Oof! Forgotten how sparse the off-peak train frequency is. 40 minute wait between trains going to Hurstbridge. ⏳
WeblogPoMo AMA #3: Best Music Experience
I’m on a roll with these, but I must warn you, this streak may end at any time. Anyway, todays question is from Hiro who asked it to Gabz, and discovered via Robb:
@gabz What’s the best music-related experience of your life so far?
Despite attending only a hand-full of concerts in my life — live music is not really my jam — I’ve had some pretty wonderful music-related experiences in my life, both through listing to it or by performing it. Probably my most memorial experience was playing in the pit orchestra for our Year 10 production of Pippin. This was during the last few weeks before the show opened and we attended a music camp for a weekend to do full day rehearsals with the music director. The director had a reputation of being a bit of a hard man, prone to getting a bit angry, and not afraid to raise his voice. It was intimidating to me at the time, but in hindsight I can appreciate that he was trying to get the best from us. And with us being a group of teenage boys who were prone to loosing focus, I think we were deserving of his wrath.
One evening, we were rehearsing late, and the director was spending a lot of time going through some aspect of the music. I can’t remember what was being discussed but it was one of those times where everyone was tired, yet each knew what they were meant to be doing and was still happy to be working. You feel something special during those moments, when the group was doing their best, not out of coercion but because we were trying to “get the work done”.
Probably a very close second was discovering Mike Oldfield for the first time. This was probably when I was 11 or 12, and I wasn’t a bit music listener back then (I mean, we did have a home stereo but I wasn’t listening to a walkman or anything like that). Dad was working one night and I came up to him. He then started playing track 1 of Tubular Bells II, thinking that I would appreciate it. I was more intrigued at first, as it wasn’t the type of music I was use to at the time: long, instrumental pieces. Yet I found it to be decent, and something I could see myself liking the future1. He then played track 7, and I was absolutely hooked after that.
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In my experience, the tracks that take some time to grow to like turn out to be the best ones to listen to. ↩︎
Weekly Update - 3 Nov 2024
I probably should stop calling these “weekly updates,” seeing that they come up a lot less frequently than once a week. Maybe I should switch to something like “Sunday updates,” or maybe something closer to what this is, which is an excuse to procrastinate by writing about what I’ve been working on, rather than just working on it.
But I’m sure you’re not interested in my willowing about the frequency of these updates, so let’s just get straight to the meat of it.
Cyber Burger
All the logic, graphics, and sound-effects for power-up/power-downs are now finished. They now spawn in randomly, with a frequency and specific types dictated by the current stage. I also added the notion of a “milkshake bonus” which awards the player a bonus multiplier for a short amount of time.
I’ve also made a few balancing changes around demerits. Based on my own testing, I was pretty blasé about loosing demerits, as you could recover a demerit every time you finish a burger. I wanted to discourage that, so I changed things around a little. You still loose demerits if you screw up the burger your trying to build — such as making it too high or not catching the correct item — but you no longer recover demerits for every burger you complete. Instead, you recover one demerit for every $50 you’re awarded. This is now every three to four burgers, depending on how sophisticated they are, which I hope would make loosing demerits something the player would want to avoid.
There’s still the difficulty curve stuff left to do, but I think I’ll start working on the meta elements, like the title screen, main menu and high score tables. I can probably leave out the addition of stages and a difficulty curve if I’m honest, but I would like to have a decent title and menu screen.
The other thing to do is write the manual. I made a start the other day, but there’s much left to do on this front. Part of me wonders whether it make sense adding “on-board documentation.” But part of the fun of using Pico-8 on this project is to imagine a time where this game came out during the late 70’s and early 80’s and the 8-bit era of home consoles. And those games didn’t have on-board documentation. That said, I might add a quick start guide for those that didn’t RTFM.
UCL
I’ve been using that tool I’ve written for work quite often so there was a need to add some additional features to UCL. The biggest one was adding exceptions, but there’ve been a lot of little things like rounding out the standard library.
All the code written in a rush is starting to weigh this project down though, and I do think I’ll need to do some refactoring to tidy things up a little. I may need to work on documentation too, just for my own sake more than anything else. I doubt this would be anything more than the toy language it currently is, but it does have it’s uses, and whenever I need to reference a built-in, I’m always going to the source code. Which is fine, but I think I can do better on this front.
Other Projects
A few other things I worked on during the last fortnight:
- I spent some time last weekend playing with Htmgo by making a simple world clock that would update every second. I ended up remaking this as a static web page backed by some WASM code. Knowing the time in UTC and some American cities could come in handy for my job. At least, that’s the theory: I haven’t had a need for it yet.
- I also made some changes to Nano Journal to add support for uploading multiple attachments at once.
So that’s the update for this past fortnight.
WeblogPoMo AMA #2: One Thing I Wish I Could Change About Myself
Here’s my answer to another question asked by Annie for WebogPoMoAMA. This was previously answered by Keenan, Estebanxto, Kerri Ann, and Lou Plummer:
If you could instantly change one internal pattern/thing about yourself, what would it be?
My answer is that I wish I found it easier meeting new people. Not only am I quite introverted, I’m also really shy, and I find it extremely hard to introduce myself to new people in social situations. That is, if I ever find myself going to these social situations. I rarely do, and if I do attend, I usually stay quietly to the side, keeping with company that I know. It was at one time bad enough that I’d find excuses to avoid going out to see those I do know.
I’m trying to get better at this. For starters, I’m no longer staying away from friends, and I am trying to make the effort of going to more social events as they come. It’s still not great though, and I do struggle when being around a group of strangers. I guess the secret is just practice, and maybe trying to make a game of it: setting goals like saying hello to at least one new person every hour or so. I don’t think I’ll ever get over my shyness, but I’m hoping I can find away to at least manage it a little better than I have been.
Title design this morning. Trying to get as close as I can to the Cyberspace Raceway font as my pixel art skills will allow for.
WeblogPoMo AMA #1: Work And Drink
A new blogging challenge has shown up on the scene: WeblogPoMo, where bloggers answer questions asked to them in the style of ReddIt’s AMAs. I’m always game for a blogging challenge so I’ll throw my hat into the ring.
I’ll start with a question from , who asked it to Gabz:
@gabz yay for more #WeblogPoMoAMA
1) I would actually love to read about your work (genetics? agriculture?) but I'm not sure how to phrase the question other than "So what do you do for work exactly?" but maybe more like what's something you really like about your job? (or hate) or what's your typical workday like?
2) what's your favorite brand and/or flavor(s) of fizzy water? I am a fizzy water drinker till I die.
Question 1: What do you do for work exactly?
I’m a senior software developer at a company called Blackmagic Design. It’s predominantly a maker of hardware devices for video production — cameras, video switches, recorders, etc — but they recently launched a bunch of Cloud services, which is what I work on. I’m working as backend engineer, doing a lot of Go (which I love) and Kubernetes (which I tolerate) which is all running in AWS.
Working with hardware is an aspect of the job I find very interest. Our team doesn’t work on the devices themselves but we work quite closely to those that do, trying to integrate them with the services we build. I’ve had dreams of working in hardware, and for a while I regretted not doing electrical engineering as a double degree at uni. As is always the case, the dream is usually rosier than reality, and I am thankful that the tools we work with are of reasonably high quality.
But it’s still fun to work at a company that deals with hardware. Not many software companies can make that claim. And I did get a chance to see the actual hardware production lines once, during a brief work trip to Indonesia, and that was fascinating.
Another thing I like about my job is the variety that can come of it. It’s not without it’s knowledge silos — system experts naturally form in a software team because it’s just easier to ask the person who worked on a system to change it rather have someone learn about it first — but we are generally expected to “pivot” on a dime when the priorities of the business change. This is definitely not for everyone, and we’ve lost a few people soon after they joined that just didn’t like working this way. But I think it’s a way of working that works for me. Or, much like Kubernetes, I tolerate it.
Question 2: What’s your favourite brand/flavour of fizzy water?
I don’t really buy flavoured fizzy water myself. I have a Soda King (sort of like an Aussie version of Soda Stream) which I use to carbonate my water. During the day I just have it straight, or somethings with orange juice. But in the evening or on the weekend, I mix it with lime cordial, bitters, and ice.
If you’ve got a question — about a topic suitable for publishing online that’s not too personal — feel free to send me an email or post it as a comment here.
Trentham Railway Station, and the start of the Domino rail trail. 🌲
Some interesting links from linkage.lol that I want to note before accidentally closing my browser tab.
🔗 Blogging Resources Complements of Robert Birming
🔗 For Linkblog Fans
It’s also a site I’ve now subscribed to.
Another day trip, this time to Mt. Macedon (again. Yes I’m hitting the classics) 🌲
Phaedra, The lmika Track Arrangement
I recently learnt that the version of Phaedra I’ve been listening to for the past 15 years had not only the wrong track order, but also the wrong track names. This is not entirely surprising, given how this version was… ah, acquired.
But after learning what the order and names should’ve been, I think I still prefer my version. And yes, that’s probably because I’m use to it, but if the official album were to have these names and this order, I think it would actually work really way. I may go so far as to say that if I got a copy of the official album, I’d probably change it to match the version I been listening to.
In case your curious, here’s how the tracks are named in my version:
| Official Version | lmika Version |
|---|---|
| Phaedra | Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares |
| Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares | Phaedra |
| Movements Of A Visionary | Sequent ‘C’ |
| Sequent ‘C’ | Movements Of A Visionary |
I’m actually a little surprised that my version of Sequent ‘C’ is officially called Movements Of A Visionary and visa-versa. The name Movements Of A Visionary gives it a more mysterious feeling, which fits well with the small, soft, reverb-filled piece of music that it is. As for the track with has that name officially… well I just assumed the name Sequent ‘C’ made the most logical sense for a piece of music with a sequencer in the key of C. I don’t have an explanation for Phaedra or Semblance other than “long piece == long title,” but Phaedra just feels like a title that fits better for a piece of music that predominantly features a mellotron.
The tracks in the version I listen too are arrange in the following order:
| No. | Official Version Name | lmika Version Name |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Sequent 'C' | Movements Of A Visionary |
| 2. | Phaedra | Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares |
| 3. | Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares | Phaedra |
| 4. | Movements Of A Visionary | Sequent 'C' |
The fact that Phaedra is the first track in the official version make sense, given that on vinyl it would’ve taken up an entire side, but I reckon starting the album with a small, soft piece — acting almost like a prelude — whets the appetite for the heavier stuff. This would be track two, which is 17 minutes long, and is quite dynamic in it’s contract across the piece. You then climb down from that into what I thought was the title track which — given that it appears as the third one in my version — gives the artists an opportunity to have a something simpler to act as the centrepiece of the album. Then you end with a relatively lively piece with a driving sequencer, that finishes with a decisive C(7) chord, making it clear that the album is now over.
So that’s how I’d name and arrange the tracks in this album. I don’t want to say that Tangerine Dream got it wrong but… they did get it pretty wrong. 😀
Old rail distance post found on the rail trail today, just outside of Loch. Only 95 km to Southern Cross station from here.
Walked part of the rail trail near Black Spur Creek. Was too slow to get a photo of the echidna but I did manage to get one of this white-necked heron. 🌲
Ok, breakfast is over. Time to leave the cafe and start my day-trip. South Gippsland is calling me. 🌲
It’s a bit of a shame to think that a piece of software that is “done” is considered abandoned. The constantly churning platforms these piece of software is running on doesn’t help. Operating systems are constantly being released with new standards, and security issues crop up and get fix. So it’s natural to assume that a software project that is never touched at all will break at some point.
But I think achieving “done” status for a piece of software is possible. We just need to defined “done” as not being required to change the code. You can still keep up with the platform if you’re still able to build the project, and I think the secret to achiving “done” this way is to be as close to the platform as you possiably can.
I guess the other requirement is choosing a platform that promises to maintain backwards compatability, both for the runtime and the developer tools. But those platforms certainty exist. Think about all those Unix C tools like “grep” or “awk” that haven’t really changed in 50 years, or all those websites from the late 90s that are still around. They’ve been built and deployed multiples times but I’m doubting people are making significant changes in those codebases.
Anyway, some random thoughts I had while browsing the web this morning.
I had all this work planned for the team to do while I was on leave. The minute I walked out the door, priorities changed and it was all put on hold. So I feel a little bad that I didn’t organise any backup tasks. Hope the team can occupy themselves over the next week. 😬
Idea For Syntax Highlighting for CSV Files
I may be one of the weird ones here where I find myself sometimes preferring to edit CSV files in a text editor. If the CSV file is small or simple enough, it can be a fair bit quicker to work in than opening a file in a table editor1. But I’ve never come across a text editor that has made this easy. Some of them give you the option to switch to a built-in table editor, but these are usually feature poor compared to text editing capabilities the application has (which makes sense, given that we are talking about text editors).
So I can see some benefit of text editors adding some form of “syntax highlighting” for CSV files. Much like how syntax highlighting works for source code, this would be geared towards making it easier to see the table structure of CSV data while preserving the overall textual nature of the file itself.
Some ideas I have for how such syntax highlighting could work:
- Highlighting the column in which the carat is currently located
- Make the header row fix in the editor, such that it always appears on top. Also highlight the current column header in a prominent manner (e.g. bold)
- Reduce the prominence of the characters used for separation and quotation.
Here’s a mockup:
Note that this list doesn’t include things like aligning the columns as if it was a table. While that would be nice — provided that it’s still possible to enter text as you would normally — I don’t think it’s wholly necessary. The same would go for things like changing the key bindings to make it easier to work with column data2. Again, nice to have, but unnecessary.
No, the goal here is to have all the features of editing CSV data as the text format that it is, while making it easier to see the table structure that the format encodes. Syntax highlighting works well for other textual formats in this regard, and I think it could also help here.
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Yes, you can open it in a spreadsheet, but… no. I’ve never liked editing CSV files in spreadsheets. They just seem to heavyweight for the types of edit I need to do. And they require excessive use of the mouse, which slows me down. ↩︎
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Some ideas for that: changing Option+Arrow Keys to move between columns, and adding keybindings for easily creating new columns to the left or right of the current column. ↩︎
🧑💻 New post on TIL Computer: Slow NATS Go Subscribers
I knew I should’ve bought two licenses to CleanShot X when I had the opportunity to get it at a discount. 🤦♂️
Think of what I could’ve done with those $9 USD. 🤔
Five years ago, I wrote my first blog post. And despite the slow start, I’m extremely happy that I was able to keep it up since then. Blogging is not just what I do, it’s become part of who I am.
Here’s to the next five years, and hopefully many more. 🥂
I love the multi-carat support in Nova, Goland, and the other text editors that have it. I use it all the time. I wish it was built into every textbox I use, including the ones used by browsers and AppKit.