There’s no such thing as a finite number of niches. People are doing, watching, and supporting interests that would’ve never crossed your mind. The internet is a really large place.
This epiphany came to me today as we were discussing, of all things, TikTok videos. I don’t use TikTok myself, but I work with people who do — or at least are more clued in to what goes on over there than I am1 — and it was quite eye-opening to hear what people would support.
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Generally not a hard thing to do. ↩︎
What I would give to be riding on a Hitachi, with pull down windows, so that I can yell at some kids who thought trespassing on the railway line is a smart idea. 😠
It’s also just a fun train to ride in, especially in summer (I’m not kidding about this last point 🙂).
Forgotten how long it takes for AMIs to bake using Amazon Image Builder (up to 40 minutes). ⏳
The laundry gods were good to me. I was trepidatious about doing sheets today, what with the forecast being showers with a top of 14°C. Fortunately there was enough sunlight and a decent enough breeze to dry them before the showers arrive. I’ll sleep well tonight in a nice clean bed.
🔗 Private blogs on Scribbles
This excites me. One of the features that drew me to look at Scribbles was the possibility of private blogs. It’s great that this has been added now. I will definitely make use of it. Thanks, Vincent.
This new HTTP QUERY method looks interesting. It essentially boils down to a GET request with a body. I had been in circumstances, usually while coding up yet another search handler using POST, where I wish such a method existed. Would be interesting to see how widespread this is adopted.
A very chilly yet enjoyable bocce session at Calton Gardens today. Won one of the four games played, which is a good day for me.
Weekly Update - 15 Sept 2024
Two projects to discuss this week.
Cyber Burger
I’ve decided to ditch game mode A, where the player is given a series of stages they need to clear. Instead, I’m changing this to be closer to an old-school arcade experience. In this mode, you start the game with a 45 second timer, and you need get as high a score as you can before the timer runs out. Your score depends roughly on how large and “interesting” your burger is. Every burger you make also adds 10 seconds to the clock, so the ultimate aim is to balance making interesting burgers for a higher score, vs. trying to avoid letting the clock run down to zero. Or at least that’s the idea. I need to do some rebalancing, as I think the game is a little easy.
I am wondering whether to award points based on how fast you make the burger. It was originally my intention, but I’m now wondering if that would be considered unfair, as you don’t get to choose the items flying across the screen. I still do need to fix the random number generator too, so as to avoid keeping the player from waiting around too long for a bun base to start building their burger. Resolving these two things will be my goal for the next week.
This working version has been pushed to the web for anyone to try out. If you do, please let me know if you have any feedback.
Nano Journal
The next project I spent some time on was Nano Journal, the web-based
journalling app stolen from inspired by Kev Quirk’s
journalling app.
I wasn’t intending to work on it this week, but I did have a motive to do so as I was expecting to do something that I wanted to document (I ended up not doing that thing).
The biggest changes I made were adding paging and post titles, plus making some improvements on the backend on how posts are stored and retrieved.
Setting the title is done using a slash-commands:
/title This is my post title
This is my post body
I also added an /append slash-command to add to the latest post,
rather than create a new one. This also works for attachments too,
allowing a somewhat clunky way of adding multiple attachments to a
single post.
I am still considering this a prototype, but I have found myself writing here more often than Day One. I definitely need to start thinking about the long-term storage of posts if I want to “productionise” this. Ultimately I want to get them saved in a private Git repository. Each post is just a markdown file stored on the file-system, which will make this easy to do, but I’m somewhat procrastinating on relearning how to use the various Go Git clients that are available.
One other thing that I’d like to do is improve instances where a post couldn’t be saved due to network issues. The way I’m thinking of doing this is to store the current draft in browser local storage, at least until it’s saved on the server. I’m also wondering if it’s worth adding the concept of draft posts. Not sure at this stage whether that juice is worth the squeeze, at least not yet. This was meant to be a relatively simple side-track. But I guess that’s the danger (beauty?) of starting something and finding it useful. 🤷
Anyway, that’s all for this week.
One of my regular walking trails go by a creek that runs along a small cliff. One day, I saw a group of people by the path pointing at and taking photos of something on that cliff. This is what they were looking at:
Since then I’ve been trying spot them, usually quite successfully.
I want to reach out to someone. A blogger that’s reasonably well known. Nothing special, just to say hello and thank you for something I’ve read of theirs recently. I’ve been thinking about it for a week now, deciding whether or not to go through with it. And after seeing a private post today from someone that been on the receiving end of such an outreach, I decided to go ahead with sending that email.
It’s almost like the fates were sending me their own message. If so, then I’m not sure how I should interpret the errors I’m getting from their email spam deferences on their contact page. Nevertheless, I think I’ll keep trying.
Anyone who wants to start a barber or hair styling place, here’s a name for you: Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.
Or, if you’re an Aussie: There Is Hair In There (And A Chair As Well)
Real opinions from real people about a project management system which unfortunately is also real.
Love the tag line of this site. Also, spoilers, but Confluence makes a warranted appearance here as well.
One day, Vivaldi’s going to release an upgrade that will fix whatever causes the browser to occasionally crash whenever I start to use the developer tools. Today is not that day.
Walking that fine line on my current work task between addressing the known flaws that may or may not crop up in production (they did crop up in testing) and spending an excessive amount of time gold-plating it unnecessarily. It’s hard sometimes to know when a task is truly finished.
Proposal for a new database maxim:
A query, originally written to find one row with a particular value, will eventually be rewritten to find multiple rows with a collection of values.
That is, if you had select * where id = ?, that query will eventually be rewritten to select * where id in (…).
👨💻 A collection of new posts over at TIL Computer:
Swoop-o-meter now at 3 noisy miners. We’ve got confirmed head contact (head strike?). Luckily it was just a tap, but I may avoid going that way for my walk for a while. 👷♂️
Select Fun From PostgreSQL
Using PostgreSQL these last few months reminds me of just how much fun it is to work with a relational database. DynamoDB is very capable, but I wouldn’t call it fun. It’s kinda boring, actually. Not that that’s a bad thing: one could argue that “boring” is what you want from a database.
Working with PostgreSQL, on the other hand, has been fun. There’s no better word to describe it. It’s been quite enjoyable designing new tables and writing SQL statements.
Not sure why this is, but I’m guessing it’s got something to do with working with a schema. It exercises the same sort of brain muscles1 as designing data structures or architecting an application. Much more interesting than dealing with a schemaless database, where someone could simply say “ah, just shove this object it a DynamoDB table.”
It’s either that, or just that PostgreSQL has a more powerful query language than what DynamoDB offers. I mean, DynamoDB’s query capabilities need to be pretty restricted, thanks to how it stores it’s data. That’s the price you pay for scale.
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My brain muscles couldn’t come up with a better term here. 😄 ↩︎
Working from home today as there’s a protest at the convention centre, disrupting traffic. Got me thinking of the last time I was at that convention centre. It was 5 years ago, almost to the day, when I attended a small dev. conference. I left early on the last day as I had to join a protest.
Swoop-o-meter now sits at 2 noisy miners. Also, wearing or not wearing a blue beanie makes no difference. No magpies yet. 👷♂️