Why does AWS do things like limit the size of IAM role names to 64 characters? Why not something like 256 characters? I cannot deploy something because a service name is slightly too long, so now I need to consider whether to break the naming convention, or just skip deploying it.
Went to the Heide Museum of Modern Art with Mum and Dad today. Was really good. Found some of the exhibits to be a little challenging (which, I guess, is the point). But the history tour was great and that walk around the grounds was lovely. Can recommend if you’re ever around the Heidelberg area.
Working on my Chips Challenge “fan game” this morning. Added the notion of “lower thirds,” which will show text at the bottom of the play field. I’m hoping to use it for narrative or way-finding, like here in this hub level:
Also working on puzzle design. There’s about 19 or so “real” puzzles but I’m wondering if it’s worth adding a few tutorial ones for those that have never played the original Chip Challenge before. I’ve done about 5 such puzzles and I think I need to add maybe 3 or 4 more to cover everything I’m hoping to demonstrate. I wish I liked puzzle design more than I like tinkering on the engine.
Of course, the big question is why I’m working on this at all. There is, for lack of a better word, a vision for this, in terms of narrative and structure, but this project has been in development on and off for about 9 years or so, and I’m wondering if it’s time to just stop working on it altogether. I really am starting to get sick of it, in a way. And yet, this project has shown remarkable staying power over that time that I feel like if I don’t actually wrap it up, it’ll just continued to be worked on. It feels like the only way to end this project is to finish it, in one way or another.
So I’ll set myself a dead-line: something releasable in two weeks, and actually released a week after that. After that, no more! I’ll work on something else.
Number of consecutive Saturdays where I’ve been swooped by a noisy minor: 2
Happy Friday everyone. It’s the end of a busy week at work. Wish I can say more about what we’ve been working on. If the stars align, I may be able to, in time. But until then, here’s hoping for a quiet weekend.
On a train. Heard an announcement from the Metro control center: “yadda, yadda, follow us on Twitter.” Wondering if anyone outside of tech news readers know that the service has been rebranded. It’s either that or they’re saying to themselves, “yeah, I’m not gonna call it that.”
Sat down on a park bench to reply to someone and this magpie came running up to me. Stayed for a minute then moved on after he realised I had no food for him.
A thought just occurred to me while reading this post: all the effort that goes into optimising the browser for bloated, “commercial” webpages pay off in spades for sites with a lighter presence. If they can make those crummy, script-laden page usable, they can make the simpler ones sing.
On Tools and Automation
The thing about building tools to automate your work is that it’s hard to justify doing so when you’re in the thick of it. Easy to see all the time you save in the aggregate, but when you’re faced with the task in your day to day, you’re just as likely to say “I can build a tool which will let me do this task in a couple of seconds, but it’ll take me an hour to build it verses the 5 minutes it’ll take for me to just do the task.”
So you just “do the task.” And the next time you get that task, you face the same dilemma.
Of course the alternative is spending the hour to automate it, and then never running that tool again (or investing more time than you save keeping it up to date l).
I’m not sure what the best answer is. Maybe tracking times where you wish you had that tool you didn’t build somewhere? Then, when you’ve done it at least 3 times for the same thing, you have supporting evidence that it’s worth automating. Maybe include the time it took to do it manually as well, so you can compare it to how long it might take to build the automation.
Might be worth a try.
If there’s any indication of the staying power of Twitter the brand, it’s hearing podcasters continue to refer to the service as “Twitter” a week and a half after it was rebranded “X”. Will be interesting to see how long this keeps up.
I wonder if a read-it-later service that could work for me would be one that’ll show a random article once a day on a private RSS feed. I put links into Instapaper and they’re never seen again. But I’m always in FeedBin or NetNewsWire, so I’m more likely to read a post that’ll show up there.
A couple of updates from my day at work today, in no particular order.
Still working on that design task. I’m not quite done yet, but I did spend today going over some of the earlier details, and I found that if I were to add a domain specific language (DSL) to one of the data models, it simplifies other areas of the design. I know how fraught adding DSLs can be, especially given my eagerness to add DSLs to everything I touch (a bit of an exaggeration, but not quite). But here it seems to work, at least on paper. I guess that’s a good hint to push for a DSL here when the design goes up for review. We’ll see what my colleagues say.
Speaking of colleagues, someone asked me how I did something in DynamoDB and I shared with her my terminal DynamoDB tool. She downloaded it and gave it a try, and it looks like it clicked with her. So you can imagine how stoked I feel hearing this! Will ride these good vibes for a little while, at least for the next hour.
Attempting to design an app icon for a Chips Challenge fan game I’m working on. Going for something that looks like the fireball sprite in the original game with a hint more realism and tinted in the colour blue. For reference, here’s the original fireball sprite:
And here’s my attempt:
I started with Stable Diffusion to get the base image:
Then imported into Acorn to rotate it, colourise it, and distort it to look a bit closer to the original sprite.
Desaturating the original image got rid of the purple centre, then applying the Glowhoo and Hue Adjust effect recolourised it to the blue I was looking for (I’m not sure what the Glowhoo effect does, but it seems to adjust the colour based on the pixel intensity, so it was good enough for what I wanted). Finally, I added a Twirl Distortion effect to achieve the slight warp in the star.
And yeah, it’s not going to win any design awards, but it’s good enough for now.
Oh, and just for kicks, here was my first attempt of producing the sprite using Affinity Designer.
That’s definitely not going to win any design awards. 😂
Greg Morris wrote an excellent post about personal blogging that resonated with me. I know this is something that I struggle with. There are many posts on my blog that are formal and impersonal. And I hate re-reading them: they’re super boring. On the flip side, seeing posts about my day (sans post about work), of photos and videos I’ve taken, are a joy to relive. I know these are posts I tend to prefer reading on personal blogs of others. I’ll try to write more of those.
Related: Nobody cares about your blog, via. Skoobs.
Design task at work. Would be so sweet to junk what we have at the moment, which is a rat’s nest of dodgy code and weird behaviours, with something new. Unfortunately, the deadline is tight so I think I’ll need to keep what’s already working. Also, there’s the second system syndrome to be aware of.
It’s great that MacOS comes with virtual machine support out of the box for Apple Silicon Macs. Makes this sort of notarisation testing so easy to do now. I’m using VirtualBuddy to create and manage these VMs, which is a really nice app.
Success! Managed to get a Go app built, signed, and notarised all from within a GitHub Action. It even cross-compiles to ARM, which is something considering that it’s using SDL. Here’s the test app being downloaded and launched in a VM (ignore the black window, the interesting part is the title).
For reasons that are “totally” coincidental to the news of the day, I had a quick check to see how much the domain Y would cost:
Hmm, might be a bit much for a joke domain. 😃
Apple, please improve the error messaging of your code signing tools. Simply saying “specified item is not found” without saying what “item” is is borderline user hostile. You are not giving them the information they need to solve the problem. They’re left high and dry, which is not good.
To anyone who needs to know this: if codesign is throwing the error The specified item could not be found in the keychain, but you can see the certificate that you’re trying to sign with, just check that that certificate has the associated private key as well. The “item” not found might be that.