Free idea for anyone interested in building an Obsidian plugin: a calendar picker which will open up an arbitrary daily note, either in the past or future. Would be useful for making notes on upcoming events.(There may already be a plugin for this, I haven’t actually looked).
EDIT: Thanks to @jayeless for sharing this Calendar plugin which does exactly what I was hoping for.
What the fridge happened to Tumblr?! It took me 15 minutes to find the RSS feed of a blog there.
To save everyone the pain from trying to find the answer by browsing crappy websites full of ads, the RSS feed of a Tumblr blog is:
https://<user>.tumblr.com/rss
This also works with profiles in the form tumblr.com/<user>.
Nearing the end of the week and I’m starting to tire. Can’t retire just yet though: got to look at a clean-up task caused by a release I was part of. 🤦 #mbnov
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.
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HT to Hank in Breaking Bad. ↩︎
You know, the whole point of having standup-free Thursdays is that we would have the morning to get work done. It wasn’t intended to have a blank calendar for others to start filling in with meetings. 😫
A couple of hours away from where I am right now is a town called Bowral, with a pronunciation reasonably close to barrel. We stayed there one easter a few years ago. The house we stayed in was shocking, but the town itself was absolutely lovely. #mbnov
A defining feature of the cafe culture in Melbourne that I absolutely love is that most cafes are independently owned and I think preferred. Well known coffee franchises have not taken a large enough hold to push them out of the market. #mbnov
Now, I know what you’re thinking: watching cab-rides on YouTube is great, but there aren’t any of the Melbourne and Victorian rail network. Well friends, if you’re tired of the Shinkansen and TGV, this is for you. 😀
It’s interesting to think how many products made of aluminium are actually referred to as tin. Alfoil, sometimes called “tin foil”, is one such example. #mbnov
Oof, what a day. It was not my intention to leave this Microblogvember post to the last minute, but it’s been really hectic at work. Things are coming due and nothing is working. Seems like it’s just before the release of something when the bugs show up. 😮💨 #mbnov
I’m starting to suspect that Slack might not be the productivity magic-bullet it’s touted to be. That is, unless your job is getting distracted every 30 minutes. In that case, Slack works great!
Ivy and Archie show their affection by preening elements of my face; usually the eyelashes, ears, and nose. And while I appreciate the sentiment, their beaks act like a pair of tweezers and it’s a little painful.
Most of what’s going on with Audax and Dynamo-Browse is “closing the gap” between the possible queries and scans that can be performed over a DynamoDB table, and how they’re represented in Dynamo-Browse query expression language. Most of the constructs of DynamoDB’s conditions expression language can now be represented. The last thing to add is the size() function, and that is proving to be a huge pain.
The reason is that the IR representation is using the expression builder package to actually put the expression together. These builders uses Go’s type system to enforce which constructs work with each other one. But this clashes with how I built the IR representation types, which are essentially structs implement a common interface. Without having an overarching type to represent an expression builder, I’m left with either using a very broad type like any, or completely ditching this package and doing something else to build the expression.
It feels pretty annoying reaching the brick wall just when I was finishing this off. But I guess them’s the breaks.
One other thing I’m still considering is spinning out Dynamo-Browse into a separate project. It currently sits under the “Audax” umbrella, with the intention of releasing other tools as part of the tool set. These tools actually exist1 but I haven’t been working on them and they’re not in a fit enough state to release them. So the whole Audax concept is confusing and difficult to explain with only one tool available at the moment.
I suppose if I wanted to work on the other tools, this will work out in the end. But I’m not sure that I do, at least not now. And even if I do, I’m now beginning to wonder if building them as TUI tools would be the best way to go.
So maybe the best course of action is to make Dynamo-Browse a project in it’s own right. I think it’s something I can resurrect later should I get to releasing a second tool.
Edit at 9:48: I managed to get support for the size function working. I did it by adding a new interface type with a function that returns a expression.OperandBuilder. The existing IR types representing names and values were modified to inherit this interface, which gave me a common type I could use for the equality and comparison expression builder functions.
This meant that the IR nodes that required a name and literal value operand — which are the only constructs allowed for key expressions — had to be split out into separate types from the “generic” ones that only worked on any OperandBuilder node. But this was not as large a change as I was expecting, and actually made the code a little neater.
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Dynamo-Browse was actually the second TUI tool I made as part of what was called “awstools”. The first was actually an SQS browser. ↩︎
I usually make small adjustments to photos before I post them here, like small crops to emphasise the subject. I’ve tried cropping them as squares, but it feels like one adjustment too far. I may go back to keeping the original aspect ratio. #mbnov
I had my suspicions that today’s Microblogvember post would be difficult to write. Well, my suspicions turned out to be correct. #mbnov
The National Carillon, on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin. Music was being played on it this morning, although I didn’t recognise the tune. It wasn’t Tubular Bells, though.
Ugh, I just completely screwed up the test deployment of something just now. Missed a service that needed to be in place before rolling out a config change. The config change updates a DynamoDB table, and the stream of updates from that would be picked up by this service and pushed onto an SQS queue. Because the service wasn’t there, these events were completely missed.
I don’t think there’s any way to replay the original events from DynamoDB, so I tried cleaning this up by rolling back the config change. I ended up making the whole situation worse, and it was pointless in the end as it would have completely invalidated the test anyway. Now I have to go to the tester and ask him to reset.
Oof, is it clock-off time yet?
I prefer to have my phone in my pocket with the display facing my leg. But with the Pixel 6 Pro I had to switch it around because the display was always getting phantom taps. This would pause music and podcast playback, and it actually called 000 once. Not ideal. 😕 #mbnov
It feels a lot like I’m rubbernecking but I just cannot look away from the slow moving trainwreck which is the Twitter takeover. Laying off people who know how things work; all the imposter Twitter Blue accounts with the blue checkmarks. Really something to behold.
Google Photos came up with this amusing suggestion today.
Just to be clear: it was the birds that were rotated, not the camera. 😀