Rob Fahrni

So, what is this, any bug people out there? 😆

Whoa! I can’t believe I missed this! It’s been a year since my knee replacement and it is, no doubt, one of the best decisions I ever made.

I realize I didn’t have a surgery or knee category when I wrote my series of blog posts about my knee, which is a real shame. I need to add a category, search back through the posts, and categorize them all.

My first update was pretty simple. I’d just woken up and was extremely happy!

As it stands my knee is doing really well. I still get some extremely minor pains in my knee area but those are mostly in the supporting structure. I’m older, overweight, and out of shape so you have to expect some aches and pains in the body.

Update #2

When, or if, the right knee goes and I’m not too old I’ll have it replaced as well.

I won’t lie and say it was a cakewalk. I had my struggles and it was painful at times but it was all worth it. I didn’t even post about the pulmonary embolism I developed in my right lung, requiring a trip to the ER. I had to be put on blood thinners for a few months. That was not fun.

My new knee allows me to walk long distances, do yard work, play with my grandkids, and stand for longer than 30 minutes without excruciating pain.

Obligatory one year picture. Looks a lot better, doesn’t it!

I thought I’d share some early influences who got me into blogging and helped me model my blogging style, if you will.

Dave Winer

Dave is an early blogger, creator of RSS, and co-creator of Podcasting.

Dave’s writing and frequent tiny posts were the way to go before we had social networks. Blogging was our social network. His blogs style heavily influenced my own.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey is a Web Standards pioneer, wonderful human being, and fantastic writes.

He doesn’t blog nearly as much as he use to, but I’d imagine he’s busy.

Evan Williams

Back when I was trying to figure out how to write more frequently on my website I had no idea there was a thing called blogging. I happened across an article about something called Blogger — Evan’s creation — so I signed up. As they say, the rest is history.

My blogging started off here at rob.crabapples.net in early 2001, moved to iam.fahrni.me in 2009, and returned here in August 2021. It’s hard to believe it’s been two years.

These different sites, over a combined 22 years, are my blogging presence.

Hopefully there are many more years to come.

Anil Dash via Blue Sky

I think I am just giving up on getting people to realize that, by committing their words and personal reputation to Substack’s platform, they’re enabling openly venal people to profit from their creativity and labor. I guess folks just really truly do not care.

Back when Nilay Patel interviewed Substacks CEO and it became clear they clearly do not care if you’re a racist, misogynist, or Nazi, they’ll give you a platform for cold hard cash I reached out via Substack’s own Notes product to tell a couple of my favorite reads; Robert Reich and Steven Beschloss, about that interview. They paid no attention. I mean, why would they? I’m Joe Nobody. 😕

No, I really want you to answer that question. Is that allowed on Substack Notes? “We should not allow brown people in the country.” - Nilay Patel from Substack CEO interview

I love that Anil points to using WordPress to do a newsletter. That’s a great choice. ❤️

Scripting News

This is about a service that is sold to end users and developers. The users pay for the service, and developers invest in it. Once it’s up and running it will be the foundation for the web as an open platform for users and developers.

I was reading this nodding my head in agreement because I see the usefulness of it. As I was wondering what current massive services like AWS, Azure, and Google Compute could be used to creat something like this it dawned on me that perhaps GitHub already fulfills all these needs?

It has an identity system, it allows you to store whatever you want in an ordered way, and you could create multiple identities with multiple accounts and give them access across any of your repositories. That last one is a bit of a stretch but it would work (I think?) 😃

I don’t know if Dave will see this but I hope he does and I hope it rings true for him or is at least worth investigating.

Food for thought. 🍔

Wow. This guy is such an idiot and loves to play with fire. He’s a mob boss.

Of course this is a threat to any and all who’ve worked to get him to trial but it’s not a direct threat directed at a single person, is it?

Hey, have you heard of the Second Amendment? I hear it’s a right of all Americans.

Where was I? Right, idiot. It may be that after January 6th Orange Man’s supporters are a little hesitant to go to jail for him. Will we see an attempt made on the life of a judge or prosecutor because of this idiots threat?

I really wish the judge could throw him in the slammer for this.

That shade of orange matches his orange makeup. 😆

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

My time as a pinch hitter on my current project comes to an end next Wednesday but I’ve enjoyed the ride.

My next project is undecided at the moment but I know there are two possibilities. I’d be happy to work on either.

Lisa Respers France • CNN

Paul Reubens, who found fame as the quirky man-child character Pee-wee Herman, has died, according to an announcement on his verified social media.

I liked Mr. Reubens as the flatulent “superhero” Spleen in Mystery Men. Pure sophomoric comedy.

RIP 🪦

Naomi Nix and Will Oremus • Washington Post

Initially, the team carried just two product managers and one or two designers alongside dozens of engineers — a flatter and more coder-dominated group than most Meta product teams, Mosseri said. (At launch, it had grown to three product managers, three designers and 50 coders.) Instead of 30-minute presentations on a single design decision, typical at Facebook and Instagram, “It would be like, ‘Here are six things we need to go through this week.’”

Lean teams can often pull off amazing things if they’re extremely talented. I’d imagine this team is extremely talented. The other thing that helped them succeed was the freedom to cut to the bare minimum allowed to make a great 1.0.

Also, 50 engineers isn’t a small team. 😃

Raymond Chen • The Old New Thing

Depending on what version of Windows you have, you might see a body of water where Poland should be.

Mr. Chen has been involved with the Windows team for 30 years and has been sharing his stories on The Old New Thing for 20. He’s a real gift to us old guys who wrote Windows apps.

His title should be Microsoft Historian. 📜

Gleb Tsipursky • Fortune

Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. In other words, employers knew the mandates would cause some attrition, but they weren’t ready for the serious problems that would result.

This doesn’t shock me. Once you settle into a routine at home it’s really difficult to muster the desire to go back to the office. Some folks need to be in an office with other folks but other, like me, don’t need it.

I like the control I have over my environment. My desk, my chair, heck I even bought my own monitor so I could make my setup just the way I want it. Couple that with no commute and the convenience of walking up stairs to our kitchen for lunch or coffee and it’s hard to beat. 🏡

Kim Zetter • WIRED

The backdoor, known for years by vendors that sold the technology but not necessarily by customers, exists in an encryption algorithm baked into radios sold for commercial use in critical infrastructure. It’s used to transmit encrypted data and commands in pipelines, railways, the electric grid, mass transit, and freight trains. It would allow someone to snoop on communications to learn how a system works, then potentially send commands to the radios that could trigger blackouts, halt gas pipeline flows, or reroute trains.

Wow. This is a nightmare. We work really hard to make sure our code isn’t exploitable and here you have a company who intentionally made their software just that, exploitable. If you have a back door it’s an invite to every bad actor to walk right on in. 🫣

Jim ODonnell • Barn Finds

Before I could get this post completed, this 1947 Lincoln Continental cabriolet disappeared from Facebook Marketplace.

I love this car! Design in the 40’s and 50’s was beautiful. Lots of curves and fins and just plain style. Restoring a car like this would be a real honor.

Beyond the beauty of the design it sported a whopping 125 horse power from its 292 V12. 😆

Kylie Robison • Fortune

But in June, Bluesky found itself embroiled in its own controversy after a user signed up for the service with a racist handle incorporating the N-word, and had apparently been permitted to use the platform for weeks without anyone at the company seeming to object.

Bluesky seems to be attracting a lot of the folks who make Twitter so attractive to many and with that it’s also attracting the terrible people.

I miss some actors and writers from Twitter and some seem to have taken to Bluesky. But if Bluesky is going to allow racism and hate to exist on the platform then I really don’t care to use it.

Yes, I have an account but I rarely use it. I’ve found a home in Mastodon.

Joshua Sokol • The Atlantic

One dusky June evening, two days before the 2022 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, the biologist Sarah Lower sat on a back porch, watching the sky for a specific gradation of twilight. A group of Lower’s students from Bucknell University hung around her, armed with butterfly nets and stopwatches for counting the time between firefly flashes—a way to differentiate between the multiple lightning-bug species that live here at the edge of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest.

I love fireflies! It’s one of the things I’ve come to love and look forward to here in Virginia. Little critters with butts that light up! What could be better?

I feel fortunate to be able to walk outside and watch these beautiful creatures at work. Alas, it seems they’re almost finished for the season but watching them was a real joy while it lasted.🧡

Justine Bateman • The Daily Beast

Hollywood CEOs Would Sooner Wreck an Industry Than Suffer Bruised Egos

It feels like this could get really ugly and I hope for the sake of the writers this whole mess will work itself out in their favor, but I’m not holding my breath. 😮‍💨

Lauren Forristal • TechCrunch

Warner Bros. Discovery reported its second-quarter earnings results Thursday, revealing that it dropped in 1.8 million streaming subscribers across HBO, Discovery+ and its new combined streaming service Max.

This is a real bummer. Max is my most watched service, but only from the HBO perspective. To see them combine the catalogs of Discovery and HBO feels like a bad idea. Why not have two apps with one set of credentials? 🤷🏻‍♂️

No commentary this time around. I haven’t posted anything about Space Karen in a while so the articles have been stacking up.

Enjoy.

Juli Clover • MacRumors

Twitter or “X” CEO Elon Musk today said that he plans to speak with Apple CEO Tim Cook about lower App Store fees for creators who earn money through subscriptions on the Twitter/X social network.

Charlie Warzel • The Atlantic

This question, with its exclamatory urgency, has never been more relevant to Twitter than in the past 48 hours, when Musk decided to nuke 17 years’ worth of brand awareness and rename the thing. The artist formerly known as Twitter is now X. What is happening?! indeed.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Twitter Blue, which Elon Musk is currently rebranding to X Blue, now includes the option to hide the notorious blue checkmark. Twitter Blue subscribers recently started noticing the “hide your blue checkmark” option on the web and in mobile apps, offering the ability to hide that they’re paying for Twitter and avoid memes about how “this mf paid for twitter.”

Asher Notheis • Washington Examiner

Actor Mark Hamill has called for people on social media to partake in a boycott of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Robert Reich

Yesterday, it was reported that Elon Musk’s X Corp., parent of Twitter, has sent a letter to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) accusing the nonprofit of making “a series of troubling and baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally, and its digital advertising business specifically” — and threatening to sue CCDH.

Casey Newton • platformer.news

The X Corporation has in recent days devoted more time to signage-related issues than is prudent for a company that continues to lose advertisers, employees, and users’ time. But it’s consistent with Musk’s current incarnation as a cultural vandal, using his money and power to deface once-influential institutions and dare anyone to stop him.

Daring Fireball

Any normal company planning a product name change would have everything sorted out with the iOS App Store and Android Play Store ahead of time. Needless to say, X Corp is not a normal company and so of course they didn’t have anything sorted out.

Matt Binder • Mashable

Elon Musk and company take @x handle from its original user. He got zero dollars for it.

Rumman Chowdhury • The Atlantic

Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. I lived it. I saw firsthand the harms that can flow from unchecked power in tech. But it’s not too late to turn things around.

Casey Newton • platformer.news

On Monday afternoon, a crane rolled up to Twitter’s headquarters on Market Street. The plan was to remove the sign from the historic building’s facade, putting a symbolic end to the company that owner Elon Musk had over the weekend re-branded to X.

Taylor Lorenz • The Washington Post

Far-right Twitter influencers first on Elon Musk’s monetization scheme

Reuters

Elon Musk said Twitter’s cash flow remains negative because of a nearly 50% drop in advertising revenue and a heavy debt load.

Looks like the orange man is about to get another indictment.

Idiot man. Why are you such an asshole criminal? Stop breaking the law and you’ll stop being indicted.

You’re welcome.

Jerk.

Ahead of the NASCAR race at Richmond today I thought I’d share what I think are the best and worst liveries on the grid.

The Best

Chase Elliott usually runs a NAPA livery so it’s nice to see this mint green on his car.

Denny Hamlin seems to run FedEx and Sport Clips mostly. This blue-green is a really nice change and looked really amazing next to Kevin Harvick’s livery last week at Pocono.

Bubba Wallace always has the best looking liveries on the grid be it McDonalds, DoorDash, or Dr. Pepper. They’re always great looking.

Alex Bowman’s car mostly sports Ally liveries in various configurations. Love ‘em.

The Worst

I’m sure Menards is a really wonderful place to shop full of amazing people but that typography looks terrible.

Something in NASCAR that’s way overdone is a sense of patriotism. So many red, white, and blue liveries. Which isn’t a bad thing! It’s just this one is so boring for such dynamic talent as Kyle Larson.

That’s it. That’s the list. I’m sure many NASCAR fans will disagree but that’s why we have so many cars to choose from!

At the end of the season I hope to post a better list of my favorites from any race.

Also, back in the dinosaur years cars didn’t change sponsors from week to week. That’s definitely not the case today and I love the variation.

Who found me on LinkedIn this week? Well, no real surprises, I guess?

WillowTree makes sense given I asked our CEO something in a public space some thought was stupid of me to do. I didn’t see it that way and it was definitely presented with the best of intentions. Still, seen as bold. Perhaps folks thought “Who is this idiot” and immediately did a LinkedIn search? I dunno?

I love seeing Sketch there! That is a premier Mac application I think any died in the wool Mac developer would love to be a part of. Honored.

Vicon Industries also makes a lot of sense because I worked for Pelco and I’m very familiar with video encoding and decoding and generally how our digital solution was architected and built. Vicon is looking for C# / .Net devs for their new cloud solution. Again, honored to show up in that list.

I’m not sure why Sonos shows up in there but it’s cool. It looks like they need iOS Devs. Makes sense.

CapTech is a consulting service. I can see why that’s in there too, given I work at an agency and have run my own consulting company.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m getting more and more excited about writing code full time at work. I’m sure that won’t last but I’m going to enjoy every minute of it while I can. 😃

I ran into issues getting my git SSH keys to work earlier in the week and while I find that frustrating it was also a nice challenge to fix. I’m up and running and ready to break some stuff! 👍🏼

I hope you enjoy your coffee and the links.

Sarah Burns • The Irish Times

Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor has died at the age of 56, her family has announced.

The 80’s was my era of music and I most certainly remember Nothing compares 2 U, it was a big hit.

The thing that really struck me is, she was 56 years old. As I age my mortality has occupied more of my thoughts than I care to admit, but there you go.

God speed. ❤️

Jacob Zinkula • Business Insider

ChatGPT creator says AI advocates are fooling themselves if they think the technology is only going to be good for workers : ‘Jobs are definitely going to go away’

Emphasis is mine. I’ve not used ChatGPT but we’re pushing into AI hard at WillowTree. It’s such a hot button item at the moment all agencies will have to take it very seriously.

For my daily work I see it as a really smart auto complete. The next evolution in code assistant. It felt like cheating early on but as a developer you still have to validate the output. Did you get valid and good code? It may not work all the time. Yes, it’s fallible but it’s also early days. I am certain I’ll use it at some point to help generate some code.

Give it another 10 years to mature. I’ll be really close to retirement by then and the next next generation can use it to their advantage. 😃

Owen Bellwood • Jalopnik

According to General Motors boss Mary Barra, Chevrolet has backtracked on its plans to completely kill off the Bolt, which has so far seen its sales more than double in 2023. Now, the company is working on a next-generation Bolt, which will join Chevy’s other electric models: the Silverado EV, Blazer EV and Equinox EV.

I found this really encouraging! We need more little EVs in the market and I always thought the Bolt was a nice little car.

Hopefully the next generation gets its fire issues under control.

Oh, the only downside I can think of is Chevy’s insistence on building their entire infotainment system.

Manton Reece

Dave Winer posted a 12-minute audio recording on his blog, addressed to me but applicable to everyone who is creating tools for the social web. Listening to it, I have a bunch of thoughts. In this post, I just want to start with server-to-server ActivityPub, and leave some of the other technologies Dave brings up for later.

Dave Winer has created a bunch of the technologies we rely on everyday in the blogging world; blogs, RSS, and Podcasting delivery. Now he’s trying to unify the mechanism to span posting to multiple social networks and blogging.

Manton Reece is the creator of Micro.blog — the service I use to publish this site — and is into open standards like MetaWeblog and ActivityPub, so much so Micro.Blog is a Fediverse server by federating with Mastodon.

To see these two chatting about putting something together to bride these systems is nice to see. I see what Dave is proposing as the next version of MetaWeblog, perhaps extended to accommodate new blogging and social network norms.

Perhaps Micropub could serve to do this? I’ve not looked into it but it seems like it could be the way to go?

I have my own opinions on the matter and I’m sure I’ll voice them at some point. In the meantime it’s nice to see this happening and I’m going to keep an eye on it. 👀

Robert Reich

Someone who has tried to overthrow the U.S. government cannot be president.

Mr. Reich is point out what may sound obvious at first but what he’s really saying is it shouldn’t take a conviction to eliminate TFG. We all know he tried to overturn a fair and valid election in 2019. We all know he rallied his supporters to storm the Capitol and try to stop the formality of recording the election results.

He doesn’t need to be convicted. He’s a danger to democracy and the rule of law. That’s disqualifying. ⚖️

leboncoin Engineering Blog

I recall how, when I was a junior developer, I often felt happy and reassured when I was writing software. It felt like a safe place compared to the overwhelming complexities of the world. The simple, deterministic functions, mechanical in their way of working, offered comfort. If you inject an input, it always gives the same output. It’s controllable, manageable, uncomplicated!

If you’re good at what you do eventually someone will notice and give you more to do with greater responsibility. Eventually you’ll be mentoring people and more junior developers will naturally look to you for your experience.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s just what happens and isn’t isolated to software engineering. This happens in all fields.

While I enjoy working with Junior folks there’s also this big part of me that’s ready to sit in the corner and just work on features and bugs, and that’s all. A simplified dev life. 😃

Dean Obeidallah

Barbie not only broke box office records, she destroyed the GOP’s Barbie Boycott

Barbie isn’t a film I plan on seeing but it sounds like the GOP is once again up in arms over cultural issues dealt with in the film.

I hope it breaks all the records. 🎬

Tony • arcadeblogger.com

I was visiting my family in the Chicago suburbs recently, when my niece mentioned she saw “some TRON thing” sitting on a curb while she was riding her bike through the neighbourhood.

As a teen I remember well the arcade in Exeter. It was called the Quarter Slot. Ahhh, good times. Anywho, I will never forget the Tron game — not the one mentioned in the article — because there were two guys who spent a crazy amount of time playing it and taking copious notes on how to beat every level.

Yes, those were the days.

James Surowiecki • Fast Company

Threads has one big advantage over Twitter: Zuckerberg understands advertising

If Threads can pull people away from Twitter — I mean, ahem, X — does that help to extinctify the ailing bird?

Who knows. Musk is crazy rich so I’d imagine he can keep it afloat for a very long time.

All I want to know is when will he be selling Twitter.com and for how much? It would make for a great Mastodon instance. 🐘

Ryan Erik King • Jalopnik

The Alpine F1 Team is currently competing at each race weekend with the odds slightly stacked against them. The Renault power unit used by the French factory team is believed to be 30 horsepower behind their rivals. Under normal circumstances, Alpine would be told simply to improve on their own, but there’s currently a freeze on engine development. The FIA, the sport’s governing body, wants to allow Alpine to catch up.

Alpine is kind of what remains of the Renault team and it seems like they’re going backwards.

I’d love to see them move closer to the front of the pack but they continue to be one of the “back of the pack” teams with flashes of brilliance on rare occasion.

Formula One is an extremely tough sport to compete in. Teams with extremely deep pockets can buy great engineering and dedicate huge resources to land their teams in victory lane. It also makes the races really boring. 😃

Here’s hoping Renault is given a chance to fix their horsepower issue ahead of next season. At this point I suppose it doesn’t matter much.

I’m a Haas supporter myself. It’s the only American team on the grid so why not support them? They also have Guenther Steiner who is the most entertaining of all the Principals in F1. 😃

Oh, by the way! Since you’re an American team why not use American built power? I mean, you run Ford motors Stuart Haas Racing, why not work with them on an amazing F1 power unit? I’d love to see that! Don’t let Red Bull be the only team doing it!

Who else is looking forward to the next season of Drive to Survive?

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

Apple has become the target of a £785 million ($1 billion) class action lawsuit on behalf of over 1,500 developers in the UK over its App Store fees, reports TechCrunch.

Unfortunately this is pocket change for Apple. I don’t make much as a developer of apps for Apple devices but to those who do giving up 15 to 30% of revenue is a big deal.

Even if Apple allow for third party stores or payment processors they’re still going to charge their fee. Might as well keep the App Store as it is and be done with it.

Daring Fireball

Translation From Hostage Code to English of X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino’s Company-Wide Memo

I mean, if Yaccarino isn’t actually asking for help to get out now I suppose she will be in six months to a year because Space Karen won’t agree with her about something and drive her insane or sack her.

Just let Twitter fade away, sell off the domain, and let’s move forward with the open web.

Janis Mara • berkeleyside.org

Peet’s is widely credited with transforming the industry — after all, the three founders of Starbucks learned much of their craft from founder Alfred Peet — but there’s much more to it than that.

I’d always known Peet’s was a big influence in the coffee world but I had no idea how much of an influence it really was.

This story is a fun read about one employees view from the inside. ☕️

It was a record sales week for my little apps!

Yes, I’m genuinely happy about this.

How’s this for a prototype logo? 😂

I have zero artistic talent. Oh, in case you can’t figure it out. That’s an IB, not the number 13, and it’s my stab at a logo for Indie Developers to use on whatever to act as a stamp signaling the app is Indie Built!

When our granddaughter is over she has this old iPhone 5c that was mine at one time. I absolutely loved that little thing but iPhone 7 FOMO got me to upgrade mid way through the iPhone 7 upgrade cycle. I kept the 5c as a test device, which is something I’ve done with all of my phones.

Fast forward a bit and the 5c is no longer useful as a test device because it’s 32-bit and Apple dropped OS support for that. So, it just sat in a drawer for quite a while.

Eventually I reset it and passed it on to our granddaughter as a toy. She loves talking to voice memos and writing stuff in note, so it’s kind of perfect for her. Oh, not to mention all the wild pictures we get. 🤣

Anywho, I had the 5c out last night charging it for her and realized how amazing it felt in hand. It made me wish I could have this exact form factor, plastic and all, with modern guts and a big storage device. Even if it still had the older camera I’d be cool with it.

Can someone get on that? Could modern M Series chips fit inside the smaller case and would the battery last? I kind of doibt it, but it would be fun to have.

Gracie knows how to sit on stairs. 🤣

Dave Rogers

I don’t know what we’re going to do. If we were better situated, I suppose we’d buy a “second home” in a safer state. Someplace to land if this place gets wiped out. But we’re not so well situated that we can afford a second home. And moving after we’ve spent so much time and money making this place the way we want it is almost impossible to contemplate. And we’re not getting any younger, either.

Dave is one of my Floridian friends I worry about. He’s opposed to everything DeSantis is doing to the state and he feels somewhat trapped. I hate this!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been a strange week for me. I started on a new project, 50% of my time, as a developer while transferring my work as a Director the other 50% of my time. That is some strange hat swapping. 😃

Coffee in hand! Let’s go!

Allison Quinn • The Daily Beast

Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”

Florida is the worst place in our nation. How in the world can a government be so stupid and cruel all at the same time? Oh, right, Ron DeSantis is how.

Friends in Florida. If you have the will to stay I hope you’re ready to fight the good fight. These sorts of policies on seem to be getting more and more extreme. I hope, for the sake of future Floridians, and our Nation you can make a change.

The other option? Get out.

Steven Beschloss

A deeply disturbing New York Times story published Monday described in polite terms a plan for “sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government,” what might be more accurately described as an aggressive effort underway to install dictatorship if Donald Trump retakes the White House.

I love reading Steve Beschloss’ work. I’ve never read a story of his with such a tone of fear. I’ve made the comment that I thought TFG wanted to be a dictator but we’ve managed to avoid it. I keep coming back to a statement he made about China not having term limits for their leader and saying “maybe we should try that” or something to that effect.

No, we shouldn’t try that out. We don’t need a dictator. Stopping that for future generations is worth dying for. I hope I don’t have to see it come to fruition. 🙏🏼

Nikita Lisitsa

It only runs on certain architectures (arm64-v8a) and Android API versions (26+), but still. It doesn’t sound like a big deal until you realize that I’m using my own C++ game engine. It took me about a week to support building for Android, and in this post I’m going to tell you how this is done.

So how cool is this? Yeah! Go write your Android code in C++, that’s the way it should be done! 😃

Yes, I’m a big fan of C++ and kind of wish we could write more platform neutral UI code using the language but each platform brings its own style and unique perspective on their UI. It’s just plain better to do your UI using the frameworks and preferred language of the platform. In most cases. 🔧

Games, of course, seem to be the exception. 👾

Michael Lopp

I use Bear 300 times a day. Probably more. I could sketch their five preference screens from memory. I’ve written and edited two books in Bear. I’ve spent hours understanding how tags propagate through the system. Ask me about their sync system. Quiz me on their keyboard shortcuts.

Shiny Frog recently released a new version of their award winning writing tool, Bear. Congratulations! 🥳

Of course I have it on my iPhone and Mac but I’ve found I really enjoy the absolute simplicity and versatility of Iconfactory’s Tot for writing. It’s just plain old text and I add Markdown by hand. Super easy.

They’re both wonderful writing tools if you’re ever in the market for one.

Eduardo Domene Junior

Before Async/Await was officially introduced into Swift, many of us adopted Combine for one-shot operations that don’t necessarily need a stream of values, such as API calls. The new feature, however, makes such operations easier to construct and to read, thus it makes sense to consider migrating them. We will see a simple extension that lets us work with both Combine and Async/Await at the same time, making it possible to gradually migrate our code.

I haven’t written production code in a year-and-a-half. In that time a lot has changed in the iOS Development community. Namely SwiftUI and async / await have become the preferred way to do UI and asynchronous programming respectively.

The addition of async / await to my iOS and Mac development toolbox is a welcome site and one I’ll put to use in Stream.

Now if I can wrap my brain around SwiftUI I’ll be off and running. 👍🏼

Scott Dance • The Washington Post

In recent days, China set an all-time high of nearly 126 degrees Fahrenheit, while Death Valley hit 128 degrees, two shy of the highest reliably measured temperature on Earth. Phoenix experienced a record-breaking 19th consecutive day at or above 110 degrees Tuesday. And in the Middle East, the heat index reached 152 degrees, nearing — or surpassing — levels thought to be the most intense the human body can withstand.

Nahhh, climate change isn’t a thing. 🤬

I suppose Earth will heal herself by killing us all off. 🌞

Amanda Silberling • TechCrunch

According to Mullenweg, Tumblr is spending about $30 million more than it makes each year. This isn’t too surprising, given Tumblr’s history as a company.

I’d imagine most folks (all two of you) reading this blog have a Tumblr account? I know I do. At one point I’d considered using Tumblr as my blogging platform. It has almost everything I’m looking for, but there are two things missing; taxonomy choice and static publishing.

I like my posts to have a YYYY/MM/DD/post format and I love having them published statically. By having them published as plain HTML it makes it super easy to pick them up and move them somewhere else.

For some reason I still have a soft spot for Tumblr and even tried to get a job there a few times! Heck, I’d still like to work for them. Perhaps I could influence them to make the changes I want? 🤔

Anywho, I hope it survives and manages to pull off ActivityPub and Mastodon support. Matt Mullenweg understands open communities and I believe Automattic will do right by the ActivityPub and Mastodon communities.

Kev Quirk

I love my Crocs. I have 3 pairs, and in this post I’m going to convince you that they’re the best shoes on earth.

I’ve worn Crocs and they are quite comfortable and squishy. I like that. 👞

Wil Wheaton

But, yes, I am a member of SAG-AFTRA since 1980, and I am on strike with my union, which has been in solidarity with the WGA since May.

Wil Wheaton is an interesting character and seems like a really great fella.

It’s nice to see actors come out in force to support writers. They need each other. 🪧

Lawrence Hodge • Jalopnik

Whether you like it or not, subscription-based vehicle features are coming. Make no mistake, its a horrible idea to have to pay to unlock a feature that has already been built into your vehicle. But automakers are in the business to make money and they don’t care.

I really hate this trend. Fine, charge me for satellite radio, no problem or for OnStar but this idea of charging a subscription for heated seats and who knows what else is ludicrous to me.

It’s a good thing we continue to have choices. Chevrolet seems to be headed down the subscription road but Ford may not? I hope we have at least one big American car maker who keeps it simple.

Joe Kukura • sfist

There’s yet another bid for the bankrupt, 127-year-old Anchor Brewing Co., and the call is coming from inside the house, as brewery employees are launching a seemingly longshot bid to buy the company.

I’d like to see Anchor survive. It’s made it through tough times and here’s another one staring them in the face.

If they do close here’s hoping someone revives the name and recipes down the road. I hope it doesn’t get that far.

Oh, and shame on Sapporo.

Anil Dash

Today, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman shares a key insight that his headline editor summarizes as The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me. While this is true, what’s even more key to me is why the most prominent tech tycoons (who are one of the most powerful cohorts of the rich) have gotten so radicalized.

The Silicon Valley is full of strange bro billionaires like Andreessen, Dorsey, Thiel, and Space Karen. They’re American Oligarchs with a thirst for power and some strange ideas.

The ultra rich definitely live in a reality distortion field of their own making and enable each other.

Ms. Gracie visited the vet for the first time today. She was 45 pounds when we got her, now she’s 61.

Here’s a picture of Gracie and Kolby on the deck. She’s only six months old, he’s six years old. 😃

TL;DR

• I bring a lot of industry experience
• I know how to ship software
• I can work at all levels of the Software Development Lifecycle
• I’ll do the work people don’t care to do
• I’ll get down in the mud to get things accomplished
• I’m not the best developer in the room, ever
• I love mentoring younger developers
• I’m collaborative
• I’m empathetic
• I don’t give up
• I tell random stories, like the one you’re reading

That is a really good question. My answer is, I don’t know. My amazing wife — whose put up with me for over 36 years — would say something like ”Because you’re smart and know what you’re doing.” She’s always been my biggest supporter and I love her dearly for it. Anywho, I’ve always been my biggest critic and I can get down on myself, especially as I’ve aged.

After a failed attempt to run my own consulting company in 2014 I was really down and found it difficult to pull myself out of the funk that followed. Agrian saved me and I’m forever grateful for that and will never forget.

Moving forward to getting my gig here at WillowTree I was absolutely thrilled to make it through the interview process. I am a horrible interview. Sure, I do fine with the basic stuff; interacting with the interviewers, talking about general software development things, but the white boarding sessions are MURDER for me. There no other way to put it, I suck at them. They’re nerve wracking. I’m a slow coder, always have been, so that is an instant strike against me. I’m pragmatic and iterate on code until I’m happy with it. That often means I will chose an easier implementation that doesn’t go right to the best algorithm, but it written in a way that would allow for that later, perhaps during code review, perhaps in the next release. Maybe never if the code is easy to read, maintain, and is performant. Remember, premature optimization is not a good thing.

I can point to my feed reader Stream as an example of how I work. It took me two years to complete the first release of it and it’s a very bare bones app. As one reviewer said of it:

Very basic, unintuitive app, lika an experiment of a beginner de­vel­op­er

At first I was devastated by that. After some time to think on it and some encouragement from friend I came to realize it was a compliment in some regards. I’d made the app ”Very basic.” Yes, that was my intent from the beginning. I can fix the unintuitive bit and I believe I know what they’re talking about.

I’ve worked on and succeeded at developing large scale software projects. Two I can think of right off the top of my head are Visio, I was the 19th employee there, and worked on the project in various capacities for over 10 years. The second was Pelco where day one I was put on the embedded Linux version of our video decoding and viewing software. I was only there for five years, the first time, but feel like I accomplished a lot during my tenure.

Those were my heydays. I wrote a lot of C++ code on top of the Windows API and at Pelco the C++ code was shared between Windows and Linux. We had some really amazing devs there who I helped build a video decoding and encoding pipeline and base class framework for Windows and Linux. Those were good times.

But time marches on and so did my thirst for knowledge. At the end of 2008 I sat down to learn Xcode, Objective-C, and Cocoa/UIKit so I could become a mobile developer. After much frustration I shipped my first iOS app in mid-June of 2009 and it was approved on July 4th. It was a great day.

Since then I’ve learned Swift and various frameworks and as of this writing I’m just starting to dip into SwiftUI (worst technology name ever.) I may even have some Roku in my future, which I welcome! Yes, the one constant in Software Development is change. Embrace it!

Some select blog posts:

• Confessions of an Old Developer
• A Kind Word
• Reusing your code investment
• Stream 1.0
• Scripting iOS
• Old C++ Code

Matt Birchler

I continue to be flummoxed by the popular take that Bluesky is doing so much better than Mastodon. Mastodon has 2 million active users and is built on ActivityPub, which means it also communicates with other services that use the same protocol. Oh, and Threads will bring its 100+ million users to ActivityPub soon(ish).

No, Mastodon isn’t “dead” or “dying.”

Look, this platform isn’t something corporations control and isn’t something that needs to make money as a centralized service. It’s run by the people. I run my instance — well, masto.host does — and I don’t require my friends to pay me a monthly fee, some have sent me money to keep it going (thanks Steven!) but overall the $20US per month is cheap for me to have my own instance with a few friends on it.

Anywho, it’s all about the people, not about corporate profits so who cares how many users there are on the network? I don’t.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week was mostly calm at work. The team I’m on is coming to the end of transferring our work to our client. It’s a time to document our process and a time of reflection. This particular project was a great deal of fun and was one of our longer running projects. This is also my last project as an Engineering Director.

Monday I start a new project as a developer 50% of my time while continuing 50% of my time as Director on my current project. Believe it or not I’m pretty excited about the new project and my new role. This particular project is tvOS based! Super fun! 📺

Om Malik

This rapid growth seems to have gotten under Elon Musk’s skin. No wonder he is calling Zuck a cuck — giving the rest of us even further proof that money doesn’t buy you class or brains. In reality, the more Threads grows, the more it takes ad dollars away from Twitter, and the $44 billion mistake starts to look bigger and bigger.

It really looks like Elon is such a thin skinned egomaniac he can’t deal with the heat of competition. Threads isn’t perfect — what is — but it’s just a baby and it has 100 million users, if reports from Facebook are accurate. That’s a significant user base in a very short period of days. They’re already a quarter to a third of the size of Twitter. By contrast Elon has just run Twitter into the ground and has proven he’s not the genius everyone thought he was.

Andrea Bergia

I am very happy with what I have learned, about Rust and about how to implement a virtual machine. In particular, I am super happy about having implemented a real, working, garbage collector. It’s quite mediocre, but it’s mine and I love it. 💘

I’m always super impressed by folks who follow their passions, knuckle down, and create something that gives them joy. Not only did Andrea build something joyful, he’s built something useful as a learning exercise. 👍🏼

Tumblr Staff Blog

Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.

We know Matt Mullenweg is an open source proponent and built one of the most beloved blogging tools turned CMS in the world. It’s no surprise to see Tumblr open up some of its code.

When companies do this I always wonder how many hacks are in the code and how many curse words folks will find. 😀

Nish Tahir

A Schema is essentially a metadata document that describes an API. It defines the inputs and outputs of a system while eliminating ambiguity. When used correctly, it creates the foundation for a contract between an API and its consumers. Here’s an example of an OpenAPI[1] schema describing a health check endpoint for a RESTful API.

I have the honor of working with Nish. He’s a very rare talent, kind, and empathetic.

I love this piece. It’s pragmatic. If you provide a scheme for your API folks using it can diff the changes, generate new client side code to use it, and at a glance know what’s expected. It’s just a contract like any protocol or interface in your programming language of choice would establish, only this is for the web.

Being in an agency we see lots of web APIs and having a clear picture of the API is extremely helpful. Being able to generate “boiler plate” code to communicate with an API is also extremely helpful. Why write it when you could generate it? 🧠

Corina Knoll • The New York Times

A Hollywood Diner Becomes a Writers’ Room of a Different Sort

I love this story of community and solidarity. These folks are fighting for their livelihoods and managing to experience a little joy during a very stressful time.

Now that the Screen Actors Guild has joined in Hollywood has screeched to a halt, but will all this effort make a difference? I think so. I think it’ll spawn some smaller, more nimble, studios and perhaps writers will find a way to have ownership of their work?

Paul Hudson

SE-0304 introduced a whole range of approaches to execute, cancel, and monitor concurrent operations in Swift, and builds upon the work introduced by async/await and async sequences.

Oh boy. More stuff to learn. Time marches on and coding practices continue at a frenetic pace. My aging brain is screaming at me. I’m slow. A slow learner. A slow coder. Slow. Keeping up is a challenge but I’ll figure this stuff out. Probably not as deeply as I’d like but enough to get myself in trouble. 🐌

John Scalzi

The Kaiju Preservation Society is a 2023 Hugo Award Best Novel Finalist

I really like John Scalzi. I’ve only read Old Man’s War and I really enjoyed it. I’ve started The Ghost Brigades and need to get back to it but I appreciate Mr. Scalzi for more than his books. He’s super fun to read on social networks and he maintains a fairly active blog! Follow his RSS feed for a bit and see if you like it. 📚

Majid Jabrayilov

This week I will talk about the state management approach I have used in my apps for years. We will cover building a predictable, testable, debuggable, and modular state management system in Swift.

A post about a small chunk of code described in detail. A simple, powerful, concept.

Between Majid, Paul Hudson, and John Sundell we have more than enough authorities on the Swift Programming Language. I can’t keep up. 🤣

Justin T. Westbrook • Jalopnik

You may not remember the rumors that Aston Martin was going to shove a V12 into its infamous Cygnet city car, but you’re never going to forget that they went ahead and shoved a naturally aspirated V8 in there instead despite the car being dead for over five years.

Talk about overkill! I love it! I’m all about moving toward EVs, bicycles, and mass transit as our future of transportation but there’s something special about a well built, powerful, engine I appreciate. The combination of little car and V8 is just so ridiculous I love it. I’d love to take one for a spin.

My Dad is a car guy. He’s built numerous cars over his lifetime including; a Ford Anglia, ‘37 Chevy Coup street rod, a Baja bug, and a Chevy S10 with a V8.

That S10 was a Frankenstein of a truck. Not beautiful and polished with power and grace like his Anglia or Chevy Coup. It was hideous with way too much power under the hood, but boy was it fun.

The motor was so large and sat so high in the engine compartment Dad had to cut a hole in the hood and add a scoop so the carburetor and filter could stick out. 🤣

Political Wire • Taegan Goddard

Trump Wants Trial Delayed Until After Election

Cartoon by Ed Hall

And, there it is. Everyone knew this was coming. TFG is trying to delay the process until after the election in hopes he becomes our next President. These motions have no merit and I hope they’re quashed soon.

He needs his day in court to prove himself innocent or face the consequences if found guilty. The President of the United States should be held to the highest standards of integrity. TFG just wants unlimited power. Why? I can’t say because my brain doesn’t work that way. I’ve never understood it.

Here’s hoping he’s convicted and eliminated from the Presidential race. They’d better hurry. The clock is ticking.

Steven Monacelli • Texas Onserver

“This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on [Facebook(https://www.facebook.com/texasobserver/) and Twitter.”

Dozens of members of the neo-fascist, white nationalist group Patriot Front marched through the streets of Austin Saturday. The group did not announce the demonstration in advance, leaving no time for opposition groups to mount a counter-protest. It was the largest public gathering of the group’s members since they held a similar march in Washington, D.C., on May 13.

Our country’s slide into White Christian Nationalism continues and it’s extremely troubling. I keep expecting a Civil War to break out but in modern day America it’s difficult for me to fathom what that might look like.

I still feel like a major kerfuffle is coming. I’d imagine it’ll center around TFG and how his many trials and investigations conclude. At least two could result in Federal convictions. If that happens he should be tossed from running for or holding The Office of the President.

Julio Merino

To summarize, the Twitter thread shows two videos: one of an old computer running Windows NT 3.51 and one of a new computer running Windows 11. In each video, I opened and closed a command prompt, File Explorer, Notepad, and Paint. You can clearly see how apps on the old computer open up instantly whereas apps on the new computer show significant lag as they load.

I spent a bit of time at Microsoft in 1994-95 working on the Windows NT file stress testing team as a contractor. I was part of the IBM team working on the port of NT 3.51 to PowerPC. The 3.51 version of NT was a rock and at the time my favorite OS. It didn’t have fancy hardware accelerated graphics and rendering was still very fast.

At that time device drivers didn’t have kernel access, they ran at ring 1. When NT 4 was being worked on drivers were moved into kernel space, ring 0, for performance reasons. I wasn’t a fan of that move but it gave them the performance they were after (gaming) and with that came more blue screens of death, which is the kernel’s way of saying “Uh, excuse me, you can’t write to that memory.” 😵

Michael Ponsor • The New York Times

I joined the federal bench in 1984, some years before any of the justices currently on the Supreme Court. Throughout my career, I have been bound and guided by a written code of conduct, backed by a committee of colleagues I can call on for advice. In fact, I checked with a member of that committee before writing this essay.

Bring on a code of conduct for the Supreme Court. Once again power corrupts and it shouldn’t be this way for folks in a position of power like these folks are. They’re the highest court in the land and should be held to the highest standards. It’s time to do something about it, but how? I haven’t the slightest clue. ⚖️

Jordan Bianchi • The Athletic

Corey LaJoie is working on finalizing a multiyear contract extension with Spire Motorsports to continue driving its No. 7 Chevrolet in the NASCAR Cup Series, NASCAR industry sources told The Athletic. The deal is expected to be completed in the coming weeks.

I love me some Cory LeJoie. He’s a very likable character and while he struggles to run in the top-15 he’s a joy to watch and listen to. His podcast, Stacking Pennies, is a nice look inside the race of the last weekend and NASCAR in general.

I keep hoping this fella will win a race and become a consistent top-10 finisher. Go underdogs! 🐶

More flower pictures from the garden and an appearance from Ms. Gracie.l

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Sorry for the lateness in publishing today. We had a deployment of some services for a project at work and duty calls! I did have my fair share of coffee to get the old noggin going this morning.

Chris Benshoof

Today, with one command and a couple of cores, I’ve decompiled and annotated every Sierra SCI game, and practically every version, and dumped the results on github for everyone to enjoy.

Many moons ago Sierra On-Line was the game company to work for. They were nestled in the woods of Oakhurst, California, and made fun games.

In 1988 or ‘89 I applied for a job as a Tester and was offered a position, but, I’d also been offered a job as a developer at another company for more money. You can guess which job I took. Right, the dev job.

Anywho, if you’re a Sierra On-Line games fan and a developer have fun checking out the code.

Chance Miller, Benjamin Mayo, Zac Hall, and Filipe Espósito • 9to5mac.com

10 million join Threads in under ten hours, boosted by Instagram integration

I installed Threads and gave it a look. It’s a nice app, scrolls a bit slow at times, and has a look that has me questioning what technology they used to build the app. Apparently one of the Slacks I’m a part of has been having that discussion. I’ll be check it out in a bit.

My initial observation is it’s where all the brands and party people hang out.

One thing I really disliked about it is you are forced to see posts from people you don’t follow. That makes your timeline super noisy. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

Congratulations to the Facebook folks who worked on the app and got it out the door. Now, take the next step in life and quit this disgusting company. 😃

Definitely a huge difference in privacy between Threads and Mastodon.

I’m all in on Mastodon. ❤️

Chad Hanson • Los Angeles Times

The naturally regenerating giant sequoia forest was so vigorous and lush that, in many places, we had to pull the stems of young sequoias apart just so we could walk between them. There were hundreds of them on almost every acre — many of them already 8 or 9 feet tall.

When I was in Yosemite a couple years back there was a lot of burnt out space with saplings growing all over the place. Here’s hoping the little ones continue to grow like mad.

Chance Miller, Benjamin Mayo, and Zac Hall • 9to5mac.com

Electrify America is the largest alternative to Tesla’s Supercharger network, offering nearly 800 charging stations across the United States. The company offers a CarPlay app that makes it easy to find Electrify America charging stations nearby; the app can also route you directly to those charging stations.

I had to link to this article today because WillowTree may, or may not, have worked on one of the apps mentioned in the article. 😁

Peter Cohen • iMore

Game Porting Toolkit in macOS Sonoma won’t fix what’s broken with Mac games

The TL;DR is Apple doesn’t really care about games and doesn’t really invest time and money to help game developers take a chance on the platform.

EditorDavid • Slashdot

2096 subreddits were still dark on Friday, as PC Magazine shared this update about ongoing protests at Reddit: To stamp out any remaining protests, Reddit is sending “final warnings” to subreddits that decided to permit NSFW content as a way to derail the company’s advertising business.

That number is much bigger than I expected it to be, wowzer!

Reddit really stepped in it, didn’t they? Who’s to say the new moderators of these subreddits won’t pull the same trick once they’re in charge?

Eric Wills • GQ

On a Wednesday afternoon in mid-April, the greatest bowler in the world, perhaps in the history of the sport, sat in a booth in a Bowlero in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a cold wind lashing outside, and pondered how it had all gone wrong.

I’m not a bowler but I’m somewhat familiar with the sport because my grandmother was a great bowler. Seeing someone over the age of 10 using both hands is odd, but if you can be a champion bowler who cares how many hands you’re using. Right?

Aaron 0928

Currently Microsoft has rewritten two main projects, DWriteCore and Win32 GDI, which contain some very old code. Win32 GDI was written in the late 80s and early 90s and was designed for the 286/386.

What language did Microsoft choose to do these rewrites in? Rust. Yes, that’s right, Rust.

GDI is at the core of painting and drawing on a Windows surface since the introduction of Windows 1.0 on November 20, 1985! It will be 40 years old in 2025. I turned 17, nine days after it shipped! 😳

That’s quite a history and a fair bit of legacy C to replace, HDC or HBITMAP anyone? Of course GDI has seen its fair share of changes in its history. Eventually becoming hardware accelerated.

I would love to see all this new Rust code and I wonder how much of it is unsafe to bridge the gap between older C code and the all new Rust code?

I wonder if Apple will ever rewrite any of its lower level OS code in Swift? 🤔