Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I'm moving really fast this morning to get this "out the door" because I have to go pickup our trailer this morning. We bought a larger one, but it needed a bit of work and a good once over. The work is done, time to get ready for our maiden voyage in June.
I’ve only had one cup of coffee so I decided to play the Doom Soundtrack to increase my typing speed 1000%. 🤣
I hope you enjoy the links and the bad opinions. ❤️
Kyle Busch, a two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, has died at the age of 41, just hours after his family said he was suffering from a severe illness.
Kim sent me a text Thursday night that simply read “Kyle Busch died.” When I read it, it didn’t quite register at first. My first thought was “Can’t be that Kyle Busch?” I was so wrong.
Kyle Busch was one of my favorite NASCAR drivers. He was brash but had mellowed over the years and I liked his competitive nature. Even though he’s struggled to record a win over the last three seasons he is, as Denny Hamlin says, on the Mount Rushmore of NASCAR.
I especially feel for his family. I can’t imagine the pain. ❤️
Godspeed, Mr. Busch.
I think maybe it’s time to consider a reboot of WordPress. I can’t seem to seed them with any ideas about building on it from the point of view of the web. It’s a product unto itself, it has plugins, but I’m not a plug-in sort of guy. I write operating systems. That’s what drives me. I see a great place to put an OS with WordPress as the storage and publishing component, and everything else grows up around it.
I’ve been watching Dave create his WordLand project on top of WordPress for a while now and it got me thinking about using WordPress as the backend for a new project. I don’t think it needs a reboot, just some different ways to use it. Dave’s own work shows that would work.
My idea is to build out a Micropub implementation that uses WordPress as its backend. That would allow for anyone to hook up their Micropub enabled client app or website to the backend.
The other part of my idea was to hook into the publishing flow to output static HTML pages since it’s what I prefer for my blog.
All the parts are there. They just need connecting. I’m sure it won’t be without its challenges but I bet an LLM like Claude could help pull it all together. I’m thinking of doing it in C++ because it’s something I know and is highly portable. Swift would also be a decent choice since it’s also very portable.
Who am I kidding. It needs to run on Linux. 😄
Virginia might be for lovers, but more recently, it’s for data centers. The state has more data centers than anywhere in the world, and companies are pushing to build more of them, including around some of the most hallowed ground in the country: the Manassas National Battlefield Park.
We’re definitely data center heavy here in Virginia and folks all over the state don’t want them in their area. Who can blame them given stories out of states like Texas and Tennessee where data center operators are polluting the air and water and making residents sick. Noise and light pollution are real things.
I mentioned it last weekend. If data center operators want to build they need to bring two things with them; power and an alternative to water for cooling. Oh, and they need to be HIGHLY regulated. I mean regulated like nuclear power plants. Green energy and restrictive noise pollution standards. Water is a big one. We need it to survive and many of these places are polluting water and putting it right back in the ground.
They’ve become a nuisance to communities. Who’d want them in their neck of the woods? I sure don’t.
The Nice Guys bombed at the box office in 2016, grossing an estimated $62 million at the end of its theatrical run with a $50 million budget. This commercial turnout is largely credited to releasing the same weekend as the Angry Birds movie, and in the 10 years since critics and fans alike have bemoaned the loss of potential sequels this action-comedy could have spawned had it received more spotlight. To this day, cast and crew still get asked about the possibility of it in interviews.
I think I saw The Nice Guys on Netflix a few years back, it could’ve been another streaming service, but I think it was Netflix. Anywho, it’s a good film and I’d recomment putting it on your “to see” list.
I’m referring, of course, to the daily miracle that is coffee. Our grandparents were told to cut back on this dirty-tasting beverage but today, it has become one of the most studied and virtuous and quietly luxurious parts of the human diet. All in all, coffee — yes, coffee — is one of the best reasons to be alive in the year 2026.
I mean, duh! Coffee is life blood! If you’re reading this now you understand I drink a decent amount of coffee throughout the day. Three cups in the morning — occasionally adding a medium mocha on top of that — and a hot cup or maybe a large cold brew in the afternoon.
LONG LIVE COFFEE! ☕️
Microsoft first teased its movable taskbar in March as part of efforts to rebuild trust among users. You can adjust the alignment of the icons inside the taskbar, as well as open the Start menu drawer from wherever you placed it. Windows 11 Insiders can access a shorter taskbar, too, which could come in handy for devices with smaller displays. There’s also an option to choose from a “Small” or “Large” Start menu.
It’s really nice to see Microsoft take a step back and work on fixing up the Windows UI. One thing I wish they’d do is make the UI consistent and get all to look and behave the same. Their settings app used to be tiny and clear of clutter. Now it’s a real mess.
Separating WinUI 3 from the operating system is a plus and a minus. It’s a plus because they support older releases. It’s a minus because the Windows team hasn’t fully integrated that new look into the OS. By fully integrating I mean anything built with the “old” Windows API — on top of the USER component. Why hasn’t Microsoft updated USER to draw using WinUI 3? If they were able to do that all applications using the old User functions for window and dialog management should adopt the new UI without change, or very little change. I think KERNEL and GDI could stay the same, maybe? Of the two GDI is definitely a candidate for updating so they could hide new graphics technology under it.
When Microsoft was developing NT they did an amazing job maintaining backward compatibility that allowed 16-bit Windows apps to easily move to their new 32-bit operating system. Did we have to make changes? Yes, we did, but they were really minor.
I’d imagine it’s not important to the big picture. Folks don’t really build new native Windows apps any longer. Most stuff is built to run in the browser. 😔
I have all kinds of bad ideas around marrying the old and the new to allow existing applications to get the benefit of the new without a total rewrite. Microsoft is usually pretty good at backward compatibility. In the case of WinUI 3 they opted to leave USER behind, to bit rot. Which is kind of sad to me.
As soon as people found a Bun branch mentioning an experiment to use an LLM to port the existing Zig code to Rust, they went mad.
This experiment is fascinating! From what I’ve read they have a direct port that works and passes existing unit tests. That’s wild and kind of exciting.
Using an LLM to create a blueprint of an existing piece of code and rewriting it a memory safe language is not such a bad idea. Sure, it’s going to take human intervention. Developers will need to review the code and understand it. Testers will need to understand how to test it and build tooling for it. But as LLMs improve it seems like this could be a really good way to rewrite a huge project bit by bit and get a safer version of it.
It’s not a perfect idea but seeing experiments like this is both terrifying and encouraging.
I’m going to keep an eye on this and see where it goes.
Hokum recently hit theaters, and it’s already outperforming box office expectations. If this Kubrick-referencing haunted hotel flick starring Adam Scott was your introduction to director Damian McCarthy, do yourself a favor and go watch his previous film, Oddity.
Kim discovered Oddity not long after it released and being a horror fan we watched it. It’s quite good.
Highly recommended if you’re a fan of the genre. 🍿
The metal-inspired soundtrack for 1993 shoot-’em-up Doom entered the Library Of Congress’ National Recording Registry last week, joining music by the likes of Metallica, Beyoncé, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In 2024, Hammer interviewed designer John Romero, Bury Tomorrow bassist Davyd Winter-Bates and Periphery guitarist Misha Mansoor to find out how the game was created – and why it made such a lasting impact on heavy music.
The soundtrack will shred your brain, jack you up, and build tension. I just want to bang my head and jump. It’s perfect for the pace of the game.
I’ve wanted try to modernize Frontier for at least ten years. I had a long-tail of things I’d wanted to do inside UserLand before leaving for Microsoft, and since the Frontier kernel was open source it was always possible — at least in theory. But I never had the right combination of available time and C-coding chops, and I lacked familiarity with the deeper parts of the C-based Frontier/UserTalk runtime for it to be a realistic thing to attempt.
I’ve looked at the original Frontier code many times since it was released to the public. It does seem like a daunting task to refresh it for modern OS’es but in the end it could make for a relly nice scripting language on Linux. No, seriously! It had a large following at one time and was used by UserLand to create Manilla and Radio. Both very good blogging platforms when blogging was young.
As someone who loves building APIs and SDKs for developers I’d like to see the UI and main Frontier engine separated so it could be embedded inside other applications. Maybe the UI could be there? 🤔 Microsoft’s VBA was a full IDE you could embed in your applications. Seeing something like that for Mac, Linux, and Windows would be incredible.
Jake, can you make that happen? 😄 Have you considered using a modern, memory safe, language and doing a straight across port? Not optimized, not really taking advantage of the language, just a line for line port from C to say Rust or Swift? Then you could slowly do any language optimaization or take better advantage of what the language has to offer after getting that initial port complete.
Food for thought. 🍕
