I’m happy that Ludo Studio managed to secure a deal for a feature-length Bluey film, plus attractions in Disney parks. But it’s just another example of how the ABC cannot keep nice things. It happened to Kath and Kim too.

Maybe it’s enough that it’s role is more of a launch pad for good media.

Oof! Almost deleted my Obsidian notes while cleaning out my work laptop. Fortunately it was a simple move to recover. Ended the year with 581 notes, totalling 8.7 MB. Most of these are Daily Notes, of which 214 were created this year. Thus ends the second full year of using Obsidian for work.

Counting down the hours now. 3 to go…

Writing documentation for tools that others will need to run over the Christmas break. I remain convinced that documentation is a great way to spot the usability flaws in the tools I write. The question then turns into one of priorities: should I fix the tool, or just explain the flaws in the docs?

Spending the last few days of the year feeding the dragon. My instructions are clear: I must feed the dragon. The dragon must be fed. At no point should I allow the dragon to go hungry.

(“Dragon” here refers to the system I’m running migrations on, a.la. this Rec Diffs episode)

Lot of interesting thing scheduled for Go 1.24, but this one looks particularly exciting:

The new Text function can be used to generate cryptographically secure random text strings.

You’d be surprised how often I need to generate random strings. Doing so, without installing a third-party package, is always a bit involved; either generating a UUID and stripping the dashes, or doing a Base64 on a random byte slice. To be given a function to do this from the standard library will be most welcome.

If there’s one thing I learnt from all the database querying I’ve been doing today, it’s that all the parallelism in the world doesn’t come close to performing as well as just being physically close to the data.

To remember for next time I open-source a package: the README should have an example on how the package works front and centre. It doesn’t have to be a large, and probably shouldn’t be complicated, but it should show your package doing something useful.

Installation instructions are helpful, but unless they differ from every other package for a language or framework, they’re not super necessary. Your users can probably guess as to how to install your package if they’ve done it before.

But they’ll have no idea how to use your package. What do you need to do to initialise it? What are the major types and methods? What’s the minimum you need to do to get something working?

An example demonstrating these should give enough information about how the package work and how it’s structured. At the very least it will show what the more important types and attributes are, so the user can use that as a launching place while browsing the documentation. But sometimes, if it’s a client for something that the user knows what to expect, a user could probably gauge enough about how it works from the example itself.

So, examples. Have them. Front and centre.

I wonder if a source of my distraction is thinking I can context switch while waiting for something to finish, like a build or a deploy. What actually happens is that I focus on the new task, and completely forget to monitor the thing that needs to finish. This wouldn’t be a problem if it were just me, but more often than not, I need to notify a coworker that the build is ready, so they can test it. I eventually remember to do this, but it’s usually after a longer delay than it would’ve been if I had just waited. And it means my focus is pulled from the new task, resulting in another context switch.

It might be worth trying to avoid context switching altogether, and just wait for things to finish. It does mean more time sitting around monitoring things, but I wonder if it would be faster in the long run.

Might need to move off Spotlight as a launcher. Since upgrading to Sequoia, Spotlight has had trouble indexing the applications I use, blunting it’s usefulness as an application launcher.

So I guess I’ll need to investigate an alternative. Might give Raycast a try.

Gonna complain about the weather for a minute. Meant to be very hot today: 41°C. So despite how awful the weather will be, you try to make the most of it and get your washing done. But does the weather co-operate? Well the band of rain wetting the doona I just put out is not. Frickin’ weather!

I occasionally dip into the Bluesky Discover feed, usually when I’m up to speed with RSS and Mastodon. It doesn’t take long for my hackles to be raised. A lot of discussion about US politics over there. I suppose I could shape it by following people but I’m not sure I’d like to spend the time.

Tried logging into Steam for the first time in years. Couldn’t recover my existing account. Gave up after 5 CAPTCHA attempts and 2 SMS messages and just created a new one.

I’ve also come around to the idea that user names must die. At this point all the decent login names — including my old one — have been taken, and you’re left with one, with numbers or dashes. Ugh! Let’s just settle on email addresses.

Spent the morning tidying up the categories on this blog. My first thought was, as it usually is, to build something to help me do this. But I ended up just doing it manually. I think was the right decision, as it proved to be quite a calming activity.