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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 toselect * where id in (…). -
👨💻 A collection of new posts over at TIL Computer:
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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. 👷♂️
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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. Continue reading →
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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.
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Swoop-o-meter now sits at 2 noisy miners. Also, wearing or not wearing a blue beanie makes no difference. No magpies yet. 👷♂️
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Wish I can use my new vacuum cleaner to suck up all the spam emails I’m getting about my new vacuum cleaner. 😕
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This week’s earworm: The Wind Chimes by Mike Oldfield. 🎵
This one’s a bit surprising since it’s not a new addition to my collection. Maybe because I haven’t been listening to it all that often.
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I didn’t record narration for the previous post. It featured a dialog and I needed a scene partner. So I tried recording one with AWS’s text-to-speech engine last night, and ah… yeah, it didn’t sound as good as I was hoping. I mean, the tech is getting better, but there’s still a way to go: that uncanny valley hasn’t been bridged yet.
This is probably the best version of what I was able to make. This was using AWS’s new-ish “Generative” voice model. There are only three voices available of this kind in AWS so far. I chose the US English male voice, since it spoke at a rate which, to my ears, is about as close to a speaking rate that I’d consider natural:
I also tried the same exchange out with the “Neural” engine, which has been around for several years:
The Generative voice model is decent. Still not good enough to fool anyone that I’m speaking with a real person, yet it’s a lot better than the Neural engine. There’s no mistake with that one that I’m speaking with a computer.
So, no recorded dialogue, but it was still an interesting exercise. And it’s always a little fun playing around with AWS’s text-to-speech engine.
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Rubberducking: Of Config And Databases
It’s been a while since my last rubber-ducking session. Not that I’m in the habit of seeking them out: I mainly haven’t been in a situation when I needed to do one. Well that chance came by yesterday, when I was wondering whether to put queue configuration either in the database as data, or in the environment as configuration. This one’s relatively short, as I was leaning towards one method of the other before I started. Continue reading →
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If all I was taught came from old DOS games, I’d probably come away thinking that archeology is the coolest job in the world. 😀
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Have to remind myself that it’s better to build for the state of the world now, rather than for some future state that may never happen. That probably means you’ll need to change it later, when the future inevitably reveals itself. Just be prepared to do so, and don’t be so hard on your past self when you do.
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Oof, left the house without my wallet. Good thing I set up Google Pay on my phone or I wouldn’t have been able to pay for my coffee.
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Project Updates
Well, it’s been three weeks since my last post here, and as hard as it was to write this update, not writing it would’ve been harder. So let’s just skip the preamble and go straight to the update. Cyber Burger (That Pico-8 Game) I’m terrible at being coy, I’ll just spill the beens. That game I’ve been working on is call Cyber Burger. It’s based on a DOS game I saw on YouTube, and it seemed like a fun project to try and work on, with some tweaks to the gameplay that I think would make it more forgiving. Continue reading →
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Finished reading: Hell Yeah Or No by Derek Sivers.
A good book. I resisted reading it for a while (I’m not sure I was ready to hear what it had to say) but I bought this Friday, hoping that it would help me work through an important decision, and I think it did. 📚
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My regular cafe no longer opens on Sunday. Most of the other cafes close to me open at 8:00. There’s one that opens at 7:00 but it takes a 30 minute walk to get there. I went to that one today, and despite the walk, I arrived home earlier than I would have if I waited for the other ones to open.
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More DOS game nostalgia watching on YouTube over the last few days. This time on Commander Keen, an absolute favourite of mine growing up. For all the other Keen fans out there, this one’s for you.
And yes, making this is how I spent my evening. 😄
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It might be that the first day where everything’s working smoothly, nothing’s on fire, and there’s nothing for me to fix would also be the first day that I’m out of a job. Even so, a day like that would be nice. 😮💨
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Oh, so those flashes of blue light was not arcing from the overhead catenary. ⛈️
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Had to deal with an API written in JavaScript where a field could have zero or more string items. Two or more items, the field is an array. If it’s one item, the field is set to a single string. Zero items, the field is not set at all.
🤦♂️
I don’t blame the language, I blame the API designer.
