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Arbitrage. That was the word I was trying to remember.
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Dealing with identities and notarisation is a huge pain. You make an archive in Xcode, notarise it, Xcode says it’s notarised successfully, you try to launch it, and MacOS throws up that security alert. Honestly, I’m surprised anyone can release anything for MacOS nowadays.
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Thinking about Twitter and newsletters during my morning walk, I wonder: did Twitter actually do anything with Revue after they bought it last year, or was it one more acquisition that was left to die on the Vine? (pun intended, sort-of)
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Didn’t sleep well last night. Why? Because it was the first night of on call that I’ve had in a while, and I was afraid of being woken up by PagerDuty. Yes, that’s right: the fear of being woken up last night kept me up last night. 😫
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I went to the dentist a few weeks ago (for the first time in five years 🙈) and the dentist asked if I was grinding my teeth. I said “no” as I didn’t think I was, but now I’m wondering if I do. It’s certainly something I’ve been noticing I do more often since that visit.
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What Would Get Me Back to Using Twitter Again
Congratulations, Elon Musk, on your purchase of Twitter. I’m sure you’ve got a bunch of ideas of how you want to move the company forward. I was once a user of Twitter myself — albeit not a massive one — and I’m sure you would just love to know what it would take for me to be a user once more. Well, here’s some advice on how you can improve the platform in ways that would make me consider going back.
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Thinking about that last post a little more, maybe it’s just a matter of framing. After all, if others didn’t post about what they’re watching, reading or listening to, there would be a bunch of great stuff I never would have heard of or experienced.
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I sometimes wonder, during days where I have very little to say, if it would be better to talk about something “trivial” like a new TV show I’m watching, or if it would be better to say nothing at all.
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For want of a new tool, Xcode command line tools needs to be upgraded.
For want of upgraded Xcode command line tools, Xcode needs to be upgraded.
For want of an upgraded Xcode, MacOS needs to be upgraded.
And you can probably guess where I’m going with all this. 😒
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A few people I know are isolating due to Covid-19, so I stayed in last night. I rewatched Helvetica by Gary Hustwit. Last time I watched it was at the start of the pandemic, when Hustwit offered viewing it for free. Watching it again actually brought be back to that time.
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Started reading: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. It was page 2, when I read the name of the mobile app the protaginst was working on, when I got good feelings about this one. 📚
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During the last four days, I drove home from Canberra (not a bad thing), my job went live with the project I’m working on, I intended the funeral of my grandfather who passed away last week, and I came in contact with someone who has Covid-19. One more day to go.
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Just got my new passport today. Shortest six weeks of my life. 😉
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🔗 Facebook on 30 Percent Platform Fees: ‘Hold Our Beer’
Meta talking about platform fees for the metaverse feels to me like a school rock-band talking about how they’d divvy up revenue from ticket sales before they get their first gig.
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Went to the National Gallery of Australia today. Must say that I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. I didn’t think of myself as someone who liked going to galleries. Maybe it’s just because it’s been a while since I’ve gone to one (last time was in 2017).
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Trying to use GitHub Codespaces on an iPad. It sorta works. When it does, it works quite well. But there are times when the Enter and cursor keys just stop responding, and a reload of the page is required to get it working again.
I’m also a little surprised there’s no iOS app for Codespaces.
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Dad and I will be driving to Canberra today to spend some time with the family over the Easter long weekend. Estimate travel time is 6.5 hours, so the trip will pretty much take all day. Not that I mind. I do enjoy the occasional long drive.
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Really enjoying the newsletter Speaking Tech by Michael DeHann. It reminds me a lot of Steve Yeggi’s Drunken Blog Rants.
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The thing about Severance is, while it may be the case that those on the severed floor at Lumon are living through a mega-corp workplace dystopia, at least they get to keep regular working hours.
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Started watching Severance yesterday and I got to say, it’s pretty good. Certainly something that grabbed me early, which is probably the reason why I couldn’t get into Ozark.
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A Case For Mocking in Unit Tests
Here’s a short account of a realisation I had this morning on the occasional usefulness of mocks in unit tests. I’ve never been a huge fan of mocking in unit tests. The code to set them up is tedious to write, and tends to be very fragile. Any change or refactor you make to the module being tested — even if the behaviour doesn’t change — and all your tests break because the mocks are no longer called the way they were. This goes against one of the key principals of unit testing in my opinion, in that it is the behaviour of the module is being verified, not the actual implementation.
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Love this remark from Gruber about the comment from Twitter about Musk’s board seat:
The first thing I’ll note is that Agrawal had to share the “brief note” itself as a screenshot, because, well, Twitter only supports up to 280 characters in a post. Duh, right?
Could have been worse than a screenshot. They could have shared their brief note as a Twitter thread. 😄
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Passport renewal forms filled in and sent away, along with new passport photos. Apparently there’s a bit of a backlog, and it will take six weeks for my new passport to arrive. I guess after the last two years, people are eager to get back to travelling overseas again.
Wow, 3 weeks is actually pretty good.
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Finished reading: Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece. Great read, especially about all the work the Indyweb is doing, and the principals behind Micro.blog’s design. 📚
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Went for a walk this afternoon and came home to two deliveries of online orders, which was quite surprising. Guess I wasn’t the only one working this weekend.
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Fired up Logic Pro for the first time in a while. Trying a rearrangement of Passion for Exploring from the VVVVVV Sound Track. Got the chorus sounding pretty good, although some of the synth attributes need a bit of fine tuning. Here’s a sample of what I’ve got so far.
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Had a drinks with friends and watched a comedy set at Comedy Republic last night. Nice place for a catch up. Managed to get a table before it got really crowded, which was lucky. Comic was pretty good too.
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On the subject of Twitter’s edit button announcement, I find it amusing that they tweeted about it on April 1, only to tweet again a few days later to avoid the impression that it was an April Fools joke. I guess tech companies can no longer announce anything on that day anymore.
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I don’t know how people on Twitter live without an edit button. I’m always posting something, then a minute later finding either a miss-spelling or a clunky sentence that can be rewritten. If I was posting on Twitter, every second tweet would be a correction.
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Testing modern systems is the worst. It feels like half the time is spent either logging into something, or troubleshooting the various layers of infrastructure that I have zero knowledge or control in. It slows everything things down and breaks flow. 😩
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After a hard day of work, it’s great to live a little vicariously by listening to the story of how John Siracusa chose the indy life on Reconcilable Differences.🎙️
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Something I wonder about these web3 and NFT projects: if the wealth aspect was removed, and there was no possibility of material gain, how many people would still be working on them?
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Just started Safari up for the first time on this laptop and I was greeted with the new “tabs” they were working on last year. Can’t say that I’m a fan. Bit surprised that this was chosen as the default.
P.S. Love the slug vs. the title of the Daring Fireball post.
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It’s the end of the day and I’m struggling to think about what to write here. All I can think about is work and some personal stuff going on at the moment, and it’s a little difficult to think of much else. Hopefully more thoughts worth posting here will come tomorrow.
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Doing a small weekend/week-long project at the moment to track favourite moments in a few podcasts I’m listening to. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I’m not entirely sure what compelled me to actually start work on it. Probably because the system I’ve been using so far — a set of timestamped Pocketcast links managed in Pinboard — has been growing quite recently and much of the limitations involved, such as the list being unordered and no skip back 30 seconds available on playback, is start to annoy me. It’s also a chance for a bit of novelty, at least for a few days or so.
It took roughly a day or so to get a small Buffalo web-app up and running which does most of what I want. It just needs some styling and a better way to play the episodes, which is what I’m working on now. I really don’t want to spend more than a week working on this — last thing I need are more projects. But a good thing about this one is that I think the scope is naturally quite small, so no real risk of it blowing out to become too large.
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Walked a little of the Castlemaine to Maldon bike trail today, which runs besides the tourist railway line. Usually a steam train travels along it, but I didn’t see one today.
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I was compelled to try the Substack app this morning after wanting to make a comment on a post. I might use it to read the few newsletters I’ve subscribed to. Looks like it could be good for that, but they’ve obviously not got around to optimising it for the iPad yet.
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Two new awstool commands: one for browsing SSM parameters and one for simply viewing JSON log files. The SSM parameter one was especially handy, as I was dealing with parameter subtrees a lot and doing that in the AWS web console is always a pain. As for the JSON log viewer; well, let’s just say there were one too many log files from Kubernete pods I needed to look at this week.
The pattern for working with state seems to be working. I may need to be a little careful that the state management doesn’t get too unwieldily as I add features and more things that need to be tracked. But at the moment, it seems to be manageable.
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