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🔗 A big bet to kill the password for good
Lot of talk about getting the user experience/OS compatability right, which is good. But I see no real indication on how they’re going to get the millions of app/website developers to switch to this. Hope they’ve considered that.
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I may need to shake up my podcast listening habits a little.
I subscribe to several tech-based podcasts which I regularly listen to. But because I am a creature of habit, I only listen to each one during certain times of the week. Plus I’m finding that I can only take so much tech talk these days, and I need some other topic to listen to.
I also subscribe to some long form, analysis based podcasts which cover a broad range of subjects, but they don’t come out on a regular schedule. So in order to “fill in the gaps”, I usually turn to some specific news based podcasts. They do come out regularly, but the news of late has been a bit anxiety inducing, and I may need take a little break from them.
So I think my regular podcast listening rotation needs something new. Might be time to start throwing in some microcasts from fellow Micro-blogers into the mix.
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A snapshot of the indie-web style project mentioned yesterday:
This is just static HTML and JavaScript at the moment. The idea is that each of these “cards” can be rearranged by direct manipulation. So I spent most of this morning trying to get drag and drop working in JavaScript.
After hooking up
dragenteranddragleaveevent listeners to the Stimulus controllers bound to each of the cards, I found that the controllers were getting enter and leave events continuously as the dragged element was moved over them. These enter and leave events occurred almost immediately, making it difficult to indicate a drop-zone just by reacting to the events themselves. Setting a class on enter and then removing that class immediately on leave meant that the class was never shown.Turns out this is because the events were being sent for all the subelements of the card. Moving the dragged element from the card padding to the text field resulted in an enter event for text field, followed immediately by a leave event on the card element.
This means that in order to do any form of indication, some element tracking is required. I’m currently using a counter to do that, which will increment by one when a
dragenterevent is received and decrement by 1 ondragleave. It sort of works — I’ve got to fix it when the drop event occurs — but I get super concerned about the counter getting out of sync and the indicator being stuck “on” when the dragged element is completely outside it.One other thing I could try is having some form of set tracking each of the entered and exited elements and using the set length to determine whether to show the indicator. I trust that the browser will guarantee that a
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We were hoping for a game of bocce in Argyle Square, which has a bocce pitch. But alas!
Beaten there by some Grand Prix event. 🙁
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Code Review Software Sucks. Here's How I Would Improve It
This post is about code reviews, and the software that facilitates them. I’ll be honest: I’m not a huge fan of code reviews, so a lot of what I speak of below can probably be dismissed as that from someone who blames their tools. Be that as it may, I do think there is room for improvements in the tooling used to review code, and this post touches on a few additional features which would help. Continue reading →
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Revising the micro-bulk-uploader project. I’ve been reading a lot about IndieAuth and Micropub formats and I got really excited about it. I figured this would be a good project to try them.
In short, this is a bulk image uploader. It’s primarily tailored for Micro.blog, but since these formats are standards in a way, there’s no real reason why it couldn’t work for other services.
Basically, the idea is this:
- User authenticates with their website.
- They are presented with a set of file uploads, which they can used to prep their images. They can reorder their images (ideally using drag-and-drop) and write some alt text.
- Once they’re happy with the images, they click “Upload”.
- The server will upload the images and then generate the HTML to produce a gallery (or just a list of images if they so prefer).
I have a few goals for this project:
- To ship a hosted service for others to use. The goal is to get into the practice of shipping software for other people. This is the principal goal: it must be usable by others. Otherwise, there’s no point doing this.
- To get a working version out the door in two weeks for others to start trying. Two weeks is April 1st, which should be achievable.
- To learn about the Indypub formats, specifically IndieAuth and Micropub.
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I forgot that yesterday was St. Patricks Day. But I did wear a green polo, listened to some Celtic inspired music, and watched a few episodes of Derry Girls last night. Does that mean I accidentally celebrated St. Patricks Day? ☘️
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Sometimes I wish I had the patients (and the hardware) to play some of the video games indies have been releasing. After reading about them, or watching a speed-run, I see that there some that are actually quite incredible. There are some really talented game designers out there.
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Reading the chapter on Microformats in Indie Microblogging brought me back to uni where we were taught about the Semantic Web. I tell you, I feel exhausted just thinking about it now.
All these standards: RDF, OWLS, tautologies, and like seven other acronyms I’ve sinced forgotten. Each one building on top of the other like a gigantic wedding cake. And oh yeah, all of them using XML1 and requiring seven different namespaces and five different forms of URI’s to express even the most basic relationship.
It was the only part of the subject that didn’t seem fun. HTML? CSS? Great, sign me up! Keeping seven different XML files up to date when a relationship changes? No, thank you.
If there was ever an instance of technologists overengineering a solution without considering how it would be used to solve the problem, the Semantic Web is a great example.
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RDF did have a non-XML representation but I do remember being told that using it was discourage in favour of the XML standard. ↩︎
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An important tenet of software development that I don’t think is appreciated that much: make your software easy to test. This includes building tests, test setup, running tests, configuration for testing, etc. If you don’t do this, your software will not be tested.
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Happy “generics finally in Go” day.
(I wouldn’t call myself someone who was itching for the Go devs to add generics; but now that they are in the language, I’ll probably use them).
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Broadtail 0.0.7
Released Broadtail 0.0.7 about a week ago. This included some restyling of the job list on the home page, which now includes a progress bar updated using web-sockets (no need for page refreshes anymore). For the frontend, the Websocket APIs that come from the browser are used. There’s not much to it — it’s managed by a Stimulus controller which sets up the websocket and listen for updates. The updates are then pushed as custom events to the main window, which the Stimulus controllers used to update the progress bar are listening out for. Continue reading →
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Learning Through Video
Mike Crittenden wrote a post this morning about how he hates learning through videos. I know for myself that I occasionally do prefer videos for learning new things, but not always. Usually if I need to learn something, it would be some new technology that I have to know for my job. In those cases, I find that if I have absolutely no experience in the subject matter, a good video which provides a decent overview of the major concepts helps me a great deal. Continue reading →
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A pretty good introduction about the fundamentals of Kubernetes, and also the post in question here.
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I was ask today by someone at work1 if I knew of a good post describing the fundamentals of Kubernetes. I remember reading one several months ago which explained the fundamentals quite well to me, and thought it would be helpful for this person as well. But I forgot to bookmark the link.
I probably should have realised at the time that it would have been a good post to bookmark. I guess I was hoping to rely on the browser’s history, but as far as I can tell, the history in Vivaldi only goes back three or four months. I felt the post was useful enought to spend some time finding it again.
As you can imagine, doing a straight search for anything on Kubernetes in either Google or DuckDuckGo would result in nothing helpful, since there are roughly a bajillion posts on Kubernetes out there on the internet. But I did remember that the author actually released a simple, for-pay image sharing application, and announced it on Hacker News.
So I did a DuckDuckGo search for “site:ycombinator.com image hosting single person.” Amazingly the Hacker News post was the top hit. This eventually led me to the app in question, which eventually led me to this person’s blog, and after one more DuckDuckGo search, eventually to the post itself.
It took a good 20 minutes find this post once more, and I was honestly unsure whether I would have been about to find it at all. I’m bookmarking it now so that it may never2 be lost again.
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Finished reading: Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod 📚
Another book full of thought provoking advice that could be read in a weekend.
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Hard to get out of old habits. I’ve started reading Indie Microblogging by Manton today. So far a terrific read — which natually means that I stopped so that I can save it for “later”. Really need to just finish reading what I find interesting now.
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This is by far the most useful quick action I’ve made in Automator. It generates a UUID, and places it in the pasteboard. I’ve got it bound to Ctrl+Opt+Cmd+U and I’ve been using it constantly over the last week (writing a lot of tests with test data).
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I think it’s time to close the “Untitled Summer Project”, the service I was working on to upload files to S3 for publishing on Drummer.
The goal — despite not being entirely public — was to have a service that could be used by others to upload images to S3 for the purpose of publishing them to their blog, particularly blogs published using Drummer and served through Old School. I was hoping to have something that I could share with others by the end of Summer.
Well, now it’s Autumn, and I’ve made very little progress on it since early February. So it’s time to cut my losses and shut it down.
I think there were a number of factors that resulted in the failure of this project:
- I wasn’t using it enough to get excited about it. I mean, I was using to manage my uploaded pictures for workingset.net, but I was only doing so occasionally.
- Apart from not using it, I wasn’t getting much out of the project itself. There wasn’t anything exciting about the project from a purely coding standpoint (apart from doing image resizing in the browser using WASM, which might come in handy for some other projects), and if I was getting nothing from using the project myself, there was no other intrinsic motivation to continue working on it.
- I was planning to move on from Drummer and Old School as a blogging platform. I figured giving write.as a try, which also has image hosting, so there was no real need for it anymore.
I think what I need to do for any project that I hope to share with others, I need to share it with others much earlier than when I was originally planning to. I think that feedback from others using it is important for driving the project forward, particularly if I am not getting that drive from using it myself.
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Here’s another clip of the echidna, taken from the same 2 minute video I took yesterday. It’s also the third video of wildlife looking for food that I’ve posted on this blog. Is a trend forming I wonder? 🤔
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Went for my afternoon walk yesterday, and saw an echidna looking for food. That doesn’t happen every day, so it seemed like a good subject for a video.
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Wondering if I could part with A$ 10,000.00 on a souped up Mac Studio. Very tempting, but that’s a fair bit of money.
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I’m looking for a new CMS for my side-project journal, which is currently on Drummer and Old School. I’m looking at write.as as a possible contender, and so far it looks promising.
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My printed Day One journals for 2021 have arrived, much quicker than I expected. They came out nicely. I think paper covers are the way to go — they feel much better to flip through than the hard cover one I have for 2020.
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I was reminded about the post on streaming apps by John Siracusa when I was browsing Apple Maps today. Do you know that after a search, it takes three taps to dismiss the sidebar, reveling the actual thing I want to see — the map? Do these taps count as “engagement”? 😒