Weeknotes 222

“Where Does Book Data Come from?” – I expected that this question would be fairly involved, and it is.

My Virgin Media broadband contract came up for renewal 🙀 I’ve been anticipating this moment since we signed our first contract. Unfortunately, we had little choice. They are the only viable choice choice on our street. Openreach and City Fibre are constantly “planning” but have failed to “build” so far.

Surprisingly, Virgin were not quite as bad I had anticipated, still the cost to carry on without entering a new contract would have gone up to £83.84 per month from £48.37 😢

The renewal offered for a new contract was ~£47 a month. I managed to get them to drop it to £42. So it could’ve been much worse. We are now contracted for another 24 MONTHS though, so I expect Openreach and/or City Fibre to suddenly get their act together starting Monday.

Libghostty Is Coming

Terminal emulation is a classic problem that appears simple on the surface but is riddled with unexpected complexities and edge cases.3 As a result, most of these implementations are incomplete, buggy, and slow.

I bet!

On DHH’s “As I Remember London”

Well I’m born in the UK (London of all places), and I’m white. Does that make me a ’native Brit'?

Not really. You see, my parents are Danish.

A well thought-out and reasonable analysis.

I don’t think an open letter will achieve any real change, but I think it is valid as a form of protest. If you are unhappy with leadership, what else can you do? Forking something like Rails is not viable without the required resources. The amount of defacement happening in the repo is pretty pathetic. I imagine these are the same sort of people who would vehemently defend “free speech” as long as you’re saying things they like.

Apropos of nothing 👀 the repo-lockdown and changed-lines-count-labeler GitHub Actions look useful.

This whole debacle has also reminded me that it is difficult to agree with disagreeable people.

Let’s reset ✨ The former Nintendo of America president and COO, who has just stepped down, is called Doug Bowser ✨

More good news. We bought a tumble dryer and it’s changing our lives. How did I make it this far into my life without experiencing the humble tumble?

Cleaning up code using ast-grep – ast-grep seems cool, but I’m not sure this process is as easy as the author implies. I can see many find and replaces happening instead 😆

elephantshark

Postgres network traffic monitor

Seems like this would be very useful if you needed it.

I can really recommend Mr Inbetween – it is excellent. On paper there is nothing particularly interesting about this programme, but the script and great acting elevate it to something very worthwhile.

Alien Earth is also over, and all I can say without spoiling anything is that I wanted more. And I still want more. And when will Season 2 be released please.

Rails on SQLite: exciting new ways to cause outages – Good balanced take on running SQLite in production

Cognitive load is what matters

I really enjoyed this, but the problem is getting other people to agree on what is or isn’t creating “cognitive load”. I have definitely worked with people who would not agree that the various examples in this article are difficult to understand. #empathy

I think we might have a new contender for most useless delivery company: APC.

Long story short, I asked for them to deliver the parcel to a local shop, which they eventually did. However, they failed to say where they had delivered it to. None of the numerous emails or texts they sent said where it had gone.

Don’t you know where you parcel is going Jordan?

Reader, when you are receiving the quantity of parcels I do sometimes you forget where they are going.

“Can a coding agent build a database system?”

Yes, but not one I trust or would want to maintain.

I installed the Herb LSP after talking to Harry about it. I’m not sure how much this is going to help me, but I’m glad someone is working on HTML tooling. I’ll see how I go!