demerits, as you could recover a demerit every time you finish a burger. I wanted to discourage that, so I changed things around a little. You still loose demerits if you screw up the burger your trying to build — such as making it too high or not catching the correct item — but you no longer recover demerits for every burger you complete. Instead, you recover one demerit for every $50 you’re awarded. This is now every three to four burgers, depending on how sophisticated they are, which I hope would make loosing demerits something the player would want to avoid.
There’s still the difficulty curve stuff left to do, but I think I’ll start working on the meta elements, like the title screen, main menu and high score tables. I can probably leave out the addition of stages and a difficulty curve if I’m honest, but I would like to have a decent title and menu screen.
The other thing to do is write the manual. I made a start the other day, but there’s much left to do on this front. Part of me wonders whether it make sense adding “on-board documentation.” But part of the fun of using Pico-8 on this project is to imagine a time where this game came out during the late 70’s and early 80’s and the 8-bit era of home consoles. And those games didn’t have on-board documentation. That said, I might add a quick start guide for those that didn’t RTFM.
UCL
I’ve been using that tool I’ve written for work quite often so there was a need to add some additional features to UCL. The biggest one was adding exceptions, but there’ve been a lot of little things like rounding out the standard library.
All the code written in a rush is starting to weigh this project down though, and I do think I’ll need to do some refactoring to tidy things up a little. I may need to work on documentation too, just for my own sake more than anything else. I doubt this would be anything more than the toy language it currently is, but it does have it’s uses, and whenever I need to reference a built-in, I’m always going to the source code. Which is fine, but I think I can do better on this front.
Other Projects
A few other things I worked on during the last fortnight:
- I spent some time last weekend playing with Htmgo by making a simple world clock that would update every second. I ended up remaking this as a static web page backed by some WASM code. Knowing the time in UTC and some American cities could come in handy for my job. At least, that’s the theory: I haven’t had a need for it yet.
- I also made some changes to Nano Journal to add support for uploading multiple attachments at once.
So that’s the update for this past fortnight.
WeblogPoMo AMA #2: One Thing I Wish I Could Change About Myself
Here’s my answer to another question asked by Annie for WebogPoMoAMA. This was previously answered by Keenan, Estebanxto, Kerri Ann, and Lou Plummer:
If you could instantly change one internal pattern/thing about yourself, what would it be?
My answer is that I wish I found it easier meeting new people. Not only am I quite introverted, I’m also really shy, and I find it extremely hard to introduce myself to new people in social situations. That is, if I ever find myself going to these social situations. I rarely do, and if I do attend, I usually stay quietly to the side, keeping with company that I know. It was at one time bad enough that I’d find excuses to avoid going out to see those I do know.
I’m trying to get better at this. For starters, I’m no longer staying away from friends, and I am trying to make the effort of going to more social events as they come. It’s still not great though, and I do struggle when being around a group of strangers. I guess the secret is just practice, and maybe trying to make a game of it: setting goals like saying hello to at least one new person every hour or so. I don’t think I’ll ever get over my shyness, but I’m hoping I can find away to at least manage it a little better than I have been.
Title design this morning. Trying to get as close as I can to the Cyberspace Raceway font as my pixel art skills will allow for.
WeblogPoMo AMA #1: Work And Drink
A new blogging challenge has shown up on the scene: WeblogPoMo, where bloggers answer questions asked to them in the style of ReddIt’s AMAs. I’m always game for a blogging challenge so I’ll throw my hat into the ring.
I’ll start with a question from , who asked it to Gabz:
@gabz yay for more #WeblogPoMoAMA
1) I would actually love to read about your work (genetics? agriculture?) but I'm not sure how to phrase the question other than "So what do you do for work exactly?" but maybe more like what's something you really like about your job? (or hate) or what's your typical workday like?
2) what's your favorite brand and/or flavor(s) of fizzy water? I am a fizzy water drinker till I die.
Question 1: What do you do for work exactly?
I’m a senior software developer at a company called Blackmagic Design. It’s predominantly a maker of hardware devices for video production — cameras, video switches, recorders, etc — but they recently launched a bunch of Cloud services, which is what I work on. I’m working as backend engineer, doing a lot of Go (which I love) and Kubernetes (which I tolerate) which is all running in AWS.
Working with hardware is an aspect of the job I find very interest. Our team doesn’t work on the devices themselves but we work quite closely to those that do, trying to integrate them with the services we build. I’ve had dreams of working in hardware, and for a while I regretted not doing electrical engineering as a double degree at uni. As is always the case, the dream is usually rosier than reality, and I am thankful that the tools we work with are of reasonably high quality.
But it’s still fun to work at a company that deals with hardware. Not many software companies can make that claim. And I did get a chance to see the actual hardware production lines once, during a brief work trip to Indonesia, and that was fascinating.
Another thing I like about my job is the variety that can come of it. It’s not without it’s knowledge silos — system experts naturally form in a software team because it’s just easier to ask the person who worked on a system to change it rather have someone learn about it first — but we are generally expected to “pivot” on a dime when the priorities of the business change. This is definitely not for everyone, and we’ve lost a few people soon after they joined that just didn’t like working this way. But I think it’s a way of working that works for me. Or, much like Kubernetes, I tolerate it.
Question 2: What’s your favourite brand/flavour of fizzy water?
I don’t really buy flavoured fizzy water myself. I have a Soda King (sort of like an Aussie version of Soda Stream) which I use to carbonate my water. During the day I just have it straight, or somethings with orange juice. But in the evening or on the weekend, I mix it with lime cordial, bitters, and ice.
If you’ve got a question — about a topic suitable for publishing online that’s not too personal — feel free to send me an email or post it as a comment here.
Trentham Railway Station, and the start of the Domino rail trail. 🌲
