It was a record sales week for my little apps!
Yes, I’m genuinely happy about this.
Indie Built
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!
My Old iPhone 5c
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. 🤣
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!
Saturday Morning Coffee
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.
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. 🙏🏼
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. 👾
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.
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.
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. 👞
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. 🪧
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.
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.
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. 😃
Why do companies hire me?
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:
Mastodon’s supposed “death”
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.
Saturday Morning Coffee
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! 📺
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.
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. 👍🏼
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. 😀
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?
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. 🐌
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. 📚
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.
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. ⚖️
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
Saturday Morning Coffee
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.
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. 😁
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.
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?
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?
Rusty Windows
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? 🤔
We’re working on a rename of Ms. Cocoa to Ms. Gracie. It feels like a more fitting name for her.
The Musk Files - Weekend Hobbies
Musk is mainstreaming new standards of behavior, and some of his peers are joining him in misguided acts of masculine aggression and populist appeals.
MIKE ISAAC and Ryan Mac • The New York Times
The day after Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg on social media to “a cage match” last month, Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, received a text.
I’m not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg but I think he’ll knock Musk on his butt pretty quickly, if he has the guts to step into the ring.
Matt Binder and Matt Binder • Mashable
Twitter’s new API may now cost tens of thousands of dollars per month, but the service being provided to its customers appears to be worse than ever.
It’s really sad to see what was once a decent service turn into a junker of a service.
Oh, BTW, that API was the way to limit folks from overwhelming your servers. If the API was still open, or cheap enough, folks wouldn’t be scraping the site and you could’ve controlled API access by throttling just that for bad actors.
Once again. Stellar job.
There’s nothing better than a self own! Nice work Space Karen. You DDOS’ed yourself. Genius! 😂
Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new limitations on AI companies scraping “vast amounts of data” as he announced new “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read.
This kind of checks out. Genius indeed. More like grifter with too much money.
He’s not really killing Twitter, he’s just making it a really crappy platform. He has so much money the thing will probably keep running for years and years to come but it’ll remain a crummy experience.
I’m a big biased because I have my own instance but Mastodon is a very good — not Twitter — experience. I’ve heard technically savvy people say it’s hard to figure out. I didn’t have that experience but I did not like the default web UI experience. It defaulted to a three way split screen with views of different data. I was able to fix that to be more like Twitter in settings then it looked and felt much better.
If you follow the rich and famous and are into shitposting then Mastodon might not be for you. Each server in the federation has its own set of user rules to abide by and if you break them you’ll be blocked or your server could be defederated, which is a very bad thing.
If you’re a techie I’d encourage you to consider starting your own instance with friends. It’s what I did with Curmudgeon Cafe and it’s been wonderful. I use masto.host to host my instance and I’m sure there are others. More smaller instances are a good thing.
If you’re on iOS there are really great iOS client apps for you to choose from; Mona, Ivory, Toot!, and Ice Cubes are really solid client applications and I will hop between them from time to time to see how they’ve improved.
Look! It’s Momma or Daddy toad! 🥳
Our old California stomping grounds are gonna be fun leading up to and over the 4th.
This is not uncommon for the San Joaquin Valley of California.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been an interesting week, it’s just felt off for some reason. I think part of it is having our new pup — Cocoa — in the house and part of it is work.
Ever since our layoff things haven’t felt the same, because frankly, they’re not. Our company structure has changed and we’re still adapting and moving thing around. It feels way more corporate than ever but I suppose that happens when you get beyond a couple hundred people. We’re near one thousand, even after the layoff.
After the project I’m working on comes to a close at the end of July I’m hoping to get a little bench time to work on my SwiftUI (worst technology name ever) skills and shake the cobwebs out of the old programmer brain. 🧠
We’re giving ourselves the weekend to rest, then Phase 2 kicks off Monday when we start working on paperwork and logistics to pack a few bags, our pup, and try our luck at spending the next few years abroad. (More on this later in the summer ☺️)
Ashur is a friend, all around great fella, and very talented web developer. He’s even contributed his amazing web talent to Stream and I’m forever grateful for it.
Anywho, I’m so excited for him and this new adventure. Doing it while you’re young is the right call. Do it while your body can take it. Get out, explore!
I still hope to convince Kim we need to go all in on the RV lifestyle. Still not there yet. Maybe someday.
Enjoy this new adventure Ashur! 🧳
Joel Clay • blog.meldstudio.co
It is also what backs a number of the Swift concurrency primitives – with a cross platform, open source implementation of CoreFoundation released as the backing implementation. That source code is invaluable in gaining a better understanding of how CFRunLoop works. At just under 5k lines of quite readable C code, one could grok it at a high level in a few hours.
If you know me you know I love browsing C and C++ code. The thing I find extremely interesting about this code is how many OS’es it is targeted to run on; macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Makes me wonder who’s writing code against those platforms and how the new all Swift based frameworks work on those platforms.
This article takes a deep dive into CFRunLoop and it’s a good read if you’re into C code. 😃
The Supreme Court issued a divided ruling on a pair of challenges to affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, with potential implications across higher education and beyond.
The Republican built court is doing its job dismantling years and years of progress. They’ve already set Women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and now affirmative action back. What’s next?
Here’s hoping most institutions of higher education don’t change their policies. Just leave that to the rich white racist institutions that take in dumbass rich white kids whose parents buy their way in.
Speaking of dumbass rich white kids…
My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations.
Screw Harvard and the entire Ivy League. As a nation we need to get our belief that going to one of those schools magically makes you smarter or better than everyone else. They cater to the rich and powerful who can afford to buy their way in, like Jared Kishner’s dad did for him. It’s all about keeping the rich and powerful in power.
Sure, turn away the dark skinned people with great grades and SAT scores and let the idiots in.
I’m sure there are many other schools doing the same thing and they should all be shamed.
The question is how to stop it?
For almost the whole time I wrote at the old blog, the URL doc.searls.com took you there as a redirect. Now that URL goes here, directly. Put another way, this was a Harvard blog until yesterday (and again, everything until that day remains so: that’s its legacy). From now on, it’s mine alone. It has crossed from one state to another. I’m not sure yet how it will change, if at all. But I feel energized about what new things I might do with it.
Speaking of Harvard, it sounds like they’ve shut down and archived a bunch of blogs and their associated blogging tools. I’d venture to guess the tools they were using were long in the tooth, not well maintained, and a security risk, but I could be completely wrong about that! 😆
It’s nice to see Doc in his new home. I just need to remember to subscribe to the new site.
Instead, I think it’s safe to say it’s largely Apple’s fault. Or, maybe “fault” is the wrong word. We’ve moved on from the era of beautiful Mac software to the era of web-based apps, for better and for worse. There’s no one simple reason for this evolution, but it’s interesting to think through some of the factors.
This piece goes to all kinds of interesting places. I think the bottom line is Apple is running Microsoft’s playbook from the late 90’s when the web was taking off and they were desperately trying to keep folks tied into their OS and tools.
Eventually Microsoft got their act together and found their way into web technologies. Heck, they even went as far as scrapping their own home built browser for Chromium, but that’s another story I’m very opinionated about.
This is very sad. HRD Coffee Shop (521A Third Street), which has seen two generations of owners in SoMa/South Beach and became so well known for its fusion-style burritos and Mongolian beef cheesesteak a decade ago that they were paid a visit by Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives in 2010, closed for good on Friday, June 23. The restaurant had just celebrated its 70th birthday this year.
This was one of the places on my “need to eat there someday” list and it’s a real shame to see it close down. I really wanted to try their spicy pork and kimchi burrito. Guess that ain’t gonna happen now. 😔
It’s one of my interview questions: “what is Good Code?” Surprisingly, almost no-one gets it right. It’s not about speed, elegance, language, or style. Good Code is code that solves real problems for real people, in an effective way. Let me list the top 10 rules for writing good code.
I enjoy reading how others approach coding. I’m constantly hearing the term “best practices” and makes me cringe a little.
I don’t agree with Pieter’s number zero rule: Use Git and Github. I know git is super popular and I use it and GitHub every day, but it’s not the only version control system on the planet and there are others that work just fine. The advice I’ve always given folks is pick a version control system and use it.
GitHub is, of course, a very good choice. 😃
[David Pierce • The Verge](<https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social)
To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.
I remember how down my brother was when Google shut down Reader. He had a really nice workflow and could navigate Reader with his keyboard. It also had some very unique to Reader features he made good use of. I don’t remember what they were but I should ask him. If they’re unique perhaps Stream could benefit from implementing some? 🤔
When you write some code and put it on a spacecraft headed into the far reaches of space, you need to it work, no matter what. Mistakes can mean loss of mission or even loss of life. In 2006, Gerard Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software wrote a paper called The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code. The rules focus on testability, readability, and predictability:
I’ve heard about these rules before and they’re no bad at all, especially for smaller, self contained programs. Anything mission critical should be extra safe in its implementation.
Remember when the Mars Lander crashed because the teams used different measurement systems? It only cost $125 million to build. Good times. 💥
Jack Gutzler • beyondtheflag.com
As NASCAR descends upon the streets of Chicago for the inaugural race at the new Chicago Street Course, a new chapter in the sport’s 75-year history will be written.
Since getting into NASCAR I’ve had this one marked on my calendar and wish I could’ve attended it. I’ve never been to Chicago or a NASCAR race, why not get a twofer?
I’ll be watching it from the safety of my own living room this time around. 🛋️
Meta adopting ActivityPub has the potential to fast-forward the progress of the social web by years. Ever since I grew disillusioned with Twitter a decade ago and started pushing for indie microblogs, then writing a book about social networks and founding Micro.blog, I could only dream of a moment where a massive tech company embraced such a fundamental open API.
I’ve been trying to keep my nose out of the discussions around this on Mastodon. Opinions vary, of course, and some folks are very angry about the whole thing. It mostly boils down to folks in marginalized and discriminated against groups who made their homes on Mastodon being afraid. They don’t want to have to deal with the hate that will come along with an extremely popular, large, instance. I can’t say that I blame them.
I’m hopeful this will all work out and won’t divide the community.🕊️
Just found this little feller in our yard. Hoppy little booger. Took a while to catch ‘em.
RIP Apollo🪦😔
Kim’s gardenias are starting to pop open and they smell amazing. I don’t remember them smelling this sweet.
The next set of daylillies have come in and they’re amazing. They’re so beautiful and it’s nice to see them even if it’s only for a day or so.
Last year after the first flower burst open a deer came by and wiped out everything else. 🤣
This year we’ve hit three without a deer incident. The thunderstorms are probably helping.
Having a beer with my girls.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
We’ve been home for a week now and it’s been really nice to sleep in our own bed!
Now, if we could get Cocoa to sleep past 5:30AM I’d be thrilled. 😃
I hope you have a nice cup of coffee or tea ready and I hope you enjoy the links.
Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has refused to surrender, and called Vladimir Putin “deeply mistaken” following the Russian president’s address describing his actions as betrayal.
I heard about this as I was crawling in bed. I hope the Wagner Group is able to destabilize Putin and end the war in Ukraine.
Probably too much to hope for. 🙁
I wanted to address Reddit’s continued, provably false statements, as well as answer some questions from the community, and also just say thanks.
I love this openness from Christian Selig. If folks don’t know, Christian tapes his conversations with Reddit folks. It’s been very interesting to read bit the transcript he’s shared. It’s clear they have lied.
I just wish Christian had posted this all to a weblog so it would have a more permanent home. Who knows what’s going to happen with his subreddit.
After a bruising week of protests and locked-down forums, things started to get back to normal Tuesday on Reddit, as — oh wait, what’s this?
Subreddit moderators are doing all they can to screw things up on Reddit. I applaud their effort.
If you want to watch pop culture eat itself, go see The Flash, a movie that starts out as a sprightly superhero adventure, then dissolves into a self-referential requiem for the DC Universe.
I’m torn about seeing this movie given all the hubbub surrounding Ezra Miller but I really want to see Michael Keatons older Batman!
These days, distributed version control systems like Git have “won the war” of version control. One of the arguments I used to hear when DVCSs were gaining traction was around how easy it is to branch and merge with a VCS like Git. However, I’m a big fan of Trunk-Based Development (TBD), and I want to tell you why.
I’d imagine most folks I work with today have no clue how we used to work. I didn’t use git for version control full time until around 2014 I’d imagine? I found it terribly frustrating to work with at first but know I’m fine with it.
Anywho, up until 2014 I’d worked with so many different version control systems. I’d imagine I worked with CVS the longest and we had one main branch — trunk — and everyone committed directly to it. Yes, breaking the build was definitely frowned upon so you had to be very careful about your commits!
When North Carolina Gov. Patrick McCrory signed House Bill 2 into law, I wonder if he was thinking long-range about what the result might be. I can’t see him and his staff wondering out loud if their thick-skulled, cracker logic might result in Bruce Springsteen not only canceling his upcoming show in Greensboro, depriving the state of revenue and its residents of a Springsteen concert, but inspiring Mr. Boss to issue a press release that more people have read than will ever peruse House Bill 2.
Henry Rollins seems to be a really great dude. Part punk, part philosopher, always interesting to listen to or read.
Seven years after the Brexit referendum, the proportion of Britons who want to rejoin the EU has climbed to its highest levels since 2016, according to a new survey.
I mean, duh! The British version of MAGA didn’t work out so well. It’s been terrible for so many. I hope they rejoin the EU.
The NASCAR Next Gen Garage 56 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 was a hit from day one in Le Mans, among fans, media and even other competitors. And it was fast on track, consistently putting down lap times that bettered cars in the GT class. The car ran near the top of the GT field for more than 20 hours until a drive line issue sidelined the team for more than an hour. Overall, the car was running at the finish, completed 285 laps on the 8.4-mile circuit and finished 39th in the 62-car field.
This car is an absolute beast and looked out of place at Le Mans. It would also look out of place on a NASCAR track. It is a beautiful car with some really excellent engineering. Oh, yeah, and it is super fast! Good old American V8 horsepower under the hood.
I kind of wish I’d been more of a car guy when I was younger. My Dad certainly is and has built some beautiful cars in his time. His ‘37 Chevy Coup Street Rod is stunning and he used to drag race a 454 powered ‘51 Anglia.
I had the opportunity to learn a lot but didn’t. If I could do it today I’d love to be a mechanic or engineer for a NASCAR, IndyCar, or F1 team. I’d love to specialize in engines. I do find them fascinating and would love to rebuild one again. I rebuilt a Chevy small block in High School my senior year. Yeah, I took auto shop because I wanted to do something “easy.” 😃
After 21 years, Cadillac Racing marked our return to the iconic 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 10—11 with our highest finish ever in front of a record audience of 325,000 spectators. Our No. 2 V-Series.R led laps for the first time in Cadillac history and finished on the podium in 3rd, with the No. 3 just behind in 4th, and the No. 311 fighting back for 10th in class.
There’s an article on Jalopnik that includes a video of one of these cars doing a bump start and it sounds mean. It instantly made me think of the Batmobile for some reason.
Now, let’s get more American manufacturers back in NASCAR. Cadillac would be a super interesting entry! I think Dodge is an obvious entry for NASCAR Cup, Xfinity, and Truck series given their history of legendary cars like the Challenger and their RAM trucks.
Cadillac would be super cool to see in NASCAR Cup racing but it may be too lowbrow for them? 🤣
Renting an RV and embarking on a road trip across America can seem like more of a fantasy trip than a real thing you actually do. But you can truly make it a reality. And if you do, it can turn into a thrilling and liberating experience that will leave you with unforgettable memories. Here’s why you should take the plunge.
This is something I dream about all the time but I can’t quite get Kim convinced we need to sell everything and go all in on the RV lifestyle.
As a compromise we’d like to acquire a smaller RV and do some two week to one month excursions to see if we like it. It would also be great for week long camping trips with the entire family.
Maybe someday it’ll be a reality? 🤞🏼
When former NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino was named Twitter’s next CEO last month, advertisers breathed a sigh of relief.
I don’t expect Ms. Yaccarino to last very long at Twitter. I think my original quesstimate was six months but I could see it lasting as long as a year.
Musk is too much of a control freak. The kind of boss I’d hate working for.
The best piece of advice I ever got from my VP of Engineering and CTO at Pelco was “You have to convince people your vision is the right way to go so they follow. You won’t get their best work if you’re a tyrant.” It was something like that. Basically be a leader, not a bully.
This blog post is meant to be read in order. Later answers are shorter because they rely on the information presented in the earlier answers.
This is a really nice piece if you’re following along with the TFG Top Secret documents prosecution. Dude is such a knucklehead and honestly believes he has magical powers to declassify things with his mind. Dumbass.
The engineers reminded him of their commutes. The working parents reminded him of school pickup times. Mr. Medina replied with arguments he has delineated so often that they have come to feel like personal mantras: Being near each other makes the work better. Mr. Medina approached three years of mushy remote-plus-office work as an experiment. His takeaway was that ideas bubble up more organically in the clamor of the office.
I believe with all my heart CEO’s like this are real control freaks and must have the adoration of their people surrounding them at all times. I can have these ah-ha moments, Slack someone, and fire up a zoom call to have the same conversations. It’s just not face to face in a building I have to commute to.
If our company demanded everyone come to the office, of course I’d comply, but I really don’t believe it’s necessary.
Just my horrible opinion.
A federal court heard both sides during a trial where trans youth, their parents, and their doctors challenged a law banning gender affirming care in Arkansas. The court found that the law violated the right to due process and to equal treatment under the constitution, and ordered the law struck down because Arkansas failed to demonstrate a compelling state interest justifying the unequal treatment.
We really need the courts to continue overturning these idiotic and dangerous laws.
You cannot force people to be someone they are not and denying them healthcare because they’re different than you is barbaric.
Apparently Meta’s Project 92 is going to federate with a limited set of Mastodon instances, pay them, and allow them to display Meta ads in exchange for a cut.
Embrace and extend. Amirite?
Let’s see how this plays out.
Most of the Fahrni clan.
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
