🕒︎ - 2022-06-21

If you ever looked a graphs (in computer science) you've come across the
name Dijkstra. He is also known for a paper that became sort of a
proto-meme: "Go To Statement Considered
Harmful",
and a number of other papers and pithy quotes, like this:
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes."
and:
"I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge
'How not to make a mess of it,' has not been met."
Watching this video: A Programmer’s Early Memories by Edsger W.
Dijkstra from The
International Research Conference in the History of Computing at Los
Alamos,
1976
make my toes curl - the contrast to e.g. Donald
Knuth's or Konrad
Zuze's stage presence is
striking.
🕝︎ - 2022-06-18

Many, most, programming languages use English keywords. That leads to a
bias, I think.
How would you go about constructing a programming language without?
Another bias is that most programming languages are written
left-to-right. I guess some asian languages are written top-to-bottom?
So, left-to-right, right-to-left and top-to-bottom are out. That leaves
bottom-to-top. Hm, or it could be "on the bias", i.e. diagonally.
Keywords must'nt be in English. So they are out. The latin alphabet is
also out.
It feels like this thought experiment might very well end up as a
variant of
Whitespace.
(Inspired by this recently restored video from The International
Research Conference in the History of Computing at Los Alamos,
1976:
Early History of Programming Languages by Donald
Knuth.)
🕦︎ - 2022-06-13

Warming up for Big Thief tonight was Tucker
Zimmerman who I had never heard of
before, so we arrived at the time the concert was announced, to hear him
as well.
It was touching to see the band help Tucker Zimmerman (he is of
1941-vintage) on- and off stage - they also accompanied him on a couple
of songs, including the encore.
I can't remember being at a concert where the warm up artist played an
encore before :-)
It was quite fitting that this concert was my first since the SARS-CoV-2
lock down on March 11, 2020, as the early Big Thief
concert that evening was the
last concert before the lock down - the late concert got cancelled!
I still haven't heard any of their recorded music, so I know very little
of it, but I also enjoyed this concert - which was sold out - and so did
the audience, which seemed quite in tune with a very sympathetic band.
If Big Thief plays near you - next are
Stockholm, Helsinki, Stavanger, Bergen, Oslo, Göteborg, Pilton, Cologne,
Utrecht, Brussels, Belfort, Hamburg, Roskilde, Berlin and then
Australia - go check them out!
🕦︎ - 2022-06-11
The website "Sad and Useless" has a bunch of pictures labeled "Pigeons
Make The Laziest Nests!"
I may be slightly jaded, but my first thought when looking at the
pictures was: "Those are IT-pigeons: Minimum Viable Product".
If the pigeons are a certain type of Free Software/Open Source zealot
they would be going "Not happy with the nest? When you hatch, send a
patch".
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
🕓︎ - 2022-06-10

I randomly ended up reading the comments on this 6 year old blog post:
export TERM=aaa-60 which
sent me on to an archeology archive site of Emacs sources.
Paradoxically, or not, hosted on Microsoft GitHub.
Anyway, the blog comment referenced the top of the Gosling Emacs'
display.c
:
/-------------\
/ \
/ \
/ \
| XXXX XXXX |
| XXXX XXXX |
| XXX XXX |
\ X /
--\ XXX /--
| | XXX | |
| | | |
| I I I I I I I |
| I I I I I I |
\ /
-- --
\-------/
XXX XXX
XXXXX XXXXX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXX XXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXX XXXXX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXX XXXXX
XXX XXX
**************
* BEWARE!! *
**************
All ye who enter here:
Most of the code in this module
is twisted beyond belief!
Tread carefully.
If you think you understand it,
You Don't,
So Look Again.
To optimize the number of changes done to update the screen a dynamic
programming algorithm was used; here is another comment later in the
file:
/* 1 2 3 4 .... Each Mij represents the minumum cost of
+---+---+---+---+----- rearranging the first i lines to map onto
1 | | | | | the first j lines (the j direction
+---+---+---+---+----- represents the desired contents of a line,
2 | | \| ^ | | i the current contents). The algorithm
+---+---\-|-+---+----- used is a dynamic programming one, where
3 | | <-+Mij| | M[i,j] = min( M[i-1,j],
+---+---+---+---+----- M[i,j-1]+redraw cost for j,2
4 | | | | | M[i-1,j-1]+the cost of
+---+---+---+---+----- converting line i to line j);
. | | | | | Line i can be converted to line j by either
. just drawing j, or if they match, by moving
. line i to line j (with insert/delete line)
*/
Quite neat.
🕤︎ - 2022-06-09

In Why We’re Sticking with Ruby on Rails at
GitLab
the CEO of GitLab writes:
Wouldn’t it be better to have a proper plugin interface? Or better
yet, a services interface modeled on microservices? In a word: no.
Which is short and to the point. The article continues:
Not only do these approaches impose deployment and integration hurdles
that go far beyond “I made a small change to the source code,” they
often enforce architectural constraints too rigidly. Anticipating all
the future extension points is a fool’s errand, one that we luckily
did not embark on and do not have to.
Very good point - make it easy to contribute rather than building
complicated integration of plugins or splitting everything out in
microservices.
With our boring modular monolith, users and other third-party
developers can and do contribute enhancements to the core product
I wasn't convinced that GitLab would be a great choice when we installed
at it work in 2016, but it has only grown better (and our instance is
widely used, among other reasons because we took advantage of
GitLab being free software/open source and added single-sign-on support
and automatic account creation into it, so our colleagues didn't have to
sign up) - I think reasoning like outlined above has very likely been a
big contributor to that.
Boring is good.
🕒︎ - 2022-05-28
I got annoyed with seeing loglines like this from PostgreSQL:
2022-05-28 01:57:34 CEST [2992011-1] lantern@lantern LOG: duration: 606.988 ms
statement: SELECT article.id, [...] ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 7
Really? 600 ms for just getting the 7 articles for the frontpage?
Admittedly including the comment count, but still!
So after finding the obligatory example code on
StackOverflow and fighting my way through adapting it to work, I got
the
query
down to a more reasonable ~20 ms.
Also, the query that generates the Archive page was
identical (except for the LIMIT (and sort order)), so I refactored
it
to use the same base SQL-string. This could be improved to only get the
fields needed on the page, but then I need to figure out how to have a partial Article data type, and I don't want to do that now.
There are still 3
places
I use connectby()
; they need to be eliminated as well, but it's late,
so not tonight.
One thing I didn't leave for another day, was to get rid of a
warning.
Phew.
Friday
Beck Hansen (52).
Ruby Vega (28).
dazz (39).
Saturday
Adam (49).
Courtney Love (56).
Tom Hanks (65).
Anjelica Huston (70).
O.J. Simpson (74).
UN Small Arms Destruction Day.
Palau: National Day.
2022-07-15
Rosetta Stone discovered in Egypt (223).
2022-07-18
Nelson Mandela (104).
2022-07-21
H.C. Ørsted describes electromagnetism (202).
2022-07-22
koldfront (23).
Prins Felix Henrik Valdemar Christian (20).
2022-07-23
Amiga launched (37).
2022-07-24
Christina Ruskær Nielsen (43).
2022-07-29
George Bradshaw (222).
Jesper Holm (45).