I tried walking around with a notebook yesterday to… you know… be the type of person that carries a notebook. First attempt did not go well: got in the way of my phone a fair bit. I might try carrying it in my other pocket with my keys.
I used the BBEdit diffing tool for the first time today, and I must say that it’s actually quite good. Shame I didn’t try it sooner. It would have saved me a couple of hours trying to debug the CI/CD problem I’m trying to fix.
The "Too Much Data" Error in Buffalo Projects
If there’s anyone else out there using Buffalo to build web-apps, I just discovered that it doesn’t clean up old versions of bundled JavaScript files. This means that the public/asset directory can grow to gigabytes in size, eventually reaching the point where Go will simply refuse to embed that much data.
The tell-tail sign is this error message when you try to run the application:
too much data in section SDWARFSECT (over 2e+09 bytes)
If you see that, deleting public/assets should solve your problem.
Signed up for an online course this morning, then browsing the web an hour later I found someone else offering another course on the same topic that also looked interesting. Can I sign up to two courses that cover the same thing at once? 🤔
I really dislike code reviews. I admit it. I don’t like doing them, and I don’t like having it done to the code I write. I know this is my ego talking here, but really, sometimes I just want to say to the reviewer “if you don’t like the code as written, why don’t you write it?”
🔗 No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund :focus-visible in Safari (via Daring Fireball)
I see nothing wrong with this. Apple has got their own priority backlog of work for Safari, but the fact that Safari is open source means that if others have different priorities, they have the ability to make these changes to the project directly, should they be capable of doing so. What these other contributors choose to do, and how they choose to decide this, is their business.
I’m not expecting regular users of Safari to understand this distinction between open-source project owners and contributors, but I’d had though that web-developers, whom I imagine deal with open-source software all the time, to know better. So it’s either that those complaining are not aware that Safari is an open-source project, or they do know and are just jumping on the rage bandwagon for whatever reason they may have. If it’s the latter, then I think they’re doing themselves a disservice.
Watching a lot of vintage computing videos recently, it’s staggering how much system “software” was actually burned into ROM. The modern day developer in me feels squeamish about the prospects of releasing something like this, bugs and all, without the ability to change it.
I’m feeling a bit stuck in my career at the moment, and I’m wondering if the thing that’s keeping me from moving to the next level is the fear of being on the hook for something.
A couple of months ago, I put my name down on a waiting list for an online course I thought would be useful for my career. I got an email last night saying that applications open next week and now I’m slightly afraid to enrol. Must be worth doing, just for that reason.
It’s interesting. I’ve lived in Melbourne my whole life, and there are large, large swatches of the metro area that I’ve never seen before. Might be worth exploring some of these places.
One thing that has been lost from all this working from home is the ability to use things like whiteboards to sketch out an idea with a team. I bought an Apple Pencil in 2020 so that I can recreate the experience to some degree in video conferences. Probably one of the most useful things I bought during this pandemic.
Now, if only Apple made it easier to share an iPad screen during these video conferences.
Finished reading: The Dip by Seth Godin 📚
Short book: only took a few hours to get through it. Message is quite simple but will require some courage to apply.
On Posting Daily
I recently listen to an interview with Seth Godin on the Tim Ferris podcast. In that interview, Seth mentions that he writes up to five blog posts a day. He just doesn’t publish them all. I guess that means that he has at least one or two drafts that can be touched up and published when he needs them.
Although I don’t think of this blog as being anywhere near the quality of Seths, I think I’d like to start trying to publish on this site at least once a day. I don’t post to any specific schedule here, and there have been stretches of days in which this blog has not seen an update at all. But over the last week, I’ve found myself falling into a streak, and I like to see how long I can maintain it.
The thing that has thwarted me in the past (apart from not even thinking about it) was either not being in the right frame of mind or not being available that day to post something. I’m not sure this blog warrants the discipline to set a specific time each day to sit down and write something. I treat this blog more or less like a public journal; a place to document thoughts, opinions or events of the day.
But I’m wondering if maintaining an inventory of unpublished drafts might help in maintaining this streak. So even though the goal is to write and publish a post on the same day, having something to fall back on when I can’t might be worthwhile.
At the cafe this morning, someone arrived with a dog that shares the same name as myself. It was surprisingly tricky not to respond to this person issuing commands like “Leon, get down” and “Leon, stop doing that.” 😄
Boosted. 💉💉💉
Also bought a “Moderna muffin” to mark the occasion. (it’s just a chocolate-chip muffin from a nice bakery) 🧁
It’s amusing to see that Google is confident enough in their AI to tell me that I’ve received a SMS message that is spam, yet not quite confident enough not to tell me that I’ve received a SMS message that is spam.
I got a bit of a streak going so I was hoping to post something here today. Only trouble is that I had some nervousness and pessimism preventing me from thinking of topics to write about. It calmed down after some writing it my journal, freeing me up to make this post.
The Future of Computing
I got into computers when I was quite young, and to satisfy my interest, I read a lot of books about computing during my primary school years. I remember one such book that included a discussion about how computing could evolve in the future.
The book approached the topic using a narrative of a “future” scenario, that would probably correspond with today’s present. In that story, the protagonist was late for school because of a fault with the “home computer” regarding the setting of the thermostat or something similar. Upon arriving home from school, he interacted with the computer by speaking to it as if he was talking to another person, expressing his anger of the events that morning by speaking in full, natural-language sentences. The computer responded in kind.
This book was published at a time when most personal computing involved typing in BASIC programs, so you could imagine that a bit of creative license was taken in the discussion. But I remember reading this and being quite ambivalent about this prospective future. I could not imagine the idea of central computers being installed in houses and controlling all aspects of their environment. Furthermore, I balked at the idea of people choosing to interact with these computers using natural language. I’m not much of a people person so the idea of speaking to computers as if it was another person, and having to deal with the computer speaking back, was not attractive to me.
Such is the feeling I have now with the idea of anyone wanting to put on AR and VR headsets. This seems to be the current focus of tech companies like Apple and Google, trying to find the successor to the smartphone. And although nothing from these companies have been announced yet, and these technologies have yet to escape the niche of gaming, I still cannot see a future in which people walk around with these headsets outside in public. Maybe with AR if they can do so in a device that looks like a pair of regular-looking glasses, but VR? No way.
But as soon as I reflected on those feelings, that book I read all those years ago came back to me. As you can probably guess, the future predicted in that story has more-or-less become reality, with the rise of the cloud, home automation, and smart speakers like the Amazon Echo. And more than that, people are using these systems and liking it, or at least putting up with it.
So might the same thing happen with AR and VR headsets. I should probably stay out of the future predicting business.
Shut down one blog this week and moved all the posts into this one. There’s another blog that I haven’t updated for a while, but people are reading it and I’m wondering whether it’s worth bringing it back to life. I only wish I picked a better name for it.
I posit to you that the reason developers find it hard to do anything related with encryption is not because they’re in the weeds of how the algorithms work. Rather, it’s the confusing barrage of acronyms and standards that all reference each other.