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I’m looking forward to the day when I can type
pythonin any command line on any OS, and it will launch Python 3, rather than invoke some crazy dice-roll between two major versions of Python. -
Went out for breakfast again today. Wondered how long I could use my iPad without turning on my mobile hotspot. Lasted pretty well with just cached webpages and NetNewsWire, but had to succumb during my second coffee when I wanted to follow a link.
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A podcast I was listening to mentioned a book that sounded interesting, so I checked the Kindle bookstore to see if I could buy it. Well, not only did I already buy it ages ago, it has been sitting in my library all this time and I barely started reading it.
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Pro-tip for anyone using Vivaldi: you can unbind the “Cmd-Q” keyboard shortcut within Preferences so you don’t accidentally close all your browser windows with a single keystroke, like I just did. 🤦
(A confirmation prompt would be nice, Vivaldi).
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Cookie Disclosure Popups Should be Handled by the Browser
I really dislike the cookie disclosure popups that appear on websites. Ideally I shouldn’t be seeing them at all — I know that the EU requires it, but I’m not a citizen of the EU so the regulation should not apply to me. But I’m pragmatic enough to know that not every web developer can or will selectively show this disclosure popup based on the geographic region of the visitor. Continue reading →
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You know those journals you see in movies where the writer is working on something, and they write down every single thing they do? I’m wondering if I need to start one. There are things I know I’ve done recently when dealing with a problem, but I can never remember the details.
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I wonder if there’s a way to replace MacOS’s pretty ordinary spellcheck suggestions with a straight up web-search for “define <miss-spelt word>” and getting the first result. Doing this using DuckDuckGo seems to yield the word I was trying to spell almost every time.
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My Impressions of GitHub Codespaces
The GitHub Universe 2021 conference started a few days ago and one of the features touted in the day one keynote was GitHub Codespaces. This is a development environment that is accessible from within your web browser. It’s based on VSCode, which is a popular and well-designed IDE that is already written in JavaScript1, and also provides access to a Linux shell running in the cloud, allowing you to do various things like build and test your code. Continue reading →
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Alto Catalogue Update
I’ve really tied myself up in knots here. I’m spending some time working on Alto Catalogue, trying to streamline the process of uploading individual tracks into a new album. This is a workflow that is absolutely not user friendly at the moment, and the only way I’ve gotten tracks into the catalogue is to run a hacked-together tool to upload the tracks from the command line. The reason why I’m addressing this now is that it’s slightly embarrassing to have this open-source project without having a nice way of doing something that, by all accounts, is quite fundamental (a good hint for when you’re facing this is when it comes time to write the end-user documentation: if you can’t explain how to do something in a way that doesn’t include the word “hack”, “complicated”, or “unsupported”, then something is missing). Continue reading →
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Today is starting out reasonably quietly. All the big development work is done and the only tasks left are the little annoying things, the “bottom of the backlog barrel” if you will. Still, won’t be long before the next major feature comes our way.
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A Tool That (Almost) Solved My Step Function Woes
I reached the end of my tether at work today on the task I was working on. The nature of the task involved crafting an AWS Step Function with several steps. Each step on the critical path contained some error handling, and several of them contained some cleanup logic, that had to be called by a bunch of other steps. This cleanup sequence is relatively complicated, and I’ve raised a number of PR’s to my colleagues which have come back with requests for change. Continue reading →
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Thinking over the NaNoWriMo short story I’m working on, there seems to be a lot scenes with characters just sitting around and talking. It’s in danger of turning into a Star Wars prequel. 😄
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Really enjoying Succession season 3 at the moment, but I’m afraid I’m one of those viewers that gets a little lost in all the business jargon. Fortunately, the Succession podcast really helps here, breaking down what actually happened in the episode.
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Thought I’d give omg.lol a try this morning. My profile page. Looks a lot nicer than what I could come up with.
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For the last month, I was having trouble installing software on my work laptop because I thought I lost admin privileges. But it turns out it was just because I was using my username in the password prompt, instead of my full name.
Why, Apple? Why did you not take my username?
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Feeds In Broadtail
My quest to watch YouTube without using YouTube got a little closer recently with the addition of feeds in Broadtail. This uses the YouTube RSS feed endpoint to list videos recently added to a channel or playlist. There are a bunch of channels that I watch regularly but I’m very hesitant to subscribe to them within YouTube itself (sorry YouTubers, but I choose not to smash that bell icon). I’m generally quite hesitant to give any signal to YouTube about my watching habits, feeding their machine learning models even more information about myself. Continue reading →
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It’s a bit strange how the stopwatch on the NaNoWriMo site doesn’t automatically fill in start and end times. It knows when I start the stopwatch. It knows when I stop the stopwatch. And yet, I still need to enter these times myself.
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Some days I wonder why I ever considered being a software developer. 😒
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It’s said that it’s a good idea not to blog while your angry. I think that’s good advice. After all, there’s already a lot of anger out there and no-one needs any more.
But I need to vent somewhere. So watch out journal!
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YAML and Accidental Programming Language Design
I’m not a huge fan of YAML in general, but I do see it being useful for situations when a structured configuration language is needed. Something for which JSON would normally be used, but where human readability and maintainability is important. What I don’t like is seeing YAML being used as a way to define a sequence of actions. I complained about Step Functions, but just as annoying is the various CI/CD services that use YAML as the means of defining the build sequence. Continue reading →
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I’ve manage to get the first 1,000 words out of my NaNoWriMo-adjacent goal of a 10,000 word short story. I’m sure they’re pretty crappy words at the moment, but at least they’re on the page.
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I really like to support independent software developers, but $150.00 for a file diffing tool is a bit much. The tool does a lot, like diffing images, but I don’t need any of that. If they release a text-only diff/merge version for like $30-50, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
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Some Screenshots Of Broadtail
I spent some time this morning doing some styling work on Broadtail, my silly little YouTube video download manager I’m working on. Now, I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a designer. And these designs look a little dated, but, surprisingly, this is sort of the design I’m going for: centered pages, borders, etc. A bit of a retro, tasteless style that may be ugly, but still usable(-ish). Continue reading →
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I had the opportunity to go out for breakfast this morning. I was originally going to get it as takeaway, but it was such a lovely morning (if not a bit cold) and with some tables available outside, I figured “what the hell”. It’s nice to be able to do stuff like this again.
