Heading back to Melbourne today after my 2.5 weeks in Canberra. Going to have to say goodbye to these two for a little while. Must say that my stay has been fun. Even though I’ve been working, it felt like a bit of a holiday.
Discovered the Causality podcast after listening to an episode of Reconcilable Differences. The subject matter — engineering disasters and what caused them — might be grim, but I think it’s helpful for people working in engineering, or software in that matter, to hear about them once in a while. After all, what we build will eventually be used by people, and the safety and usability of our creations can affect real lives.
Got blocked on how I to fix a problem encountered with the current task I’m doing for work. Always helpful to go back to the approach of “make it work, make it right, make it fast” in order to clear the blockage. May have generated a better way to actually do the task as well.
🔗 Internet Explorer was once synonymous with the Internet, but today it’s gone for good
So long, Internet Explorer. We sadly knew you all too well.
Worth pointing out that support for an “IE compatibility mode” won’t be removed from Edge until 2029, so can we really say that IE is dead?
Got to –4.5°C last night. As you can imagine, things were pretty frosty this morning.
Honour, Democracy, and Galati: A Day in Canberra
Since being in Canberra, I haven’t really done anything “touristy”. Given that today was a public holiday, I figured it was as good a time as ever to do so. So I decided to spend the day visiting a couple of national landmarks, plus something I’ve been planning to do since returning to Canberra.
The War Memorial
The first time I’ve ever been in Canberra was during Christmas holidays in 2007 my family. During that time, Mum and Dad and my two sisters went to the War Memorial and Parliament House, while I stayed in our rented town-house. The reason why I stayed back was a little embarrassing: I claimed that I was tired, but this was during a weird period where I didn’t really want to be seen doing something touristy (I’ve mostly got over this feeling). Not going when I had the chance was something I’ve regretted since that day. Well, today I make amends with at least one of these, with a visit to the War Memorial.
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Old Parliament House
Following my visit to the War Memorial and a brief lunch at the Poppy Cafe, it was time to visit Old Parliament House, and the Museum of Australian Democracy.
Following this was a brief walk around the gardens.
The City, And Galati
My final stop was the city. Why? Well, during my visit in April, we found a really nice galati place where we stayed, and since knowing that I would be back in June, I made it a point, in half jest, to return. When talking to Mum and Dad on the phone, they asked if I have fulfilled this promise. So since I was nearby, it felt like the perfect time to do so.
Despite how sunny it was, it was still quite cold. But even so, that galati hit the spot.
Ivy’s discovered the vessel I drink from and wants in on it.
P.S. Ivy doing this actually reminds me of this post from @martinfeld.
I’m toying around with the idea of building something to help me upload multiple photos to Micro.blog and easily produce a gallery. I’m hoping for this thing to work in both Android and macOS. After watching a few Google IO sessions this year, I hear that Flutter can now build macOS applications, so that seems like the best framework to try. There’s even a package that offers macOS looking controls.
I took a brief look at the online demo and I’m quite impressed by how close they get to real macOS controls. Buts just like CGI faces, there’s a bit of an uncanny valley associated with them, in that they look so close to native macOS controls but it’s clear that they’re not.
I wonder whether it’s worth going with this control-set regardless, or whether it’s better leaning in to the fact that this won’t be a Mac-assed Mac app and going with something completely different.
Afternoon Walk Around Lake Ginninderra
Went for an walk around Lake Ginninderra this afternoon. Well, not “around” the lake: that walk would have taken a while. But I did walk along the path that would take me around the lake for about 30 minutes, then walked back again. Below are a few photos I took.
Archie loves head-scratches. In fact, when I reach my hand into the cage to let him out, he doesn’t immediately perch on it. Instead, he bows his head expecting me to scratch it.
My Evening
So here’s how I spent my evening:
Watching the WWDC state of the union until the DNS resolver konked out in the WiFi router, causing the Chromecast to get into a state in which it could no longer connect to the network, resulting in about 10 minutes of troubleshooting before deceiding to clean up, not go to the gym, spend another 10 minutes trying to troubleshoot the issue, then stared at my laptop for about half an hour wondering whether to go back to troubleshooting the Chromecast, or doing something else with the hope that it would eventually work itself out.
Eventually, after another 5 minutes of fruitless troubleshooting, I finally got the Chromecast fixed by doing a factory reset and connected it to the 2.4 GHz band.
Anyway, I hope your evening was more productive than mine.
(And I was worried I would have nothing to write about today.)
This is a little embarrassing, but it was only just yesterday that I learnt that tanukis are an actual species of animal. And they look adorable.
Writing documentation for your project can be a bit of a humbling experience. You encounter all the holes in your functionality, maybe find out that it’s not as easy to get started as you first thought. Of course it takes an attempt at explaining the thing you’re building for you to realise all this.
I guess that makes writing the docs all the more valuable, so that you can find all these shortcomings and fix them. Might even be worth writing the docs before you write the code. That way, you can avoid them altogether. Sort of like TDD but with documentation (DDD?)
The names for GitHub Codespaces are randomly generated, but I kinda like the one chosen for this website repo. Seems fitting in a way.
I gotta admit: the most exciting announcement I saw from WWDC 2022 was the FreeForm app, with the ability to share boards with others. Hopefully now I can ditch the QuickTime Player technique for sharing hand-drawn diagrams on Slack calls.
I’m always torn between using a tool I wrote to draw sequence diagrams for work vs. using the “built-in” diagramming tool of the wiki software uses. On the one hand, having diagrams that others can modify is probably a good thing. On the other, dealing with this point-and-click software for drawing sequence diagrams is a huge pain, a part of the reason why I built the tool in the first place.
These little fellas just love going for the keyboard and mouse when they’re out with me. Maybe, with a bit of training, I might be able to get them to do my work for me. 🤔
The Powerline Track Walk
Went on a walk of the Powerline Track, which I was personally calling the “powerline walk” (yes, I’m impressed at how close I was). I saw this trail when I was in Canberra earlier this year, and knowing that I would be back, I made a note to actually walk it, which I did today. This track follows the powerlines just south of Aranda Bushland Nature Reserve, then goes under Gungahlin Drive and into the Black Mountain Nature Reserve. The weather was cold but pleasant, at least at the start of the track. It eventually got quite dark and a little wet near the end, but that did result in some nice winter lighting over the landscape.
Here’s a gallery of some of the photos I took. Note that there’s a fair few of powerlines, which is something I’ve been drawn to ever since I was a little kid.
Now that the May Photoblogging Challenge is over, I need to come up with my own topics to post about again. How did I do this in April?