Reached the point in my life where I can buy a pair of runners online with the knowledge that I’ll feel comfortable in them. My feet have stopped growing ages ago, and I know which brand and model I like, so I can just continue buying the same thing. A positive development.
Working on a component design. Need to add a parameter which will store a single event type, like user-created. But with software systems being what they are — where what you’ve built is worth twice as much as what you’re planning to build — there’s always a chance that this simple value will be extended in some way. Say that it needs to be a list of event types (user create and delete events) or characteristics of the events will need to be configured (are we interested in getting all user create events, or only those for users of a particular type). What to do?
I could go with JSON right now, making the value something like {"events": ["user-delete"]}. But that feels like overkill at this time. There’s no guarantee that what we’re building will ever need something as advanced as this. And the price of locking us into JSON now is that it’ll make configuring and reading these values more tedious than it needs to be.
So I’m opting for a simple string value now. If it needs to be extended to something more structured, I’ll use something like comma separated values. Sure it’s one more “ad-hoc mini-language” that’ll be added to the pile, but I think there’s value in keeping things simple now. The effort that may come from building a customer parser for comma separated values seems like a cost worth paying now. And if it does ever get unwieldily, we can always move to JSON down the road.
And just from a personal perspective, part of me is resisting the immediate turn to JSON whenever we need to represent structured data. It feels like no-one builds mini-languages anymore. And yeah, I see the reason why: no need to build parsers, and “everyone” knows how to work with JSON. Still this lack of diversity feels a little sad.
Trying to get over a blocked ear that I’ve had for a week and a half. I think it’s slowly improving, but each stage seems to introduce other annoyances. Today it’s the burst of static I hear whenever I cough. I guess it’s better than last week, when the ear just remained blocked regardless of what I did.
Looking for a new project to work on. I kinda want to give Unity a try, maybe look at making a game of sorts. How I’m going to get the artwork made is anyone’s guess though. Goodness knows I can’t draw it. 🤷
Update: Ok, decided against working on a Unity project. Working on Alto Catalogue instead.
After following a few Mastodon users, the Micro.blog timeline is beginning to feel like my main social feed. I’m being really conservative in who I follow though. The anxiety that came from consuming Twitter’s timeline is one that I rather not recreate here.
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:
I don’t know why Tumblr is generating RSS items this way. I can only imagine that it’s something to do with the mistaken belief that RSS items require titles. But even if that’s the case, has it not cross their minds just how ugly these posts would look in a feed-reader if the quote is more than a sentence long? Could they have done something like truncate the title? Or is it not a priority to them?
In any case, if they do decided to fix this, may I suggest simply adding the quote part within a <blockquote> at the start of the RSS item, while leaving the title unset.
An arguably better reading experience for your RSS audience. Or at the very least, it would look closer to what the post would look like in Tumblr itself.
A Mac with everything you’d want in 1995.
A fully loaded version of System 9 running in your browser. Posted here because I found myself opening and playing around with this over the last few days.
(via. podiboq in the Hemispheric Views Discord)
It’s debatable whether or not frequently posting here has improved my writing. I suspect not so much, given that I mainly write micro-posts here. But I have found myself speaking more clearly than I use to, and I’m wondering if posting here has help that in some small way.
Ok, I’m probably the only person that feels this way, but I not a fan of all the “yearly wrapped” things that apps like Spotify and now Pocketcasts are offering. To me it just shows how much of your listening behaviour that’s being tracked (the degree to which I’m concerned about this varies from app to app). Besides, I’m not sure how much I’d like to know about my revealed listening preferences. I think I’d like to leave some room for “mystery” (read, personal denial) in that domain. 🙂
Playing around with location services in a Flutter app. Pretty straight forward getting something up and working, which is something I like about Flutter, but I wish Dart was a better language. I mean it’s fine, but it’s not a language I can fall in love with.
The weather has been cycling between summer and winter all week. A few days ago it was 33°C and I had the AC on. Today it’s max 18°C and I’ve got the heater on. For someone still recovering from Covid-19, the weather’s not doing any favours.
Two things occurred to me after reading the Stratechery weekly article about ChatGPT.
First, it might be a good time to read Gödel, Escher, Bach again. From my last read of it — which was ages ago — I do remember something about how a (theoretical at the time) advanced AI systems would not have the same level of determinism as a traditional computer. The conversation may feel natural, but it may include factual inaccuracies. This was a theme that seems to run through from the weekly article as well.
Second, I wish I did better at AI in university. It was the only subject that I almost failed at. At the time, once I got over my disappointment, I sort of waved it away with the expectation that AI would not be a predominant part of the software development industry during my career. How wrong I was. 😬
Made a telemedicine call for the first time last night (I caught Covid-19 and developed an ear infection) and I’m quite impressed by how pain-free the whole thing was. Doctor called up, asked a few diagnostic questions, and sent through a perscription via SMS. Whole think took a few minutes.
I wonder if it would work for perscription renewals as well.
And after one last 15 hour flight, I’m back home. And I get to stay home for more than a week. After almost a month living out of my suitcase, I’ve been looking forward to this.
Went on a tour to see the Hoover Dam this morning. What an impressive feat of engineering.
Equally impressive was the bridge where the first shot was taken.
The amusing — and quite frankly, obvious — thing about everyone moving to Mastodon and the Fediverse is that it demonstrates that you don’t need to include a frickin’ blockchain to every system designed to be “distributed.”
🎵 Twenty Four Hours from Café Del Chillia
Effectively intermission music but I have found myself liking it. I do, however, think that with just a few tweaks it could be much better. Changing the base line so that it no longer clashes with the melody, for example.
Follow up to this post about Kindle books that are only available in the US. Apparently it’s not enough to just be in the US, with a suitable IP address. I think you’ll need an actual US postal address. What a shame. This is not a problem with real books. 😞