Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I haven’t reported on Ms. Gracie’s sleep schedule for a while. She’s finally — FINALLY — letting me sleep longer. It seems I can get to bed around 11:30 and she doesn’t need to do her business until 5:30 or so so. Sometimes 6:30! It’s been wonderful. Puppies really are like human babies in a lot of ways.
On with the links!
It’s called apelink.c and it’s a fine piece of poetry that weaves together the Portable Executable, ELF, Mach-O, and PKZIP file formats into shell scripts that run on most PCs and servers without needing to be installed.
This is kind of cool and, again, I like having an open solution folks could evolve.
I can’t figure out how to put together a good search query to find an article on it but macOS does this today with its application bundles. I suppose it’s not exactly the same but the idea certainly is.
The ideas Dave is talking about in this podcast are serious (even if he is laughing a lot), and he spells them out in text at a site called Textcasting.org.
I think I get what Dave is saying but I’d need to spend more time thinking about it. To get buy in from all the big platforms would mean either compromise or extensions to the format that only certain platforms would use. In other words, it’s a can of worms.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be done and that it’s not worth doing. It just means it’ll be difficult.
We already have blogs, links, and RSS. I publish posts to my blog to other sources automagically. But, that means my platform has to know how the API to that platform works. If there were a standard format for uploading RSS or some other structured document format I could see that being appealing.
Would the publisher push the changes to various other platforms or would each platform pull the post, like RSS works today? 🤔
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said today that a Threads API is in the works. This will give developers a chance to create different apps and experiences around Threads.
I like it when API’s are created to open up platforms but I have a feeling this one will be extremely limited. And what happened to using ActivityPub and Fediverse support? Why not do that? Oh, right, it would mean completely opening Threads to developers. They don’t want that because they need those eyeballs clearly focused on Threads.
Hey, how about starting with RSS? Let me subscribe to a users RSS feed for their posts. That would be really nice and allow me to follow some brands without cluttering my Threads timeline.
Also, give us Mastodon integration. 😀
Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally syndicated radio show the Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”
I know Jimmy Carter is seen as a Presidential failure by many, but there is no questioning his commitment to humanity and everything he’s given post Presidency. He’s a national treasure and someone we should listen to.
Of course nobody will. Nobody except we commoners not part of the political establishment.
I have no clue how to change this stuff but I’d like to see it happen. The unlimited money pouring into campaigns needs to be reined in.
Could a set of laws be created to give all campaigns an equal amount of money with equal amount of airtime and web presence to level the playing field?
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I’ve made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
This story made me chuckle a couple times. Corporations can get so bogged down in process and politics it’s amazing they can accomplish anything, much less a useful computing infrastructure.
Mike Johnson Hates America, But He Believes He Can Save It
It seems like Mr. Jones is quite the Christian Nationalist and hasn’t the slightest clue what our founding fathers intended for us.
Having a national religion is an abomination. The First Amendment to the Constitution is pretty clear on the matter.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It’s right there in black and white. We have the freedom to choose a religion. That can include Satanism. You don’t have to like it, you just have to live with it.
A new way to bring garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly
Here’s a bit of light technical reading for you! It’s incredible what hoops we jump through to achieve amazing things in computing.
I still believe the CLI standard should’ve been the runtime of choice for the browser.
We’re stepping back from the increasingly dangerous and dysfunctional ‘X’, and we’re sorry it’s taken this long
I suppose we’ll continue to see this. The big question is where do they land? They’ll probably have to have a presence on Mastodon, Blue Sky, and Threads.
Record labels and recording companies have been working to prevent artists from re-recording their albums like Taylor Swift, according to reports.
Can you blame artists for wanting to own the rights to their work? I certainly can’t.
The record labels should be ashamed. It’s kind of a scammy business and it’s too bad musical acts haven’t figured out a why to band together and move record labels out of the picture altogether.
I say that and of course I can’t do anything about my reliance on Apple to get my app in front of millions of people.
Jacquelyn Melinek • TechCrunch
Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been found guilty on all seven counts related to fraud and money laundering.
I guess he effed around and found out!
For me this brings up all the Orange Man trials. Why did this one happen so quickly and his are dragging out?
Anywho. I’m sure SBF will be taking these charges to the next higher court, then the next, and so on. The rich and famous have such an advantage in the legal system.
Elizabeth Blackstock • Jalopnik
It’s getting tough out there for the poor folks who have never faced systemic inequality but desperately want to feel oppressed. That’s why America First Legal — a conservative legal group led by Stephen Miller, a former adviser to former President Trump — is claiming that NASCAR is actually racist against white American men. That’s a first!
This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Have you ever watched a NASCAR race? It’s probably 99% white faces in the stands.
They’re just pissed NASCAR finally came into the 20th century and banned Confederate flags from NASCAR races.
Poor racists and their “But ma heritage!” Yeah, a heritage of hate and enslaving people. Great heritage. 🤬
Downtown Tech Office Shuts Down Its Free Cocktail Bar For Employees, CEO Says ‘The Office Is Dead’
Not even free booze could bring employees back to the office.
If you’re interested in socializing you should go to the office. It’s fine. I know a lot of people who prefer it to working from home.
I’ve seriously considered going into the office one day a week to change things up and hang out around other people. I’ve been to our office less than 20 times since folks started returning. I got COVID last summer during a group on-site and more recently had an on-site to nail down some API design and someone had COVID and didn’t know it until they returned home at the end of the week. Thankfully I dodged that bullet.
Maybe they should open a pub. Might as well do something useful with that liquor license, right? 🤔
Bubba Wallace’s No. 23 Toyota Camry will be doing a special Star Wars paint scheme for the NASCAR Cup Series season finale this weekend at Phoenix Raceway. The livery is intended to promote 23XI Racing sponsor Columbia Sportswear’s upcoming Star Wars collection, but the design is far more than just a couple of logos and movie characters slapped onto some bodywork.
If you’re a Star Wars fan or a NASCAR fan you owe it to yourself to go watch the video. Not only is Bubba Wallace’s car sporting a Star Wars theme so is Tyler Reddick’s.
I’m still having a great time at work integrating React Native into an existing iOS App. I still have a lot to learn about JavaScript and TypeScript but my interest is piqued. Don’t get me wrong, I still need to learn SwiftUI and I still love doing native work, but this is worth learning because we’re seeing more clients ask for it.
How about some moderate Republicans approach 
Its been a super duper exciting couple weeks which culminated in an 
Where did the week go? I supposed getting to the weekend so quickly is a sign of how much I’m enjoying work.
I’ve been really busy at work lately but it’s felt really good overall. Sure I’m feeling a little pressure and I’m a bit stressed but that’s par for the course.
Another week in the books. It’s my favorite time of the year. Trees are changing color and dropping leaves. Temperatures are beginning to drop. We have Halloween and Thanksgiving coming up. What a wonderful season!🍁🎃🦃
I’ve never purchased an Apple iPhone case because they’re just too darned expensive for what you get. I have a couple of custom cases from Syd Cases and a couple Unicorn Beetle cases.
Exciting update on Gracie’s potty training! She’s eight months old today and doing really well. She now comes to me and boops me with her nose or smacks me with her monstrous paw when she needs to do her thing. That’s a huge improvement.
I’m on a project at work using React Native but not in the typical way, which is to say it didn’t start as a React Native project. It’s an exiting app out in the world actively uses by, I’d imagine, tens and tens of thousands of people. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. Bottom line is, it’s a frontline app and is important to our client.
With all that in mind here’s what our client is looking to do. We are building new features in React Native and leveraging much of the internal native code to fetch network data, build models, and return that data to React Native code. The API or Interface to the native code is well defined and implemented on iOS and Android. The React Native team code is the same for both platforms. I’m part of the platform team integrating React Native into the existing app and providing the API/Interfaces to the React Native developers.
The one really ugly bit, at least to me, is the requirement to use npm. I know web devs are accustomed to using it but it feels really strange and fragile to use these two package managers to be able to build and run an app that includes React Native. I know I’ve run into random issues I can’t explain when node packages change or are added but that’s just me being a big whiny cry baby developer. I understand it well enough to be dangerous but I don’t currently have that deep knowledge I like to have. I’m learning new stuff everyday but I’ve only scratched the surface.
