yeroc @yeroc@qoto.org

Jerry Lewis: You cannot polish a turd.
Stanley Kubrick: You can if you freeze it.

…and that's why we do freezes in software development.

#Programming #Software

Happy new year! Have you seen these images floating around online of animated pixel art? These are scenes from a calendar program from the 90s called Seize the Day, featuring art by Mark Ferrari. The scenes used palette cycling, a very efficient limited form of animation.

Did you know that there's a mobile port called Living Worlds that shows you the scene for the month? Each scene has a tiny story that progresses over the year, so now's the perfect time to check it out.

Enjoy it, and seize the day!

https://pixfabrik.com/livingworlds/

@LivingWorldsArt

i noticed that for the last two years, Sun brand Japanese mandarin oranges - an absolute staple of canadian christmas - have been missing from the shelves.

apparently only one company in canada imported them for the past 140 years: Oppy. it had a special railcar devoted to shipping them.

even growing up in the sub-arctic, Sun mandarins (with requisite green paper wrappings) were available. i hope they solve the logistics problems and get them imported for 2025.

https://oppy.com/a-holiday-tradition-japanese-mandarin-oranges/

#canada #japan

New blog post, on RSS feeds and real time crawling.

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_113_rtc/

Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah to my friends who celebrate. I hope that you are celebrating with your family!

The Apollo 8 astronauts performed lunar orbit insertion #OTD in 1968.

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit the moon, the first to see an earthrise, fifty three years ago today.

Anders spotted the Earth coming up over the Moon’s horizon:

"Oh my God, look at that picture over there! It's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!"

Image: NASA

There was a world before, when a "gamified game" was word salad. Where the game existed to be there when you needed it, not engineered to require it like bag of morphine desperate to be squeezed. Simply our amateur hour of teens and adults alike wasting time away in vocal denigration, every hour.

This story gripped our province and country in July 2024. Nothing short of a miracle that all 7 crewmembers of the Elite Navigator returned home safely. #Lucky7 #Newfoundland

“From the raft, Eugene watched as the first of two divers came down from the helicopter and swam up to the raft. “He said, ‘How many people on board?’ I said ‘Seven.’ He said, ‘How many alive?’ I said, ‘Seven.’”
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/lost-at-sea-lucky-7-newfoundland

Émilie du Châtelet, who hypothesized conservation of energy, established kinetic energy as distinct from momentum and proportional to (speed)², and combined work by Newton and Leibniz with her own original ideas in "Institutions de Physique," was born #OTD in 1706.

Du Châtelet is an important figure in the development of classical physics, but she is not nearly as well known as many of her male contemporaries.

Portrait: M. Q. de La Tour

every few months i think of tom brier, before his accident, who sight-read the Super Mario World Athletic theme in the most playful, joyful style

watching tom's hands having fun with the theme brings a smile to my face every time.

after his car accident in 2016, the ensuing neurological damage impaired his ability to play. i look forward hearing about any small progress he makes in his recovery over the past 8 years, no matter how tiny you gave the world a whole lot, tom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZMroQOtS_U

#piano #retroGaming

Worrisome trend on macOS: developers releasing only an iPad or iPhone app and expecting macOS users to use the same interface. They don't respond the same to macOS hotkeys, don't integrate properly with browsers and external apps, and some don't even scale beyond iPhone size.

Every single word that @doublemmartin Melissa Martin writes is golden. Heartbreakingly so at times. As always it behooves you to read everything she writes. And to subscribe to her substack. https://open.substack.com/pub/melissamartin/p/escalation?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Just dropping this here... This was from a couple of years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngSTY2SPwRk

Léonie comparing ChatGPT output with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser is one of the most apt descriptions I have seen.

https://htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2024/7/

Two years later.

Want to know one of the major reasons Mastodon didn't catch on with journalists and large website owners?

It is *invisible* in referrer statistics.

Here's my blog from the last month.

BlueSky now sends me more traffic than Bing.

How much traffic does Mastodon send? It is impossible to know due to the "noreferrer" header in all links.

(I'm not saying your privacy isn't important. But you can't grow a community if no-one knows you exist.)

Mitogen 0.3.19 is out with support Ansible 11.
https://pypi.org/project/mitogen/0.3.19/
https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/changelog.html
#Ansible #Mitogen

@b0rk Funny* story.

When I was learning Unix (which would be around 1986), I had learnt just enough about pipes to be dangerous.

I had a lot of files in a directory and I wanted to delete all of them except a few.

I knew about rm and I knew about permissions and that it would prompt me if I removed write permission. So I did a chmod 400 (or something) on the few files I wanted to keep.

I also knew about the yes program.

So I confidently typed

yes n | rm *

fully expecting all the files to go except the 3-or-whatever I’d removed write permission from.

Reader (Julia): they were all deleted.

I was quite confused by this, as well as upset because I actually needed those files. This was when Unix was very much _not_ open source. I was at Edinburgh University, and there were some real Unix experts there. I went and consulted one, Paul Dourish, and asked him what I’d done wrong.

He contemplated a a while and said he thought what I did should have worked. Somehow, he had access to the source code for the Unix I was on. He looked at it and said something like: ah, there’s the problem.

The rm program, when prompting to override the 400 permission and delete, uses isatty() to see if the input is from a keyboard or a pipe. And if it’s not a keyboard it…
… have you guessed? …
ignores the input and assumed ‘yes’.

[Paul said: “You shouldn’t have typed that without reading the source first!”]

It’s now 2024 (as you know). I just tried it again (in a terminal on OS X’s Unix). Still the same behaviour. Consistent/

I don’t like programs behaving differently with pipes…especially assuming the user wants his/her files deleted.

* I did not think it funny at the time.