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A lot is said about AWS offering so many services in exchange for some of them being half-baked. I just wish they baked a few of the ones I’m using a little longer.
I’m dealing with a Step Function which includes a task that updates a record in DynamoDB. With Step Functions, the output of one task becomes the input of another, sort of how pipes work in Unix. But this DynamoDB update task produces an output that is really unhelpful: a lot of internal reference IDs and headers that are useless to me, and nothing of the record I’m trying to update.
I guess this means I’ll be adding workarounds in order to make this Step Function work.
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I know how frustrating it is to work with JSON for configuring things, but sometimes YAML can be just as bad. Surely there are better configuration languages we could be using than these two.
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That feeling when you have to do something that you’ve not only done before, but you’ve actually written a blog post about; and you use that post to accomplish the task in a 10th of the time in took you the first time around. 😌
See also: Stack Overflow answers.
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(Hyper)critical Acclaim
There were a couple of events that led me to writing this post. I’m sure part of it was seeing the posts on the 10 year anniversary of Steve Jobs, although such an event would probably not have been sufficient in itself. What tipped it over the edge was seeing the Ars Technica review of iOS showing up in my RSS feed on the same day. Pretty soon I’m expecting the MacOS review to drop as well. Continue reading →
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The eternal struggle of an Android phone owner (based on a true story):
Website: Hey, check out this cool new app.
Me: Looks interesting. Where’s the link to it in Google Play?
Website: Sorry, iOS only.
Me: 😿
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So Facebook has an outage and now every software engineer in the world knows a bit more about how the internet is put together as they read up on how BGP and DNS actually work.
CloudFlare has a pretty good post about the outage. There’s also this video which talks about BGP.
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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been driving Confluence at work, doing investigations and writing them up. It’s nice getting these tasks occasionally but too much of it does become tedious. So when I saw a coding task in the backlog, I jumped on it.
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This week’s earworm: Who Can It Be Now by Men At Work 🎵
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On Choosing the Hard Way Forward
This is about work, so the usual disclaimers about opinions being my own, etc. apply here. I have an interesting problem in front of me at the moment: I’ve need to come up with a way to be notified when a user connects to, or disconnects from, a PostgreSQL database. This is not something that’s supported by PostgreSQL out of the box1, so my options are limited to building something that sits outside the database. Continue reading →
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Apparently my phone carrier is pretty good at promptly sending SMS messages with “offers” or “deals”, but as soon as I need to sign into a website with 2FA, they’re quite happy for the message to take 5 or 10 minutes to get to me. 😒
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There’s no better aroma than a freshly opened bag of coffee beans.
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Small request to developers of command line tools: please do not assume everyone is using a terminal with a dark background. Light grey text on white is not a good user experience.
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Listening to podcasts with automatic ad insertion can be really jarring sometimes. You’re listening along to hosts with American accents, then all of a sudden some Aussie butts in with an offer for something. It always takes me off guard.
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Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, […], is gibberish to many modern students.
Kids these days. 😄
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Well, not every day you had a 5.8 magnitude earthquake around here (was originally reported as 6.0).
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I got a bit restless this morning and just eager to get my second vaccine shot, so I’ve put together a maxination countdown to show me how many days I’ve got to wait. I’ll probably be spending most of the next month looking at it.
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I had the opportunity to play Wingspan yesterday. Still in the process of learning it — I don’t play a lot of these sorts of board games — but so far it’s been quite enjoyable. There’s also an extension which includes Australian and New Zealand birds which would be fun to try.
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Some Notes About the Covid-19 Situation
Now that the vaccines are here and are (slowly) being rolled out, and that Covid zero is no longer achievable in any realistic sense, the pandemic seems to be taking on a bit of a different vibe at the moment. I am no longer religiously watching the daily press conferences as I did in the past. They’re still occurring as far as I know, and I do appreciate that the authorities are showing up every day once again to brief the public. Continue reading →
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You would have thought that by working from home for a year and a half, and predominantly communicating through text, that my writing skills would improve in some way. After re-reading a pull-request comment I wrote 5 minutes ago, I’m wondering if there’s been any change at all.
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It’s a real shame that the powers that be insist on keeping the arcane stupidity of country-based copyright restrictions with the move to digital products. Why can’t I buy a Kindle version of a book because the country code in a database is AU instead of US? So frustrating!
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AWS Lambda function names can only be 64 characters long.
- 23 characters are used for the stack name
- 25 characters are used for the Step Function name
- 4 characters are used for the environment
Leaving me with only 12 characters for the actual name of the function.
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Hmm, UV index expected to reach 4 (moderate) today, and 5 in a few days time. Might be time to dig the hat out once again.
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For the last two months, I’ve been working on a Mac app to automatically import my blog posts into a Day One journal. I think it’s now in a state for others to start taking a look at. So if this is something that interests you, please feel free to give it a try.
