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Indexing In UCL
I’ve been thinking a little about how to support indexing in UCL, as in getting elements from a list or keyed values from a map. There already exists an index builtin that does this, but I’m wondering if this can be, or even should be, supported in the language itself. I’ve reserved . for this, and it’ll be relatively easy to make use of it to get map fields. But I do have some concerns with supporting list element dereferencing using square brackets. Continue reading →
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🔗 Goodbye to Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio, the best iPad Pro accessory
I’ve never considered hoarding accessories before, but I might start. The Smart Keyboard Folio is perfect for how I use the iPad: a great stand and decent enough keyboard that doesn’t get in the way when I just want to read.
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Free idea for anyone interested in making a mockumentary: a band that specialises in “Musak,” the type of music you hear in lifts or dental offices. They’re trying to make it to the big leagues — a well known department store, like a Myer or Macies — and they’re up against other bands getting better gigs, the Musak industry “big-wigs,” and their own shortcomings. Sort of like “Spinal Tap” meets the doctors waiting room.
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It’s ironic to think that part of my job is to make sure that the nice artwork that I see on our 500 and 404 error pages are never seen by anyone else.
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It’s always fascinating browsing the early methods and properties of the DOM. It feels a bit like an archeologist shifting through strata uncovering facts about some long lost civilisation. “Oh, they didn’t call them query parameters back then. Instead, they were known as search strings.”
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One other skill I wish I had was good audio mastering skills. Been going through some more tapes last night and it would be so sweet to be able to remove the loud hiss some of them have. I know what I need to do in principal, but translating that into an FX chain in Logic Pro is where my gap lie.
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Browsing some of the WeblogPoMo posts on Mastodon the past few days. A lot of great posts, plus some really talented web designers out there. Wish I had their artistic or web-design skills.
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Of course I deployed something that broke other services because of dodgy permissions. So…
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My second favourite word to write in a Jira ticket, after augment, is “decommission”. I’m basically using it as an euphemism for “rip this unused code out”. To have made a few tickets with this word today feels glorious. 😊
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As Someone Who Works In Software
As someone who works in software… I cringe every time I see society bend to the limitations of the software they use. It shouldn’t be this way; the software should serve the user, not the other way around. I appreciate a well designed API. Much of my job is using APIs built by others, and the good ones always feel natural to use, like water flowing through a creek. Conversely, a badly designed API makes me want to throw may laptop to the ground. Continue reading →
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My favourite gym t-shirt. All the Aussies would get this reference.
This I got from an op-shop but I have been to the Bonnie Doon Hotel a few times. It’s actually pretty nice.
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It’s already May and I’m way behind on my reading goals for the year.
The trouble is that the book that I want to read next is one I’ve read before, which doesn’t really count towards my goal. Well, I guess it could, since I haven’t listed it here. Maybe I’ll let myself this one pass.
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On the train. Overhead announcement comes through from the control centre mentioning that a way to get service updates is to follow Metro on Twitter. Not X, Twitter. Even 1.5 years out.
Such is the staying power of Twitter as a brand, compared to what it’s called now. I’d be curious to know if those not using X or are not interested in tech know about the rebrand at all. Everyone knew about Twitter, even if they never used it.
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Tape Playback Site
Thought I’d take a little break from UCL today. Mum found a collection of old cassette tapes of us when we were kids, making and recording songs and radio shows. I’ve been digitising them over the last few weeks, and today the first recorded cassette was ready to share with the family. I suppose I could’ve just given them raw MP3 files, but I wanted to record each cassette as two large files — one per side — so as to not loose much of the various crackles and clatters made when the tape recorder was stopped and started. Continue reading →
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Interestingly, the best example of an app soliciting user feedback might be the Economist app. Just one alert modal with a simple question — “are you enjoying the Economist app?” — and a simple Yes/No answer. No star rating. No review prose. Just a simple thumbs up/thumbs down. Crude, but effective.
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UCL: Brief Integration Update and Modules
A brief update of where I am with UCL and integrating it into Dynamo-browse. I did managed to get it integrated, and it’s now serving as the interpreter of commands entered in during a session. It works… okay. I decided to avoid all the complexities I mentioned in the last post — all that about continuations, etc. — and simply kept the commands returning tea.Msg values. The original idea was to have the commands return usable values if they were invoked in a non-interactive manner. Continue reading →
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The Perfect Album
The guys on Hemispheric Views have got me blogging once again. The latest episode bought up the topic of the perfect album: an album that you can “just start from beginning, let it run all the way through without skipping songs, without moving around, just front to back, and just sit there and do nothing else and just listen to that whole album”. Well, having crashed Hemispheric Views once, I’d thought it’s time once again to give my unsolicited opinion on the matter. Continue reading →
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God bless the person that invented the command line history. They just saved me 15 minutes of work.
And while we’re handing out praises, thank you to the person that added
RunAndReturnto the Mockery mock generator. I might be able to climb out of this mocking hell with this before the day is up. -
One other thing from Rec Diffs #233: it’s amusing to hear Siracusa being as frustrated with Britishism seeping into American English as I am with Americanisms seeping into Australian English.
John, I know how you feel. 😀
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Favourite Comp. Sci. Textbooks
John Siracusa talked about his two favourite textbooks on Rec Diffs #233: Modern Operation Systems, and Computer Networks, both by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. I had those textbooks at uni as well. I still do, actually. They’re fantastic. If I were to recommend something on either subject, it would be those two. The two Tanenbaums. I will add that my favourite textbook I had during my degree was Compilers: Principal, Techniques and Tools by Alfred V. Continue reading →
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And that makes it the third time this week that I encountered a bug involving DynamoDB that was avoidable with a unit test that actually used a proper database.
(To be fair, this time is was my fault: I haven’t got around to writing the unit test yet).
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Github/Gitlab code search is fine, but have you ever tried
grep -l -r methodName projects/*? Seems to be not that much slower and like 100x more reliable. -
I wish Ghost allowed readers to choose a different email address to send newsletters, rather than just send them to the email address associated with the account itself. I’ve got news for you: send reading material to my personal inbox and I’ll never see it. That’s just not where I read stuff: it’s all in Feedbin.
Even better would be a private RSS feed. I know Gruber had issues with doing way back during the Google Reader days. But those days are gone, so it might be worth trying this again. Seems to work for Stratechery.
