I’m noticing how unproductive I am when I’m babysitting long running processes. Every time I try to start some focus work, I immediately switch back to monitoring the output with the expectation of dealing with errors or refreshing timed-out auth tokens.

Bad keyboard! Naughty keyboard! Causing all these spelling errors in your user’s last two posts. 😜

Seeing all these photos from those in the US with massive dumps of snow they need to shovel and clear makes me glad I live in a climate that doesn’t get snow.

I’ve never understood a task asking me to “find out what needs to be done.” These are not big tasks that need a design or prototype. They’re a regular size coding task, with the output being another task of the same size to actually do the work. Why not simply do the work in the first task?

Ooh, what a milestone.

Today is 30 years since Delphi was launched, in February 14th of 1995.

[image or embed]

— pikuma.com ([@pikuma.com](http://pikuma.com)) February 15, 2025 at 7:29 AM

I loved working in Delphi back in the day. I stopped after moving away from Windows and towards more cross-platform languages, but it always has a special place in my heart.

Kind of wish I can be more like Dave Winer and just write about what I’m working on without thinking too much about it. I spent the week moving posts about personal projects and questions are flowing through my head like, “should I be moving these posts? Would it better if they stayed here? Should I even be writing these posts at all?” I don’t know how this topic became such a source of doubt and indecision. I both want to write about it, and not want to write about it. I want readers to read it while also recognising that I’ll be the only one that would find any of this interesting. I want it to be a showcase of how I spent my days at the same time I want to burn it to the ground. In the grand scheme of things, this is small potatoes, yet it would be nice if I can come up with some answers to these questions.

Update at 21:25: I had a bit of a think, and a listen to Reconcilable Difference #254, and I think part of what was causing me to feel that this movement was wrong was that I was not making any forward motion. All that I was doing was cataloging the past. At this stage, I’m not sure that’s a good use of my time. So I’ve decided to not go ahead with moving all my project posts over there and continue to write about projects here. Sure it may make it more difficult to find them, but that’s okay. At least they’re documented somewhere.

Anyway, I’ve made some screenshots of what the site was to be. I do like the red colour.

Lots of good things in Go 1.24, including weak pointers (finally) and a utility function for generating cryptographically secure random strings (good for IDs). This new os.Root, which acts a bit like chroot, looks interesting too.

The Rules dialog in MacOS’s Mail needs some serious love. Aside from the fact that it’s teeny tiny, it’s also buggy. I couldn’t get the “set background colour” action to work, and selecting the condition to choose mail based on content doesn’t allow me to enter a value. Not good.

Well, damn! I ate something with peanuts today. That’s going to knock me about for the next few hours.

Here’s today’s face egging: my boss asked me to check if a list of countries we have included Åland Islands. Assuming that this list was in sorted order, I took a quick look at the countries beginning with A — conveniently at the top of the list — and came to the conclusion that the country wasn’t listed. Only after I told my boss that did I actually try to search for Åland Islands to double check, and sure enough: there it was, at the bottom of the list, right below Zimbabwe. Turns out the countries were sorted in code-point order, where Å comes after Z.