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Found the bug that was plaguing me all week! ๐ I’ve never been so happy to see faulty code in all my life. Note to self: look closely at the traces next time.
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Marketing emails teasing releases without actually saying what is new are so lame. “Today is a big day for us at Corp. For X years we’ve been champions of doing Thing the best, and all this time we’ve been building up to what we believe is our biggest launch yet. To find out more, watch this videoโฆ” Just tell me in the email! I’ll pay attention if I think it’s worth it.
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Either the code or the logs are lying to me! The code is saying “everything is present and accounted for,” while the logs are saying “mate, I’m telling you: this field is not effin’ there.” Who am I to believe? May have a word with a neutral third-party: deployment pipeline.
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One thing I miss about Java docs is that you get a list of types implementing a particular interface. Quite useful when exploring unfamiliar packages. It would be nice for Go’s docs to do something similar. Maybe clicking an interface could highlight the implementing types, for instance.
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Discovered a fatal flaw in attending boardgame night, namely that I don’t know many boardgames. Will need to go through the library and see if any sparks my interest, and learn to play them. Or, I could just bring along Wingspan.
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Interesting factoid about my commute: the time it takes me to walk 2 tram stops equals the time between successive trams on my line. That means that if I miss a tram, I can just walk 2 stops and make it just in time for me to miss the next one.
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Maybe one day Amazon will learn about this great new technology called hypertext and start using links that work. You would think that clicking a link to a security group would bring me to that security group’s config page. Yet you do that in a Lambda’s config section, and it invalidates my session and bring me to the VPC marketing page. AWS links really are the Pachinko machine of the web.
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๐ ByteSauna: AI can code, but it can’t build software
When you look at the code these people send you, you realize that โmaking the app production-readyโ really means torching the whole thing and starting from scratch.
I do use GenAI in my personal projects occasionally, but I wouldn’t describe what I do as vibe coding. I know what I want done and how I would do it, which helps in knowing whether the generated code is any good. The thought of doing this for an entire software project without the knowledge of what good code looks like doesn’t give me confidence that these vibe coders would see much success for long. Pretty soon, someone who knows what they’re doing will eventually need to come in and clean up the mess.
The fact that I get these requests says something about software engineering. I mean, if software engineering was automated, no one would be looking for technical cofounders.
Indeed.
Via: Birchtree
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๐ Devlog
Godot Game - Level 3-2 and a Rotating Platform
Starting to work on level 3-2, and adding a new rotating platform mechanic, with some thoughts on how to build it. Continue reading โ
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Facing the strangest of bugs at the moment: a services, which by all accounts should be working properly, is somehow sending missing data. The code looks right, the deployment looks right, yet fields that should be in the transmitted message are not showing up. Really baffling. Maybe it’s haunted. ๐ป
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๐ Devlog
UCL - Adding Some Missing Library Functions
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Discovered that turning off “Convert pasted HTML to Markdown” in Obsidian has eliminated the need to select Edit โ Paste and Match Style when pasting things from the terminal to a note. So glad this setting exists. One more of those things I wished Obsidian had, and sure enoughโฆ ๐ซฒ ๐ซฑ
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If one can sum up the year with a single photo, my submission would be this one. One week to go for the third shutdown of the train line, totalling four months this year. It’s so fatiguing, hopefully this will be the last time for a while. ๐ฉ
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Kind of wish I could say something about the project work I did on today. Truth of the matter is that I’ve been battling Goreleaser for most of the day, trying to get a Homebrew Cask for Dynamo Browse built and published to Forgejo. Goreleaser doesn’t actually create the Cask unless you release from a tag (no, snapshots didn’t work) so the worst form of testing was involved, where you had to create a tag, wait for the CI/CD pipeline to run, then the delete the tag again.
I managed to get that working in the end but when I tested it in a VM, found that I also had to sign and notarise the binary. This kinda means that my earlier attempts at distribuing software via Homebrew in the past would’ve failed for everyone that wasn’t me, as they would’ve been blocked by Gatekeeper.
So I pretty cool on Goreleaser and Apple at the moment.
If there’s one good that that I could say about today’s efforts, it’s that I’m still really impressed by the virtualisation frameworks that’s in MacOS. Using VirtualBuddy to spin up a MacOS or Linux virtual machine is so easy to do now, compared to what it was like before. Make it’s really easy to test the installs.
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(To the tune of Tequila)
Na nananana na, nana na,
Na nananana na, na na;
Na nananana na, nana na,
Na nananana na, na na. Na na na naaaaa na,
Na na na naaaaa na,
Na na na naaaaa na,
Nananana na nana,
Geneva! ๐จ๐ญ -
Did a bit of work on Dynamo Browse this morning, adding a command to request a single key-press from the user. I was tempted to name it
ui:inkeyin honour of BASIC, but I resisted and decided on the more appropriate (yet longer) nameui:prompt-keypress. -
๐ Anil Dash: Founders Over Funders. Inventors Over Investors
Enjoyed this post from Anil Dash; although being a tech practitioner, that probably wouldn’t be too surprising. But I don’t think it makes it any less true.
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Interesting bocce session today. We had a group of passers by approach us and ask about the game. Even asked if they could play a round, which we did. Also some bird activity, including this bin chicken that took an interest in the game.
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Waiting at the rendezvous point for a spot of bocce. The morning is absolutely perfect. The gardens are nice and shady, now that the leaves on the trees have grown in.
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Anyone remember jQuery Mobile? Looks to be live and well on Tram Tracker. First time I actually noticed it, as I usually don’t have a need to visit the website.
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I mentioned before the abandoned train line that appears in my dreams from time to time. Well, last night, it returned, and was seeing some pretty significant freight traffic. Some new infrastructure too. Looks like it may reopen soon. I wouldn’t know for sure though, I’m just a visitor. ๐
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My eye has been wandering towards the Cards Theme of late. It was enough of a pull that I decided, after a couple of schooners this evening, to switch this blog over to it. The Mythos theme is good, and the changes I made to the index page to display posts in a similar way to Scripting News was an interesting experiment, but I don’t think it fit the type of site I wanted. I’ll give the card theme a try and see if it’s a better fit for me.
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You know how everyone compares the price of their subscription to a cup of coffee? How would that work for ChatGPT Pro and it’s $200 USD /month plan? “It’s like a cup of coffee, if all you do every day is drink coffee.” (Actually, it works out to about $6 a day, so it really is like a daily coffee).
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It’s funny how I approach certain features in the tools I make, such as adding UCL to Dynamo Browse. It’s been several months since I’ve done this, and I haven’t really used it for anything substantial until today. I guess because I get the sense that it’s half-finished (mainly due to the fact that it is half-finished) I tend to approach such features gingerly: in a careful way so as to avoid any problems. That’s probably not the best way to approach these features though. They need to be taken through the ringer, and just used, lest I never find their limitations or bugs that need to be fixed.
Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying that I’m glad I actually replaced the old scripting engine in Dynamo Browse with UCL. It was added to be used, and it actually came in useful today.
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Speaking of Japan, after watching a “cab ride” (driver seat ride?) of a bus travelling from a Shibuya to Haneda Airport, YouTube’s been serving me nothing but cab rides of other Japanese public transport systems. I did enjoy this one, of the suspended railway between ลfuna and Shลnan-Enoshima.
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Japan has been an extremely popular travel destination for those I work with. I think about half the office has either travelled to, or are planning trips to Japan this year. It would be nice to go back some day. Maybe see more than the conference rooms of Tokyo.
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It’s amusing to hear Ben Thompson quip that “no one got fired from using us-east-1, at least until now.” But the instability of that AWS region has been known for some time now. In fact, most AWS engineers I know tend to stay away from that region entirely, unless they have no choice.
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Whew! Made it home. A bit of a delay but given the strong winds, it’s fortunate that the commute wasn’t longer than it was. Could’ve been much worse. Good thing that large tree branch didn’t fall on the train line (it was close enough to brush against the side of the train).
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Riding the python today. Hoping the gopher doesn’t mind.
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Walking to work looking towards the CBD and 367 Collins St. Saw some birds gliding near the top of the building. Wonder if that’s the peregrine falcons, back in town to nest.
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This sounds ominous. Does this mean more unsolicited push notifications in iOS or promotional crap added to Apple Maps? As someone who aims to not know when an F1 race is happening, it's a good indication that an iPhone is not for me.
Also, F1 in Apple Fitness? How’s that going to work? Maybe F1-related routines. “Run in a circle like an F1 car! Quick, bend over like your refilling or changing tyres.”
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It would be nice if wiki editors offered more control over the document structure as a whole, such as moving entire sections โ everything from one H1 to another H1 โ around the document without copying and pasting. Perfect feature for the table-of-contents outline maybe.
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๐ Devlog
Godot Game - Working On Backdrops
Trying my hand in making some mountainous backdrops for world 3. Continue reading โ
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I’ve never noticed how many barbers there are around here (South Melbourne). This block alone there are three, and I know of two more nearby.
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You truly don’t know what you had until it’s gone. Case in point: the touch-bar on my work MacBook was not working at all last week, and It was during that time I realised how often I actually used it to lock the screen. It’s back today, meaning I no longer need to lock it via the Apple menu.
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I was thinking about the gatekeepers of video content online when I was speaking with someone at a party yesterday. Several years ago, he made a documentary which he was trying to sell via DVDs on his site, where he was making nothing at all. It did eventually get picked up by Amazon Prime, but it didn’t really go anywhere until they decided to promote it a little. It took off after that, but even then, the returns he was seeing were quite small. He didn’t give an exact figure โ I think it was more than what he was making from DVDs โ but it didn’t seem enough to cover the cost of production or make a living out of it. He’s hardly a house-hold name, so it wouldn’t have commanded a large payout anyway, but he was lamenting that it was easier making more a decade ago. The story ended with him asking me how one can make a sustainable living this way.
I wish I had an answer for him. People go to where the content is, and for this sort of video material, that’s the streamers of the world: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc. And you’re completely at the mercy of the algorithm with those platforms, along with what they choose to promote. I suppose he could’ve tried creating buzz by releasing clips on YouTube, and maybe trying to convince people to go to his website and purchase a DVD (although to be fair, he may have already tried that).
I wanted to say “just put it on your website.” But I couldn’t see that helping him. I mean, the DVD’s weren’t selling, although I can’t imagine DVD’s being enticing to anyone that’s not a avid fan of physical media. And I’ve not watched his documentary, but knowing him and the type of shows he produces, I can’t see it being enough for people to setup a subscriptions to watch it. It wouldn’t work with this material, and subscriptions really only work if what you’re producing is timely: weekly, fortnightly, etc. (well, I guess there are exceptions: I’m a Patreon subscriber to CGP Grey and the last video he release was about a year and a half ago).
Anyway, I don’t really have a point here other to say that it’s rough out there. Hope things improve for him.
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I cannot support the idea of Apple trying for exclusive F1 rights worldwide. Not that I care about watching the race, but the F1 is so effin’ disruptive here the least they can do is keep it on public broadcast television.
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It'd be amusing to ponder, given how podcasts all have a video component now, that if Apple did name their new box "Home Pod," in 5 years time, would people think the "pod" in "podcasts" refers to that? Everyone's referring to their shows as "pods" now I do wonder if they're forgetting where "pod" originated from.
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Eastern rosella sighting. Not that they’re uncommon, but they are a little camera shy.
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