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Busses should use the tram lines more. I remember being taught that if a bus was driving on a tram line, it must be treated like a tram. This gives them dedicated lanes and certain priorities over cars. Don’t know why busses don’t do this.
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Passing by the Vegemite factory on the way to work. You usually get a whiff of its signature smell when you walk by, but today it was particularly strong.
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Achievement unlocked: first spam email offering to identify and fix vulnerabilities in one of my GitHub projects (it’s open source: if there are any vulnerabilities, just raise a PR).
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I hate the term “business logic.” Is there a better noun-phrase for things the software is meant to do that doesn’t sound corporatey? I guess “user flow” or “user experience” could work, but not everything I deal with involves the user directly.
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Currently reading: Temeraire by Naomi Novik 📚
About half way through the first chapter but already very captivating. Started strong right out of the gate. HT to pluralistic.net, where it was highly recommended.
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On the subject of birds, I was looking at my status.lol statuses this morning. There are only a handful on there but I saw these two and it made me smile. I obviously posted them while I was looking after my sisters cockatiels last November.
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Putting up a new print today.
Original is by a local artist, although I didn’t get their name.
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This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I cannot stand the MacOS development experience. I wanted to start a new project, a MacOS SwiftUI project, and once I went through the New Project flow, the first thing that happens is the preview craps out because the login to AppStore Connect cannot provision a certificate. To generate the preview of the “Hello World” app that was just created. Call me old fashion but the need to provision a certificate to generate a preview is a little unnecessary.
How do experience MacOS developers deal with crap like this? Honestly, I really feel for them devs going through all the shitty hoops Apple throws their way, as if attempting to build anything is a threat to their trillion dollar company. They really need to get some perspective.
Anyway, I’ll settle on using Go and Wails. I know how unpopular Electron-style apps are in the broader MacOS community (Wails doesn’t bundle Chrome so it’s not quite the same thing) but it’s a stack without any BS that I can rely on.
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My 2023 Word
I think I’ve settled on my 2023 word of the year: generous. Specifically (although not exclusively) generous in the projects I work on. I’m always working on some form of software in my spare time, but most of the time I keep this software just for myself. I want to do less of this, and start sharing it with others. You could say that I want to get better at shipping, but shipping to me is making the software usable for what it’s designed for, and for many of the projects I build, it’s only designed for me and my needs. Continue reading →
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Looking at the “backlog” of things to work on for Dynamo-Browse before I set it aside. I’ll fix a few bugs and add a few small features that I’ve found myself really wanting. The short list is as follows:
- Fix the activity indicator that is sometimes not clearing when a long running task is finished.
- Fix a bug in which executing a query expression with just the sort key does nothing. I suspect this has something to do with the query planner somehow getting confused if the sort key is used but the partition key is not.
- Fix a bug where
set default-limitsreturns a bad value. - Add a way to describe the table, i.e. show keys, indices, etc. This should also be made available to scripts.
- Add a way to “goto” a particular row, that is select rows just by entering the value of the partition and optionally the sort key.
I’ll start with these and see how I go.
Oh, and one more thing: I will need to kill my darlings, namely the other commands in the “audax” repository that I’ve hacked togeather. They’re mildly useful — one of them is used to browse SSM parameters and another is used to view JSON log files — but they’re unloved and barely functional. I’ll move them out of the “audax” repository and rename this repo to “dynamo-browse”, just to make it less confusing for everyone.
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I think I’ll take a little break from Dynamo-Browse. There’s a list of small features that are on my TODO list. I might do one or two of them over the next week, then cut and document a release, and leave it for a while.
I’m still using Dynamo-Browse pretty much every day at work, but it feels a little demotivating being the only person that’s using it. Even those at work seem like they’ve moved on. And I can understand that: it’s not the most intuitive bit of software out there. And I get the sense that it’s time to do something new. Maybe an online service or something. 🤔
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Updates To My Online Presence
Making some changes to my online presence. The first is moving my knowledge base site from a set of HTML pages generated from a bespoke tool to one managed by Hugo. I wrote about that already so there’s nothing new to report here, apart from changing the domain name: I guess I finally fell out of love for “tecknow.space”. The new domain is simply technote.wiki. I originally wanted “technotes.wiki” — note the S — but I ran into a few problems trying to set this up in Netlify. Continue reading →
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Discovered that the cafe I go to offers raisin toast. It’s too early for hot cross buns but the last couple of days have been relatively cool and my autumn dietary cravings kicked in a little early (it’ll warm up again in about a week so we’ll see how long they actually last).
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Might be time for a new, larger monitor. The one I’m using now, a 12 year old Samsung SyncMaster P2250, has worked well for me (apart from turning itself on during the night for no particular reason). But it felt really cramped working on it yesterday, and not for the first time.
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I’m cautiously optimistic that upgrading my iPad to iPadOS 16.2 has fixed the keyboard issue I’ve been experiencing. It’s been two days and I haven’t needed to reconnect the keyboard or restart the iPad. Hoping it was just a software problem all along.
Update: Ok, I may have spoken too soon. It started flaking out again during lunch. Slightly better than it was a few days ago, but still problematic.
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🎙 Really Specific Stories: John Siracusa
As an avid fan of all of John’s podcasts, I’ve been looking forward to this episode of Really Specific Stories for a while. I’m please to say that @martinfeld does not disappoint. A fantastic listen.
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I wonder if finding anything related to Kubernetes sidecars, cluster configuration, or tools boring or unnecessary is a career limiting move.
Update: After spending a bit more time thinking about this, I’m wondering if the reasons why things like this get so complicated is a mixture of:
- Larger teams getting split into smaller ones, and needing a way for them to work more or less independently without stepping on each other’s toes,
- Leaning towards the security side on the security vs. convenience (or rather simplicity) continuum,
- Saying “It’s what Google/Amazon/Spotify/whoever does” without taking into account that they’re got 100x more developers and 10,000,000x more users than we do.
And this complexity tends to cascade onto itself: throwing one more tool in means that we need to secure it, which means more configuration, which means that we need a tool to manage that, which adds more security, and on and on it goes.
This is not helped by people always looking out for the new and shiny. It might be because I’m getting old and cynical but that appeal is wearing off on me.
And yeah, people could make the argument for why we need each one of these. It’s the classic “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” situation here.
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Feature for web-browsers: a keyboard shortcut to go to the last tab that had input focus. Would be useful when you find yourself switching through tabs to look something up, like a link, while at the same time drafting an answer that will make use of it in another tab.
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Spent 15 minutes going through newsletters looking for a Go package I wanted to use. I really need a proper system to track these package of interest. Maybe I should use one of the 10 different systems I’ve thought of to do just that.
P.S. Feedbin’s search works pretty well.
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This Coulda Been A Podcast
Started listening to a “podcast” published as a YouTube video. I don’t like that this is how people choose to publish their shows. I can understand why that do, since people now use YouTube just to listen to music and other audio content. But for a podcast, the presence of video suggests to me that this is something that I need to actually watch. That simply listening to the audio while letting it play in another tab is not the best way to consume it, lest I miss something visual. Continue reading →
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What gets me about Twitter killing access to third-party clients is the lack of comms to the developers. No shutdown timeline. No chance to let the devs communicate this to their users. Nothing but cowardly silence. How utterly disrespectful!
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I also saw an interesting water-bird this morning. Don’t know what species it is. Looks a bit like a Pied Cormorant but the colour around the eyes and beak is wrong. I tried to take a picture but it flew off and the best photo I got, one with a high digital zoom, is quite muddy.
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While walking this afternoon, I met a small flock of gang-gang cockatoos. A gang-gang gang if you will. And yes, I have been sitting on that line for the past week or so. 🙂
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Hand-made, Home-cooked
“Here, buy this sandwich. It’s hand-made. “Well, it’s machine made. But hands made the machines. “Well, hands made the machines that made the machines. “But it’s a home-cooked receipt. “Well, it’s a home-cooked inspired recipe. We did have to get some input from nutritionists and focus groups. And a few of our stakeholder had to approve the list of ingredients we used. But we think it’s close enough. “Anyway, enjoy.” Continue reading →
