Considering my career since, it’s surprising to think that the first *nix-like OS I used in anger was not some flavour of Linux. Instead it was FreeBSD. As such, I’ve always had a fondness for it despite the fact I haven’t actually used it since. So when I was looking for a little project to pass the time, I thought “Why not port DistroD to FreeBSD?” That’s when reality finally met my rose-tinted glasses.
Apple announced the Vision Pro at WWDC 2023 with the usual breathless hype they bring to all their major product announcements. There are a number of technically-minded people online who feel it can be as successful as the iPhone. But to think that is to forget how the iPhone was successful.
One of the methods of communication over the internet that software developers favour are mailing lists. I don’t know much about the history of mailing lists but they pre-date forums, Q&A sites like Quora or StackOverflow, blogs, comment threads, and most of the many other ways that people talk to each other via the World Wide Web.
They also annoy the hell out of me. I was reminded of this yesterday when investigating an issue with Postgresql.
When developing a website in Python, you must make a number of decisions. What framework to use is one: will it be the extremely lightweight approach of Werkzeug or Bottle to the big heavyweights such as Django or Turbogears? Will it process requests using the simple synchronous threads or take advantage of asynchronous approaches like Tornado or aiohttp? These are all important decisions that will effect how you write the code and limit you in some crucial ways. But what about the WSGI layer?
With my recent purchase of a lovely new Thinkpad T480s from Lenovo, I’ve been experimenting with using Windows as my main driver after a hiatus of several years. It’s quite different from both MacOS and Linux (obviously!) but with the advent of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) a lot of my previous pain points are gone. Except for one: a decent terminal emulator. This is what I did.
As part of my general readings, I came across an interesting tool called Juju. It’s developed by Canonical and my best attempt at describing is that it is a macro-infrastructure provisioning tool. But my initial experience was poor because their tutorial simply didn’t work out of the box.
A common approach to architecting a platform in the software industry is microservices. There appear to be fundamental issues with it though. Every now and again, somebody writes an article about their bad experiences with it and online forums respond, loudly declaring they’re doing it wrong. Is it any wonder though, when it’s so poorly understood?
Browsing the HackerNews thread on a recent article criticising Apple keyboards, I was amused by a common discussion that always crops up on a subject like this: is Linux a viable alternative to Mac OS? To which the answer is always the same: no. But why is that?
A recent post about finding the keyboard shortcut for debug mode in Animal Crossing (via Hacker News) had my nostalgia senses tingling. It reminded me strongly of my first job: porting Japanese mobile phone games to European handsets.