Rob Fahrni

Back in West Virginia. 🚙

Sacked out.

Had our coffee, got Ms. Cocoa loaded up, and started down the road. We’ve just crossed into Indiana. 🚙

We’re in Nashville, no not that one, the one in Illinois. We’ve picked up our new pup, Cocoa, and head back home tomorrow. Kolby is gonna hate us for a while but he’s a sweet boy and will teach her the ropes. 🐶🚙

Say hi Cocoa.

Ron? Close enough.

Hello Kentucky 🚙

Hello West Virginia 🚙

Good morning! ☕️

Kim and I are on the road this morning. We’re headed to Nashville, Illinois, to pick up a new pup! I hope to post some pictures as we go.

The Hollywood Reporter

Tina Turner, the trailblazing rock star who set world records for ticket sales — and whose dramatic triumph over domestic abuse and the music industry itself made her a feminist icon — has died. She was 83.

Tina Turner is part of the soundtrack of my high school years.

God speed.

Deadline

Ray Stevenson, a veteran actor whose dozens of film and TV credits include RRR, the Thor and Divergent films, Vikings and Star Wars animated series, died Sunday.

I’ve always liked Ray Stevenson. I enjoyed his version of The Punisher but I’d wager he’s best known as Volstagg in Thor.

The Iconfactory

We’re proud to announce that version 1.0.4 of Notchmeister is now available to download. And with it comes a revolutionary new feature called Fusion Dice.

Software should be fun. I’ll bet Notchmeister was fun to build and it’s probably going to be fun to use.

Jalopnik

I usually get the same answer whenever I bring it up: “No, you can’t make your own engine. The castings are too complicated. How will you actually pour your own block? Do you have foundry in your mom’s basement? It’s too expensive to machine one from scratch. You don’t know what you’re doing!”

I’ve had it in mind I should build a four cylinder motor from the ground up. Sure, why not? Maybe some day. 😃

Rolling Stone

President Joe Biden and the Republican Party at loggerheads in the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations as the GOP insists on steep spending cuts and work requirements for aid recipients. Although both Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy sounded hopeful there was a deal to be made just last week, talks appear to have broken down over the last couple days.

Here we go. Headed for a cliff.

Los Angeles Times

The slow-motion rebirth of Tulare Lake has inundated farm fields and threatened levees, homes and whole towns. On Monday, the state projected the lake would reach its peak in the next week or so, but the floodwaters will linger for perhaps two years.

This is a wild thought. Tulare Lake hanging around for a couple years? That’s a crazy thought. I wish I could see an aerial view of it.

The Washington Post

Two of Donald Trump’s employees moved boxes of papers the day before an early June visit by FBI agents and a prosecutor to the former president’s Florida home to retrieve classified documents in response to a subpoena — timing that investigators have come to view as suspicious and an indication of possible obstruction, according to people familiar with the matter.

Can we convict this dude and put him behind bars for a while?

Such a scumbag.

The Daily Progress

Charlottesville-based tech company WillowTree laid off roughly 12% of its workforce on Wednesday, bringing an end to years of rapid growth

Yesterday was a really tough day at work. For the first time in WillowTree’s history (at least I think it was a first?) we had layoffs. Don’t worry, I was fortunate enough to make it through but many of my friends and colleagues did not. Economic forces finally caught up to us. 😔

In total 120 trees lost their jobs. That’s about 12% of the company. If you’ve never gone through something like this it’s very surreal to hear from a friend who’s just lost their job. That immediate “NO!” Is followed by all the stages of grief. You may even get survivors guilt.

By afternoon it was over. Today those of us who remain will try to get some work done.

P.S.

I will no longer be an Associate Engineering Director. As part of the reorganization I’ll go back to being a full time Staff Software Engineer. I’ll still get to build teams and work on technical solutions for clients, I just won’t be doing the more business side of things, which is fine with me.

I hope to put together a list of folks I know, who are all extremely good at what they do, so someone looking for extremely good folks can hire them.

I’m just happy to have a job. ❤️

Some more shots of Kim’s flowers. The peony is really beautiful. It’s white with a slight hint of pink. Lovely.

Good morning!

I couldn’t wait to get started this morning. I got my pot started and sat down to put this post together. When the coffee finished I poured my first cup. I almost let that cup get too cool to drink. The shame! I’ve since remedied the situation and have resolved to not let it happen with my second cup! ☕️

Enjoy the linkage!

Sprudge

Espresso is basically magic. The more I learn about what goes on inside the black box that is the portafilter, the more certain I am of it.

Yes, pulling a really great shot feels like magic. When Haileigh — our oldest daughter — was a barista at a very snobby coffee shop she’d spend the morning adjusting the grinder. That would result in a half to one pound of coffee being ground just to get it properly set up. Was the espresso great? It certainly was. 🪄

Mediaite

Now Disney is cancelling plans to build a massive nearly $1 billion office complex in Orlando, costing the state more than 2,000 six-figure jobs.

I would love to see Bob Iger move jobs out of Florida. The state has gone full fascist under DeSantis and isn’t a safe place for LGBTQ+, black and brown folks, women, and children. Their educational system is teaching them to become white supremacists and intolerant and even their institutions of higher education are under attack.

If you can, get out.

gonsoloblog

TLDR: Render Disney’s Moana scene in less than 10.000 lines of Swift code.

Man, I love the field I work in and the nerds who comprise it. I say that with the utmost respect.

Joyce Vance

Monday morning, American democracy became more brittle, at least in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that prohibits the state’s public colleges and universities from continuing their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Ah, yes, more of Florida’s fascist Governor making Florida a worse place to live. It makes me wonder if he’s setting it up to secede from our Union, kind of like Texas? It’s like the South is trying it’s damndest to rise again. We can’t let that happen.

Matt Corey

Ok, it didn’t exactly go down like that, and no, it wasn’t “take this job and shove it” either, but I actually did it. I left a great job that I enjoyed, and now I’m officially self employed. What hell am I thinking!?

Matt is going Indie and I’m more than a bit jealous! I wish I could pull it off. I’m pulling for you to be wildly successful Matt! 👍🏼

Defector

I’d like the record to show that I resisted getting AirPods for a long time. 

This is a really great piece by everybody’s favorite swole woman, Casey Johnston.

Her post is all about her quest to recover her lost — and subsequently stolen — AirPods. Go read the piece, it’s really good.

Steve Roy

Five years later I’m still as happy with this decision as I was then. I post to my site, and it gets cross-posted to social media. Today that means Mastodon. Eventually it may mean something else. But no matter what, steveroy.ca will always be the source of truth.

Making your weblog the hub of your social media presence is smart and the proper way to own your content. It’s why I started posting more short content without titles here. While I can’t auto post my content to Mastodon — I could but Micro.blog has some limitations — I do re-post most of my short posts there.

The Pink News

Actor and trans icon Elliot Page has opened up about how gender-affirming care changed his life in a moving Instagram post.

I’ve read stories like this time and again. As soon as a trans persons begins or completes their transition they become a much happier person. I’m happy for Elliot and wish him many long, happy, and fruitful years ahead.

Netflix Technology Blog

The Compute team at Netflix is charged with managing all AWS and containerized workloads at Netflix, including autoscaling, deployment of containers, issue remediation, etc. As part of this team, I work on fixing strange things that users report.

The modern day hero of computing is the DevOps engineer. They’re a mix of geeky computer tech and software developer all rolled into one extremely busy package.

If you’re a Unix/Linux geek I’d imagine you’ll enjoy the piece.

Jalopnik

New cars are getting too expensive, but the value from some of the old standards from Honda, Toyota and Hyundai is still there

Yep, cars are crazy expensive. Yep, good inexpensive cars are impossible to find. Yep, there are good used cars on the market.

Your mileage may vary. 🚙

Orhun Parmaksız

That day I decided to write my own pastebin service. And of course, I was going to write it in Rust.

Neat little piece about one persons quest to make their own thing. All in Rust of course. Because why not?

Steven Beschloss

The offering of “thoughts and prayers” after each murderous mass shooting has become a nauseating refrain. You know the drill: The speakers/tweeters utter this blood-stained phrase (or a close variant) like robots.

Thoughts and prayers is the GOP way to get evangelical Christian support. That’s all it is, a ploy for votes, an an easy one at that. Just drop a few simple words on social media and gain support for your Godliness. Disgusting, the whole lot. 🤬

I suspect Jesus would support an end to the violence.

PC Gamer

Activision Blizzard’s mandatory return-to-office policy is causing an unnecessary loss of talent, to the point where it could affect development of major titles like World of Warcraft and Diablo 4, according to some Blizzard developers.

Return to office has been a real hot button topic all over the country. Many jobs, like mine, don’t really require me to drive to the office.

Now, having said that, a lot of folks NEED and LOVE the interaction they have in person in an office. Our CEO is a prime example. He believes in person work is the best way to work. That’s all fine and good. Just remember others of us find it distracting, especially in open space offices.

I work in an all remote team at WillowTree but I think about going into the office once in a while for a little human interaction. 😁

One other note. I’d probably find it more tolerable since becoming an Engineering Director because I spend most of my day interacting with other folks. But developer Rob loves quiet and an open floor plan office was horrible for that. I can control my home workspace. At the office I’d have to find a place to hide to do meaningful work as a developer.

I like to tease my JavaScript friends when I get the chance. Most of them own up to the fact it’s a terrible language.😁

It’s the language of the web. No way around it at the moment. Some other thing will come along to replace it. I suppose WebAssembly could eventually be ubiquitous enough to allow us to code in other languages daily but it seems JavaScript is here to stay.

I put together some tips for folks at work back in early 2020 as COVID was starting to spread like wild fire here in the States.

–

I thought I’d throw some work from home tips in a doc. I’ve been working from home off and on for the past 20+ years, give or take.

1. Keep your routine - get up at the same time, prepare for the day the same way you always do.
2. Get dressed for work - Dress how you’d dress for work. I need this one otherwise I’d lay about all day in my PJ’s. It’s so easy to get lazy, at least for me it is.
3. Create a dedicated workspace - This one can be tough, but if you’re able, do it. This allows for a bit of separation mentally between work and home life. If I don’t do this everything starts to blur together.
4. Take breaks - Since you’re home it’s easy to skip these. Take a few minutes, get up, stretch, and walk around. Go outside, take a walk. If you have a pet, take them for a walk. They’ll love you for it! Chill during lunch. I like to eat away from my workspace and on occasion I’ll watch a bit of TV.
5. Work outside - I love doing this on nice days. I’ll work outside for a bit. It kind of goes against having a dedicated space but it’s a nice change. I tend to do this in the morning while sipping coffee. It’s so beautiful here. I’m really looking forward to trying it.

Everyone has to find a rhythm that works for them. These are the things that work for me.

When I initially started working from home I would get up, get dressed, eat breakfast (not always), and drive my kids to school. When I got home I was at work. I’d walk into my office, close the door, and go to work. It may sound silly but I needed it to get me in the proper frame of mind. If it would help you, take a quick drive to emulate driving to work.

I plan on getting out a bit. Going to the store for the usual stuff; milk, coffee, etc. The daily necessities. I’ll batch them up but I need a bit of time away from the house to preserve my sanity.

Wild roses (I think?) just outside our gate. Our home backs up to a marshy area that is a natural overflow for a river not far from us. It’s amazing how green and overgrown it is.

My friends know how much I love contrails — as in condensation trail.

More stuff blooming!

Turkish Minute

Twitter succumbs to Erdoğan’s pressure, silences key voices in Turkey on election eve

Space Karen really wants to live in a racist, white, Christofascist America.

The Verge

Twitter 1.0 was particularly notable for standing up to government censorship around the world. Twitter 2.0 under Elon Musk is actively complying with authoritarian government censorship demands ahead of elections.

See statement on the first link. I like this version because Nilay Patel called the post Welcome to Hell. Accurate.

NBC News

Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.

Psychopaths like to torture and kill animals. Twitter is the perfect place for them! It already has a narcissist sociopath as an owner. Why not add some psychopaths?

Ars Technica

Graphic images from a Texas mass shooting on Saturday that killed nine (including the gunman) and wounded seven are still circulating on Twitter after spreading virally all weekend.

So, yeah, more of the same disturbing behavior as the link above. What’s wrong with these people?

The Beaverton

KINGSTON, ON – Queen’s University has reached out to Elon Musk offering eight dollars a month to stop telling people he attended the higher learning institution.

This is an older link and I’m not sure if I’ve already posted it but I don’t care because it’s funny and perhaps a new way Space Karen could grift more cash out of folks to pay for his $44 billion mistake?

Robert Stribley

Instead, he’s making changes to satisfy the whims of his real core audience now, a ramshackle collective of alt-right extremists, Proud Boy/white supremacist types and Q-Anon whackos.

More on the abuse of the LGBTQ+ community at the hands of Twitter’s new policies. This article about the plight of the Transgender community in particular.

Variety

Elon Musk Confirms Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s New CEO, Focused on Business Operations

Oh, look, he’s finally picked a new CEO. Perhaps Ms. Yaccarino will be able to figure out how to make money for the company now they’ve lost many of their best advertisers.

Good luck.🍀

Also, over or under on her making it six months in the position?🎲

LGBTQ Nation

The law seeks to protect health care providers and payers from the “threat of discrimination for providing conscience-based health care.” However, advocates worry it’ll be used to deny LGBTQ+ people gender-affirming care, HIV-prevention medication, and other essential and life-saving care.

DeSantis is a full on fascist who could care less about folks who don’t fit his preconceived notion of a person.

It’s disgusting to an extreme and this dude wants to be President? No thanks.

The Hollywood Reporter

The following morning, Licht was aware of the backlash and social media furor when he addressed the reaction to the town hall on CNN’s editorial call, audio of which THR obtained. “We all know covering Donald Trump is messy and tricky, and will continue to be messy and tricky, but it’s our job. We’re going to do it fairly, toughly and aggressively — as Kaitlan did last night,” Licht said, in part. “I absolutely, unequivocally believe America was served very well by what we did last night because it laid bare and created, in the words of Joe Scarborough, ‘a political earthquake,’ and that people woke up and they know what the stakes are in this election in a way that they didn’t the day before. And if someone was going to ask tough questions and have that messy conversation, it damn well should be on CNN.”

First off you don’t put terrorists on television and let them lie their asses off about everything they’re asked.

Second, CNN you didn’t ask tough questions, you got the orange asshole a little upset but if you’d asked actual tough questions he couldn’t cope with it and would’ve walked off the set.

Next time, Mr. Licht, use a more senior interviewer who’d hold his feet to the fire by letting him use his own words.

You should call Kara Swisher.

Yesterday and today. What a difference a day makes.

Good morning!

I hope everyone is having a splendid morning. I began composing this post while my coffee was brewing. My cup is now in hand. That means the old noggin will wake up so I can finish. ☕️

Waxy

This morning, I was shaken to learn Heather B. Hamilton (formerly Heather Armstrong) aka Dooce is no longer with us. I learned the news from a post to her Instagram, confirmed by several friends after and then the Associated Press, announcing the tragic news that she died yesterday at the age of 47.

I think this caught most of us off guard. Dooce was one of the folks I followed in my early blogging days and was very influential to blogs in general. She wasn’t just a Mommy blogger.

RIP Heather. 🧡

Vox

Donald Trump has just been found liable for sexual battery against journalist E. Jean Carroll.

Good for E. Jean Carroll. I’m glad she made a large withdrawal from the bank of Trump. The man clearly doesn’t respect women, he doesn’t respect anything, except maybe Putin.

I hope more women come forward for their day in court now. This man deserves to be shamed at every turn so normal people see what a disgusting human being he is.

Cars are so darned expensive. I have no idea how anyone can afford a new one. Kim and I have purchased one new car in our 35 year marriage and she took it back a week later because she didn’t like it. The car was $15,000.00 out the door.

Good thing she took it back. It was a Saturn. 😆

WPE WebKit Blog

In the previous post in this series, we explained that WPE is a WebKit port optimized for embedded devices. In this post, we’ll dive into a more technical overview of the different components of WPE, WebKit, and how they all fit together.

I’m a sucker for articles about porting software and making it run on many platforms. This piece is a 30,000 foot view of WPE and a short read if you like this kind of stuff. Plus it has a nice little diagram. Always a plus in my book. 🖼️

Jezebel

A Texas man, 22, was arrested on Wednesday evening for fatally shooting his 26-year-old girlfriend for traveling to Colorado to get an abortion, the Dallas Morning News reported on Friday.

Texas is full of absolutely insane people packing guns on their hip.

Look, a woman’s body is hers and hers alone. Sure you could ask, even beg, her not to get an abortion if you’re the father of the child but ultimately it’s her body, her choice.

Your choice is to stay and support her decision or walk away.

This man chose to take her life and destroy his. Poor choice dude.

Republican politicians love to say we have a mental health crisis that causes these senseless crimes. Why is Texas so full of mentally unstable people with guns? Texas needs better leadership or we should boot it out of our Union. 🤬

Ned Batchelder

At work, we work in GitHub pull requests that get merged to the main branch. We also have twice-yearly community release branches, and a small fraction of the main-branch changes need to be copied onto the current release branch.

It’s surprising how powerful git is. Ned has put together a great little guide for how one might cherry pick their commits.

There are so many ways to manage code changes and branches. This is one of many and worth your time to read if you’re a developer of software.

Oh, and it has beautiful diagrams to illustrate what he’s talking about. 👨‍🍳💋

Rolling Stone

CNN Is Hosting a Town Hall for a Guy Who Tried to Get Me Killed

This piece is by Officer Michael Fanone. Mr. Fanone was one of the Capitol Police Officers tasked with protecting the Capitol on January 6th and had a front row view of the violence of that day.

He’s right, CNN shouldn’t provide a stage for a domestic terrorist. TFG should be tossed in prison and disqualified from holding public office, but no, we’re gonna let him run for President again know full well he’ll destroy our democracy if he wins.

Officer Fanone is lucky to be alive. 🍀

Pixelfed is the Fediverse version of Instagram. Like Mastodon it doesn’t have a corporate master and anyone can host their own server.

I’m not sure why Instagram would see it as a threat, but here we are. 😂

The Next Web

The UK bank analysed its internal customer fraud data between 2021 and 2022. It found that the Meta-owned sites and apps account for a whopping 80% of all scam cases within its three biggest fraud categories: purchase, impersonation, and investment fraud.

I have a feeling Mark Zuckerberg was thrilled when Space Karen took over Twitter because it’s been such a mess nobody is talking about how terrible Facebook is.

crnković

How I accidentally breached a nonexistent database and found every private key in a ‘state-of-the-art’ encrypted messenger.

Buyer beware. Companies can make claims about how awesome their technology is and it could be janky. This is a prime example. It looks like the company is lying to hide their flaws or maybe they don’t know what they’re doing?

WBOI

Students at Carroll High School announced last week they would be putting on an independent production of the play canceled by administration earlier this year.

These kids had their school play shut down because it included a non-binary character and a gay couple.

This is the world we live in and we can choose to love people for who they are, not shame them.

This will, of course, go down in history as a head scratcher in future generations. They’ll wonder why we were so stupid to be so afraid.

Apple Press Release

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today unveiled Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad.

I’ll be interested to know how many Audio and Video Professionals make use of these new apps. Hopefully we will see some great reviews from folks who actually do this kind of work.

I love their pricing. Yearly for $49.00 US or $4.99 per month US. It’s great because you can subscribe for a month and try it out. If it works for you great! You can subscribe for a year. If not you’ve lost $4.99. Not bad.

I’ve decided if I ever get around to writing my next app I will be using this pricing model. It should allow for constant updates throughout the year and no need to worry about batching up a bunch of big features for that big one time new version sale.

Kim’s roses are happy and just starting to put off blooms.

There have been some critters gnawing on the leaves.

Sleepy kitty.

What a horrible take. On the left we’d been saying the same thing about abortion “Oh give up it’s the law of the land.”

Well, the GOP took a very long view and kept at it to overturn abortion. Some shenanigans from the evil — but brilliant — Mitch McConnell and the GOP was allowed to get three lying Supreme Court judges through. Yes, they’re liars and I believe at least two of them are wholly unqualified. Heh, not to mention how corrupt some are.

Anywho, we need to keep hammering away at guns. Overturn the second amendment and put in super strict gun laws to lower mass murder in the United States.

Oh, and if it’s a matter of mental health then why can these “mentally ill” people get their hands on weapons of war? Nice try, assholes. The weapons are the problem.

Wow, I wrote about this less than a year ago and we’ve done nothing.

Disgusting.

I hear folks say “Stop calling the GOP Nazis.” Fine. I’ll stop when they stop behaving like Nazis.