Still Playing “No Man’s Sky” · Usually before I go to bed, for an hour or so. Idly poking around planets, finding stuff to beef up my weapon or suit or ship, chatting with aliens. Except for I’ve decided to head for the center of the galaxy, so maybe I’ll be “done” soon, whatever that means. This is mostly to pass along tips and share pix ... [3 comments]
Focal Length and Angle · If you care about cameras you probably like learning about interesting new (and old) lenses. They’re described by two numbers: How wide they open (also: aperture, brightness, speed), and how long they are (also: focal length). That first number is generally comparable across lenses: Lower is better. The aperture unit, “F-stop”, is hardly intuitive, but whatever. Focal lengths are hard to compare, because how much the lens sees depends on how big the sensor behind it is, and there are lots of different sensor sizes ... [8 comments]
Old Geek · I’m one. We’re not exactly common on the ground; my profession, apparently not content with having excluded a whole gender, is mostly doing without the services of a couple of generations ... [31 comments]
The Fixing-JSON Conversation · Last week I suggested some modest JSON improvements, and conversation ensued. Obviously, much was “He’s Wrong On The Internet (again)” but lots was juicy and tasty, and worth considering further ... [10 comments]
Fixing JSON · I’ve edited a couple of the JSON RFCs, and am working on the design of a fairly complex DSL, so I think I can claim to have dug deeper in the JSON mines than most. We can easily agree on what’s wrong with JSON, and I can’t help wondering if it’d be worth fixing it ... [35 comments]
Things About “No Man’s Sky” · Of course I had to pre-order this one after reading World Without End in The New Yorker. I’ve only played a few evenings, haven’t done anything ambitious, but I’ve learned that when you’re learning something is a good time to write about it ... [3 comments]
Light Transmission · Lots of photographers, and people who teach them, talk about the advantages of shooting under a cloudy sky, or of having the sun’s light behind you. Increasingly, I’m enjoying pointing my camera straight into the sun ... [2 comments]
Home Computer? · We’ve got this big old Mac Pro in the living room, a 2008 model; I call it “the family mainframe”. I’m thinking it might get replaced with a Windows box ... [16 comments]
Susan and her SQL Problem · As usual, it all started out innocently enough. Susan [ed: names have been changed to protect privacy] had no way to meet the deadlines her bosses had set for her. Bob had recently and abruptly left the company, and Melissa was on an extended medical absence, leaving Susan to do the work of three people. That is, three people each trying to reconcile a few dozen 40,000+ row Excel spreadsheets representing the general ledger of the Fortune 1000 company they consulted for. She was about to brush off ever-chatty and annoying Michael from Compliance when, for once, he recognized the stress she was under and said something useful ... [4 comments]
Corporate Pride · There’s this nice video message in the elevators at work, about the Pride Parade. And it’s making me uneasy ... [2 comments]
Vegetables! · This morning we went to the Mount Pleasant Farmers’ Market, which is small and good, if kind of pricey. It’s soup-to-nuts where by “soup-to-nuts”, I mean meat, vegetables, and booze. I approve of all three, but it was the vegetables in the sun that wanted to be photographed ...
The REST Report · We were talking at work about Serverless: What’s the right tooling for developers building that kind of app? One of the businesspeople in the room said “Won’t developers need s special UI construction kit for Serverless apps?” The technical people all looked blank, because REST. Browser code doesn’t care (nor does a new-fangled React thingie, nor an iOS/Android app) what’s hiding behind that HTTP POST. REST is more or less totally dominant among app builders today. Is there any prospect of that changing? ... [3 comments]
Video and Speed · I’m sure you know the feeling — you see a link to something that looks interesting, follow it, and when it turns out to be a video clip, you shake your head and kill the tab. The problem with video is it’s just too slow. But sometimes slow is OK, and maybe video can be fixed ... [8 comments]
New British Isles · Following on the British EU referendum, some political re-alignment of the British Isles feels inevitable. I propose a re-organization into three states: Ireland, Britain, and Dál Riata (or perhaps Dalriada) which comprises what we now call Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here’s a map ... [7 comments]
Other American Gods · I just finished reading The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, who also writes geek books about Linux and Apache and so on. I enjoyed it, it’s a page-turner. One of the reviewers on Amazon said “This is what Gaiman’s American Gods should have been.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but both address the tricky problem of divine personae lodged in Middle America ...
A Really Bad Year · I just finished reading 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, and enjoyed it a lot. You might not though, unless you’re interested in the ancient Near East (from Greece to Egypt inclusive), or the practice of archaeology. Well, or the large-scale systemic collapse of great empires ... [1 comment]
On the Left · I have a problem lately: When I look in the mirror, I see a left-wing extremist. I’m uneasy about my strengthening belief that Free Enterprise is gonna ruin everything good unless we take a knife to its testicles first ... [25 comments]
YouTube Addiction? · You hear talk about Internet overload/addiction, but this very specific form has crossed my radar multiple times in recent days. In students, specifically. To the extent of failing multiple courses. Because they use laptops for everything, and YouTube is always a Cmd-Tab away, and whether your itch is Team Fortress 2 or cat breeding or string quartets or tentacles, there’s always something new and fresh there to scratch it. So teachers don’t get heard and homework doesn’t get done. My hunch is it’s a real thing. Anyone else? [8 comments]
Another JSON Schema Gripe · Recently I wrote of my disgruntlement with JSON Schema. Since then I’ve learned that its authors plan more work, and that there are several other efforts to build a schema facility for JSON. This note is just a complaint about a particular use-case, with the hope that it might inform these efforts ... [2 comments]