Harrison Co.: ”If the point of a compass was centered on Fresno, California, and a 100-mile radius was drawn, the circle formed would reach across the most vital and productive growing region in the world. Although this 100 Mile Circle covers less than 1% of the total land mass of the U.S., it produces nearly one-half of its fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts – more than 250 different crops rich in the vitamins and nutrients essential to human survival.”
Over the years I’ve told many people the San Joaquin Valley feeds the world. I always had a feeling they didn’t believe me.
Yes, the San Joaquin Valley is critical to the worlds food supply and it’s constantly in trouble. Drought is a huge problem in the valley. There just isn’t enough water to go around any longer.
What happens when crops can no longer be grown there due to climate change? Things will get ugly.
Christopher Sauveur: ”Indeed, when I started implementing more complex inspector views, with several text fields with or without steppers, or a color picker, everything became painfully slow. The SpriteKit view renders generally at a flawless 60 frames per second (as long as you’re not using an Intel iGPU). But everytime SwiftUI has to update the inspector view (during movement or even just by typing inside a text field), the render would go down to a very unstable 10~15 fps. It was unacceptable.”
This is a really nice read about a developer using SwiftUI with SpeiteKit. He really gave SwiftUI a fair shake and was able to create a really nifty application.
SwiftUI is another one of those mind bending experiences. To be good at it you have to fully embrace how it’s meant to work, not try to shoehorn your way of thinking into it.
Go with the flow.
Haaretz: ”American democracy is imperiled, under a constant domestic assault against its institutions, traditions and mores. Joe Biden knows this and made fixing the problem the rationale for his bid for the presidency. Now Biden has been convinced by historians that the danger is more imminent than even the January 2021 insurrection attempt suggested.”
President Biden’s speech sent many a Republican to their fainting couches with a case of the vapors.
The President did the unexpected. He called out the MAGA forces, and their orange leader, for attempting to destroy our democracy. Rightfully so.
The MAGA movement must be destroyed if our democracy is to survive.
For the umpteenth time, I say Apple needs an App Store ombudsman. An advocate for developers like Shihab here. https://t.co/R3APum2uin
— John Gruber (@gruber) September 2, 2022
Not good. Not good at all. Hope he can appeal and get this straightened out. https://t.co/YXSLI0gTtU
— Ged Maheux (@gedeon) September 2, 2022
Reading this about Shihab’s Aviary Twitter client really bummed me out. After seeing it I checked out the description for some other popular Twitter clients and they use the same language as Shihab.
Are all third party Twitter clients going to have to change their descriptions or be tossed out of the store or is this a one-off that will be corrected?
I hope he’s able to get his app update accepted soon.
Taylor Built Solutions: ”Given all of this focus on app and web development why would you want to learn C++ these days?”
I’m definitely biased but I think it’s fine to learn C++. I worked in the language for 20+ years and found it agreeable. Sure, it has pitfalls, but once you understand those it’s easy to live with them. The new language standards certainly help developers stay away from danger zones.
Dan Rather: ”It was clear to anyone who had an ounce of appreciation for what the job of the presidency entails, to anyone who respected the constitutional order of our government, to anyone who worried about the health and safety of this nation, to anyone with a moral compass, to anyone who prizes the common sense of purpose that great leaders can summon, that Donald J. Trump had no business anywhere near the presidency.”
Who doesn’t love Dan Rather? I think he’s doing better work today than he did when he was a news anchor.
Slate: ”I can recommend a cure for that, though it might be a bit strong for Lucy’s taste: A good old-fashioned Stephen King fantasy-horror epic. Happily, there’s a new specimen: Fairy Tale. Like its predecessors in the King canon—especially The Eyes of the Dragon, the Dark Tower series, and The Talisman (co-written with Peter Straub)—it’s sometimes grisly, sometimes tense, and sometimes a bit goofy.”
My wife and I are fans of Mr. King so I’d imagine this book will make its way into our home.
Dr. Drang: ”A couple of weeks ago, I decided to cut back on my RSS feed reading.1 Not by reducing the number of feeds I’m subscribed to, but by filtering articles to eliminate those that would just be a waste of my time.”
As a creator of a feed reader I think this is a brilliant idea. Perhaps some day I’ll be able to add regex support to Stream?
I only have about 100 other features to complete. 😂
Paul Lefebvre: ”In my continuing series of Atari BASIC programs I wrote in the 80s as I was first learning to program, I present Atari Painter.”
I have a soft spot in my heart for the BASIC programming language. My first gig as a professional developer was working on accounting software written in BASIC, some dating back to 1968. It had all the nifty features of BASIC like goto and gosub but we also made use of Microsoft’s very modern Professional BASIC. The new code was nicely structured with functions and sub routines and we even leveraged some third party assembly language code for various parts of the app.
Barn Finds: ”There were three stars of the quasi-classic 1980 movie, The Blue Brothers: Saturday Night Live alum John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and a 1974 Dodge Monaco, dressed up as a retired Chicago police car.”
Quasi-classic? How dare you sir!
The Blues Brothers is a great 80’s film. Great cast, a fun premise, and fantastic music.
If you’re ever in the mood for a fun 80’s film this one is worth a watch.
