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🔗 A delightful reference for HTML Symbols, Entities and ASCII Character Codes
A great reference site I stumbled along when I was trying to find the perfect arrow to include in a webpage. Nice, clean, and quite comprehensive. No awful ads either, which is a breath of fresh air.
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Dynamo-Browse: Using The Back-Stack To Go Forward
More work on Audax toolset. Reengineered the entire back-stack in dynamo-browse to support going forward as well as backwards, much like going forward in a web-browser. Previously, when going back, the current “view snapshot” was being popped off the stack and lost forever (a “view snapshot” is information about the currently viewed table, including the current query and filter if any are set). But I’d need to maintain these view snapshot if I wanted to add going forward as well. Continue reading →
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One thing I miss about working in Java is that the JVM comes out of the box with an interactive debugger. With just a few switches, you can enable a remote debugging session without having to do anything special with your build.
As far as I can tell, such a thing is not possible in Go, at least by default. This means that if you need to debug something running in something like Kubernetes, you either need to bundle something like
delvein your container — which might not be possible if you don’t control the entire build pipeline — or you’re out of luck and need to resort to print-level debugging. -
I wonder if people who say they hate bagpipes are actually saying they don’t like the music traditionally played with bagpipes. I’m not one that likes that sort of music either. But Mike Oldfield is a favourite artist of mine, and he’s not afraid of using a fair bit of bagpipe.
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Went to the Union Club Hotel, in Collingwood, with a few friends for dinner tonight. Apparently quite popular with footy fans, which I did not know: there was a group that was quite roudy when I arrived. Fortunately things settled down when we ate dinner, which was pretty good.
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Day One needs a “this time one day ago” section, where you look at the entries from yesterday, realised you’ve made all these spelling and grammatical errors, and you go ahead and fix them. I sure know I can make use of such a feature.
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Adding Copy-To-Clipboard And Layout Changes In Dynamo-Browse
Spent some more time on dynamo-browse this morning, just a little bit. Got one new feature built and merged to main, which is the ability to copy the displayed item to the pasteboard by pressing c. This is directly inspired by a feature in K9S, which allows you to copy the logs of a running pod to the pasteboard (I use this feature all the time). The package I’m using to access the pasteboard is github. Continue reading →
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Turning Off Shared Command History in Oh My Zsh
TL,DR: add “unsetopt share_history” to your .zshrc file I’ve been using Oh My Zsh at work for a few months. As far as terminal config managers go, this one works pretty well. But the default configuration does include something which I found quite annoying. First, a few words on how I use the terminal. I’m in the terminal constantly in my day to day. At the start of the day, I’m creating terminal tabs and running commands to do things like build the project I’m working on, start a testing session, etc. Continue reading →
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Discovered something cool on the ATP website. If you play old shows while logged in as a member, you actually get those from the members feed instead of the public one. Not sure if I’m the last person to find this out, but chalk me up as someone delighted by this little feature.
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I started seeing job ads for “Blockchain Engineer” on LinkedIn recently. I have no interest in such roles. But I was curious, so I clicked into one to see what it actually entails. Now, LinkedIn is emailing me similar web3 roles, thinking that I’m interested.
Serves me right. 🤦
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Dad and I have been watching YouTube cab-rides of the NYC subway system recently. Part of the fun is trying to understand the various track configurations and how the system operates. The size of the network never ceases to amaze.
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I had the opportunity to meet up with someone I use to work with at the Bureau of Meterology this morning.
I left the Bureau about five years ago, and although I didn’t work with this person on a daily basis, our two teams were reasonably close. One advantage of working in the team that manages the message switching service (MSS) is that you tend to have dealings with many other teams that need to shuffle data around. This person belong to one such team. He dealt with with software related to severe weather, and the alerts produced by them had to be ferried around by out team.
We talked a little about the Bureau. There have been people that have retired or moved on but the team I use to work with is still largely intact. We talked a little about the project that was meant to have replaced the home grown MSS that our team was responsible for. The goal was to replace it with a commercial, off the shelf package sold by a firm that specialises in software for met services. This was meant to have happened roughly a year or two after I left, way back in 2017. But it turns out that this MSS system will not go quietly. Given how tailored it is to the general operations of the Bureau, replacing it proved way too difficult, and it seemed like those that were trying to do so have given up in defeat, at least for the moment. And I get it, nothing lasts for ever, and eventually this MSS system will have to be replaced by something. But even so, it’s good to hear that it’s still around.
And yes, I asked about the admin tool I built. It’s still being used, and indications seem to be that people still like using it.
I was pleased to hear that. Talking about it this morning bought me back to that particular project. I had fond memories working on it. It was fun, and I was proud of what I was able to build. And yet, despite how difficult it was to step away from it, I can’t help think that doing so was the right decision. Staying on that project would not have help me grow professionally. I’ve learnt so much since then, and feel like a much better developer, thanks to moving on and trying different things. Well, it’s good to have the memories.
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Adding A Back-Stack To Dynamo-Browse
Spent some more time working on dynamo-browse, this time adding a back-stack. This can be used to go back to the previously viewed table, query or filter by pressing the Backspace key, kind of like how a browser back button works. This is the first feature that makes use of a workspace, which is a concept that I’ve been thinking about since the start of the project. A workspace is basically a file storing various bits of state that could be recalled in future launches of the tool. Continue reading →
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Facinating website for the casual Melbourne train buff. A lot of great photos of rail infrastructure, plus what appears to be routine “photos from 10 years ago” posts, which brings me back. Link via my dad.
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The electrification of large vehicles is continuing. For the first time, I just saw and not heard an EV bus. Must say that seeing a bus accelerate out of a roundabout without hearing a loud diesel engine was a unique experience.
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It’s funny seeing marking images of devices intended for “work”. There’s always one shot featuring either a graph or a spreadsheet.
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Just had an hour long Slack call with someone who was drafting a huge list of tasks in a single Slack message. Thank goodness Slack didn’t fall over, or we would have lost an hour of work. Talk about living on the edge.
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MacOS’s virtualisation framework looks interesting and I’d like to get my hands on it. Problem is that I have an Intel mac and it only works on Apple silicon. Now I’m wondering if I’m interested enough to actually open my wallet for it.
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More On Scripting In Dynamo-Browse
Making some more progress on the adding scripting of dynamo-browse. It helps being motivated to be able to write some scripts for myself, just to be able to make my own working life easier. So far the following things can be done within user scripts: Define new commands Display messages to, and get input from, the user Read the attributes of, and set the attributes of, the currently selected row (only string attributes at this stage) Run queries and get result sets, which can optionally be displayed to the user Here’s a modified example of a script I’ve been working on that does most of what is listed above: Continue reading →
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Currently enjoying the sound of an eastern rosella singing it’s heart out, helping to make a long tiring week just that little bit easier to deal with.
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It wasn’t that long ago where a Google search would return useful results that were not found by either Ecosia or DuckDuckGo. That’s really not happening as often nowadays. In fact, if Ecosia/DDG cannot find anything, there’s very little reason to bother trying Google at all.
