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If it wasn’t for the use of an all-caps style, this Daring Fireball post would be a perfect reference for which words to capitalise in a title (open it in a feed reader or view the page source to see what I mean). 😄
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About 5 years and 3 employers ago, I was working at a government agency building an admin console for a home grown messaging system. This messaging system, which was around 30-years-old, was built for purpose and pretty reliable. But it suffered an outage one day, and when I leaving, there were plans to replace it with something off-the-shelf from an outside vendor.
Yesterday, I got a message from a contact that is doing some consultancy work there. Apparently the home grown messaging-system system was still going strong, and the admin console I built was still being used.
I guess software really does live for ever.
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Abound two months ago, I started feeling some strain in my wrist with my old keyboard, so I replaced it with an ergonomic one. Good news is that strain seems to have settled down, but I’m still adjusting to the new layout even now. Hopefully not too much longer before I do.
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Really not much going on at the moment. Just a whole lot of waiting. Waiting for my next vaccine shot. Waiting for the state to reach 70% vaccination of those eligible. Waiting for restrictions to start easing. Just… waiting.
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On Confluence
I’m sorry. I know the saying about someone complaining about their tools. But this has been brewing for a little while and I need to get it off my chest. It’s becoming a huge pain using Atlassian Confluence WISIWIG editor to create wiki pages. Trying to use Confluence to write out something that is non-trivial, with tables and diagrams, so that it is clear to everyone in the team (including yourself) is so annoying to do now I find myself wishing for alternatives. Continue reading →
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Working on some JavaScript which is using ES modules (i.e.
import) without needing Webpack to bundle it into a single, minified file. In fact, I don’t need any tooling at all. I don’t want to jinx it, but I think web development is starting to be cool again. -
On Apple's Media Release Gymnastics
I started listening to the latest Talk Show, where John Gruber and MG Siegler discuss Apple’s media release of the class action settlement. Releasing it to the major media outlets in such a way as to spin the guideline clarification as a concession to developers, even though nothing has actually change, is genius if true. I imagine that’s why Apple’s PR department get the big bucks. But I wonder if Apple has considered the potential blowback of this approach. Continue reading →
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If anyone else needs another reason why they shouldn’t use Twitter threads as a substitute for blogs, I only just discovered today that you need a Twitter account to read them. Attempting to view a thread when not logged in throws up a login box.
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So glad it’s Friday today. It’s been a heck of a week, both at work and with the current Covid situation here. Unfortunately, due to the current lockdown, there’s not going to be a ton of relief from the weekend, but at least the rest would be welcomed.
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It’s hard coming up with a good name for something. There has only been a handful of times a name has felt right. Every other time, the name I give a project or website has always felt sub-par.
It also doesn’t help that I usually feel this way after I bought the domain name.
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My bad spelling is going to be the end of me someday. I’ve been racking my brain trying to find out why a test wouldn’t work, trying various things to find and fix the problem. The cause: a miss-spelt header in my test harness. That missing ’e’ cost me three hours today. 🤦
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I know everyone is entitled to a break, and it’s probably just as well it’s happening now, with not much going on in the world of tech. But I do feel a little lost with Stratechery and Dithering off the air this week. Ah well, just a few more days to go.
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It’s a sad reality that as the demands of software systems go up, and more libraries and services are available for you to use, your job slowly turns from building systems from the ground up to one where you’re just gluing things together. Less programming and more configuring.
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Post Of Little Consequence
I’m wouldn’t call myself a regular poster on this blog. I don’t have a goal of writing a post a day or something. But I do want to keep it up with some frequency, and post at least one item a week. I realised today that it’s been a week since my last post. However, due to the current lockdown, very little of note has happened over the last week. Apart from work, TV, reading, and doing a few personal projects on the side, there really isn’t much going on. Continue reading →
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Argh, thought I would have dodge the side-effect lottery for the AstraZeneca vaccine, but nope! This morning started OK, with just a headache and a sore arm, but as the day is progressing, the symptoms are slowly becoming more like the cold. I expected this to occur but, yeah, wish it didn’t. In any case, I hope it clears up by tomorrow.
Not helping matters is that my backyard neighbour is using a chainsaw to do goodness knows what 😒
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First jab of AstraZeneca booked for today. I will admit, it would have been nice to get one of the mRNA vaccines, new technology and all that, but I didn’t want to wait any longer and who knows when they will actually be available. So I’m going with what’s available now.
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I wonder if Apple’s spell checker should start including a reason as to why they are making a particular suggestion. I’d be curious to know why it thinks “weak” is more appropriate than “week” in a sentence that’s mentioning time (the fragment is “day or week”).
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The browser I’m using is offering to translate a web-app I’m working on from French to English, even though there aren’t any French words on the page. Turns out it has an issue with the spelling of “Catalogue” and is changing it to “Catalog”.
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Currently watching Halt And Catch Fire on SBS On Demand. An enjoyable watch but the the plumber problem is certainly there 📺
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I hear rumours of the JS alert() function being deprecated. I hope that it isn’t so. As annoying as it may be for browser vendors to maintain it, that’s a problem they signed up for by being browser vendors. They serve us that build on/use the web, not the other way around.
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Throwing a link out to this service for anyone falling into despair about the latest IPCC report and want to do something about it. 60 EUR a month to remove 1,000 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. A bargain considering the costs of the alternative.
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This week’s earworm: DiscoVision by Anders Enger Jensen 🎵
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I discovered a downside with using a MacBook Pro with an M1 chip: it runs so cool that I can’t use it to warm my hands in cold rooms.
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Today I start my new job, and my new commute which, since it’s on the opposite side of the city to me, features a train and a bus. It would be the longest commute I would have had for a while. Hopefully it won’t get too annoying.
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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of walking a new rail trail just outside Leongatha, in South-East Gippsland. The rails are completely gone but some of the infrastructure has remained.
