Rob Fahrni

Microsoft: “React Native isn’t just for mobile! Check out how the Windows 11 Settings app is leveraging React Native for Windows to deliver new features and capabilities to users faster and with the same great visual fidelity as Windows 11.”

I find it so strange Microsoft would choose to use React Native for features in the OS. They have C#/.NET which is a wonderful choice and highly optimized for Windows development. It also works with Windows UI 3.0.

The only reasons I can come up with are: 1) they’d like to demonstrate it can be done. 2) they don’t have developers working on this “feature” with the skill set required to do it in C++ or C#?

That second one is a real stretch but I just can’t resolve in my own brain why you’d choose this over your own tools?

Red Shift: “So let’s cause some drama and ruffle some feathers, and talk about why Flutter is better than React Native… in all the ways that don’t matter.”

One glaring downside to Flutter is it doesn’t do native UI. It’s all rendered by them. That is a pretty crummy thing to do.

I could see giving this a go for RxCalc if it used native controls. It has decent support for using C++ libraries and RxCalc’s calculations are C++.

Ward Abbas: ”After 3.5 years of working at Wix, mobile R&D, infrastructure team and as an ex-owner of react-native-navigation, i can shed the light on many issues directly related to the RN architecture (new and old) and indirect stuff that the framework can easily cause bad stuff more than good.”

More negative feedback about React Native.

Part of my consternation regarding React Native is the ecosystem seems “loosey-goosey.”

Lots of node dependencies dragged along for the ride and node has its own issues.

However, to make things better you have to get involved.

The old lady and the young man.

The Bulwark - Morning Shots: “Right now, the pro-Putin (or anti-anti-Putin) faction is clearly in the minority, but they continue to have out-sized influence, especially on Russian state TV, where they provide aid and comfort to the Kremlin.”

For some strange reason one of the two political parties in the United States loves autocrats, dictators, and megalomaniacs.

I don’t understand it and they don’t understand my desire to have a better America, a people focused America. One with a few social services that make us better, stronger, and equitable.

A couple I can think of right off the bat; Universal, single payer, healthcare and a university education for anyone who wants it, for nothing out of pocket.

SFFWorld: “On the other hand, John Scalzi all but admits he’s going for pure entertainment with this novel and he most definitely hits the target.”

I really enjoy following John Scalzi on Twitter and his weblog, not to mention loving Old Man’s War.

I don’t read very often. That’s not something to be proud of, it’s just who I am, but I do have Kaiju Preservation Society and hope to dig into it.

The Atlantic: “Russian President Vladimir Putin is in trouble. Despite his limited gains on the ground in Ukraine, he is facing strategic defeat in a war that no one (including me) would have expected him to lose.”

Here’s hoping the people of Ukraine continue to lay the wood on Russian invaders and are eventually joined by the people of Russia to oust Putin.

The Verge: “The real issue is that $1,599 is a lot of money, and here, it’s buying you panel tech that is woefully behind the curve. Compared to Apple’s other displays across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad lineup, the Studio Display is actually most notable for the things it doesn’t have.”

So, I was kind of excited by this announcement, but a friend brought me back to reality.

It’s the same panel in the current Intel Mac, for like the past 10 years.

The \*exact\* same panel. For $1600.

Totally half-assed.

— Oluseyi Sonaiya (@OluseyiSonaiya) March 17, 2022

It’s a good display and you can get something just as nice from Samsung for less. It just doesn’t have the nice case around the display and, by all reports, has a really crummy stand. I’d personally use a VESA mount, so it wouldn’t bug me.

Hey, I’m still using some $300 Dell 24in display I bought years ago and I’m happy with it.

I also believe 27in is about as large as I’d like to go. I’m a single monitor guy and 27in should do nicely.

Mental Floss: “But Uslan wouldn’t be talked out of his dream. He convinced the father of a co-worker, former MGM executive Benjamin Melniker, of the project’s commercial potential, and in October 1979, after six months of negotiation, against all advice or logic, the production partners acquired Batman’s film rights for a reported $50,000. Uslan immediately quit his day job.”

This is a wonderful read about a kid who never gave up on Batman!

I also love me some Dark Knight action and I’m hoping the new, grittier, Batman is able to give us A Death in the Family on the big screen. Affleck’s Batman gave us a brief glimpse of Jason Todd’s Robin suit in Batman vs. Superman.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Hello, Fahrni

Not encouraging but feels correct. Especially when you have Trump on stage recently saying the President should have the power to fire anyone in the government.

Authoritarian much?

The Right Wing in America is dedicated to the destruction of liberal democracy and multicultural society. They’re looking to replace it with an illiberal regime dedicated to white, evangelical, patriarchal, power in line with Russia and Hungary.

That’s a fact.

— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) March 13, 2022

Ars Technica: ”The new 27-inch monitor supports 5K resolution with over 1 billion colors via 14.7 million pixels. It also has True Tone technology to attenuate color warmth in different lighting situations, reaching up to 600 nits. Overlayed on the display is an antireflective coating, but there is also a nanotexture glass option to further reduce glare.”

Of the products introduced last week I’m most interested in the new Studio Display. I’ve been a laptop only guy since the early 2000’s — back then it was an IBM ThinkPad — but I’ve always appreciated a desktop setup that includes a full size monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

My current setup is a 24in Dell display of some kind, which as served me really well. Sure, it’s not fancy, but it does the job and my old eyes appreciate the extra space given how much I have to blow the text up to read it. 😃 My personal Mac is a 2015 15in MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. I like it, a lot. I’ve written almost 100% of Stream on it (my prior MBP was a 2011.)

I’d love to pick up a new fully loaded 16in M1 MacBook Pro and one of these displays. It would be a perfect configuration that would last me for years and years to come.

I recently picked up a new desk and shuffled stuff around in the basement to get it setup to my liking. I’m going to build a new stand that will hold up to three MacBook’s in clamshell mode and mount a web cam on the Dell display. The stand should fit under the display. Once that’s done I’ll mount some Velcro cable organizers under the back of the desk and it’ll be just how I want it.

For the time being here’s the current setup. It’s in transition so please forgive the mess in the background.

Well, darn. The snow is starting to stick.

As the day has gone on the temperature has continued to drop.

Mark Hertling is a former soldier.

Interesting thread.

I said it yesterday on @cnn, I'll say it again today.

Having worked w/ UKR's army, I expected them to be very good. And they have been better than I expected.

Having seen Russian forces in training & exercises, I expected them to be bad. They are worse than I expected. 1/10

— Mark Hertling (@MarkHertling) March 12, 2022

CNN: “Over the past couple of months while I’ve been reporting from Moscow, I’ve met many people who have been horrified, shocked and numbed by Putin’s wanton aggression.”

I know we can’t get into the war, but it drives me absolutely bonkers to see us sit on our hands while innocent lives are lost or displaced with nowhere to go.

Morning Shots: “Republicans are anxious — very anxious indeed — to tell us that Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn doesn’t speak for his fellow Republicans.”

This dude has to go. He doesn’t care about legislating. He’s just in Congress to be performative and stay in power. He’s another authoritarian.

The Bitter Southerner: “So my mother and her sisters and friends amassed an impressive collection of delicious, creative cake recipes including apricot nectar cake, the Darn Good Chocolate Cake, and cinnamon coffee cake — all unapologetically starting with a box.”

Who doesn’t like a good cake?

AP: “Known as an ‘onion’ service, users can access this version of Twitter if they download the Tor browser, which allows people to access sites on what is also referred to as the ‘dark web.’ Instead of .com, onion sites have a .onion suffix.”

Learned something new. I wasn’t aware of onion sites. Hopefully this helps Russians organize and put an end to Putin. 🤞🏼

DNA Lounge: “DNA Lounge’s policy is unchanged: we will continue to take steps necessary to reduce the risk of infection to our staff, families and customers”

I was an avid reader of Jamie Zawinski’s work back when he was part of the original Netscape team. His stories were wild.

After Netscape he opened DNA Lounge and I kind of lurk in the shadows to see what’s happening there.

It’s nice to see someone is still treating COVID like it’s dangerous.

[The Fresno Bee](https://www.fresnobee.com/fresnoland/ article258792998.html): “Fresno has many people who are jobless, underemployed or underpaid or for whom opportunities for gainful employment are severely limited, aptly described by Michelle Skoor, chief workforce officer for Bitwise Industries, as ‘excluded people in underestimated places.’”

I love the city of Fresno and the work Bitwise Industries is doing.

There is an area of Fresno called The Tower District. I spent quite a bit of time there with friends when we were trying to build a little startup. The startup failed but The Tower is now in my blood.

Downtown Fresno is also a special place. It’s kind of a burnout husk of a city with beautiful — empty — buildings waiting for someone to turn them into something special. Bitwise has repurposed and remodeled a number of those diamonds in the rough. I often had delusions of grandeur about buying one, remodeling it as living space above a certain floor, with offices below, and retail at its base. Big dreams for a man who doesn’t know the first thing about pulling something like that off.

I once described it as a Technology Blackhole. It is no longer, thanks to Bitwise.

The Real News Network: “On Feb. 8, seven workers were fired from the Poplar & Highland location in Memphis. The group, who quickly became known on social media as the ‘Memphis 7,’ made up the original union organizing committee at that store location. They say they were fired because of their organizing efforts. Starbucks denies this.”

You just so happen to fire the seven people responsible for trying to form a union, and it wasn’t because they’re trying to form a union? Right.

Cult of Mac: ”During the fighting, Petryk is hunkering down with her teenage daughter and husband. The family has been sheltering for days from Russian bombardment, sleeping in an underground parking garage at night and venturing upstairs to their apartment to work during the day.”

Great piece. I can’t imagine trying to work while my city is being bombed.

If I take a couple minutes to clean this stump up it might make a decent seat or place to put a flower pot.

Spent the day doing more cleanup of damaged caused by our January snow. Todays task was dropping trees that had busted off mid way up.

CNN: ”Police in St. Petersburg arrested at least 350 anti-war protesters on Wednesday, taking the total number of protesters detained or arrested to 7,624 since the invasion began, according to an independent organization that tracks human rights violations in Russia.”

Al Corbett: ”Now, the idea is to throw low-level optimization questions at you that you will never need to deal with in your professional life — it’s not like we’re writing operating systems anymore…”

The interview process can be quite hellish. We have a live coding session with candidates at WillowTree, but to be fair I would call them different than the “Hey, write this complicated algorithm thing for me” interviews.

We work in teams. On those teams we need to make sure we can actually work with our co-workers. The coding exercise tests the grasp of your chose platform as well as how you interact with others.

If that type of exercise doesn’t work for you, you can choose to walk folks through some code you’ve written and explain it, as well as answer questions about it. Think of it as an interactive pull request.

Vanity Fair: ”Then, the day before Ratliff was supposed to shoot his scenes, Hanks fired him. The stated reason: Hanks felt Ratliff had ‘dead eyes.’”

I haven’t listened to this episode but I’m looking forward to it.

Hollywood Life: ”Barry makes a brief appearance in The Batman, and his scene teases his hopeful return as Gotham’s Clown Prince of Crime.”

Our youngest daughter and I caught The Batman yesterday afternoon (it was empty.) We both enjoyed it.

That scene with Joker, however brief, was a great scene. Only the smallest glimpse and I knew who it was.

I liked Pattinson as Batman, well done. He’s definitely a brooding version of Batman, but I like it. Gordon, played by Jeffrey Wright, was also a nice imagining of his character.

Fingers crossed they make another one.

This is not exactly encouraging.

Dave Rogers: ”But people are weird. Many, perhaps most, don’t leave. Maybe they don’t feel they have anywhere to go, maybe they feel defiantly that it’s their city, their home. I don’t know. But even with the Russians just kilometers outside the city, people went to the movies.”

We’re so fortunate we’ve never had to live in a country with war raging all around us.

Слава Україні 🇺🇦

This is what Trump said on February 22 2022 pic.twitter.com/xsqOzbMXD5

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) February 28, 2022

Trump and Putin belong together, preferably in Siberian prision.

The Loop: “Over the past couple of years, I have taken time to address issues in my personal life. In that time, I realized that there is so much more to life than work—I’ll be honest, that revelation came as a massive shock to me, but I couldn’t be happier."

All he best, Jim.

LONG LIVE THE BEARD!

Steve Beschloss: ”It’s hard to quantify the impact of Zelensky’s decision thus far to stay in Kyiv and fight with his countrymen against the invading Russians. But his rejection of the US offer to evacuate—‘The fight is here,’ he reportedly told the Americans. ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’—is already the stuff of legend. I wouldn’t underestimate how meaningful his courage is in sustaining morale and motivating Ukrainians, be they trained soldiers operating sophisticated weapons or even college students and grandmothers producing home-made Molotov cocktails to fend off their attackers.”

It has been very inspiring to see Zelensky stay and prepare to fight. The fight is coming and I hope he and his fellow citizens can continue to repel Russian forces.

Robert Reich: ”The biggest difference between the old cold war and the new one is that authoritarian neo-fascism is not just an external threat. A version of it has also taken over one of the major political parties in the United States.”

I hope we don’t see World War III or a new Civil War. Here’s hoping Putin and Trump end up in the despots waste bin of time and Democracy survives.

Who knows, maybe Russia can finally become a true Democracy once Putin and his Oligarchs are out of the picture.

Sitting here watching CNN and thinking about some of the news I’ve heard and read over the last few days I’m seriously concerned we may end up in a nuclear war.

Putin, by all accounts, has lost his marbles and has put his deterrent force on high alert.

Russia is getting their asses handed to them by the Ukrainian military and citizens. Putin is off the rails, hates the west, and he’s losing.

I wouldn’t put it past him to let his nukes fly on Ukraine. Hell, what’s stopping him from hitting other European cities or America for that matter. How about Chernobyl? The Russians have control of it last I heard. They could drop a big bomb on that site and make a real mess in the region and across Europe.

Here’s hoping someone in his inner circle puts a bullet in his brain and calls off this shit show.

As I was finishing this post off I switched over to Twitter only to see someone else with the same thought.

WW3 sides being drawn. https://t.co/YiP1XjDt9I

— Derek Powazek (@fraying) February 28, 2022

The Atlantic: ”The Tumblr users I spoke to, both new and returning, cited a few unfashionable aspects that keep them using the platform. Tumblr’s main feed doesn’t shuffle posts algorithmically based on what it determines might appeal to a user. It’s ‘a good, old chronological river,’ Maryellen Stewart, a social-media consultant who has kept a running diary on Tumblr since 2014, said.”

I’ve considered switching to Tumblr a number of times over the years, but, there are two thing I want out of my blogging system 1) control the post taxonomy 2) publish to static HTML.

I’ve lived without item number two, so it’s not nearly as important as being able to control the post taxonomy. I always want my URLs in year/month/day/ format with the post name following. Check out the URL of this post. It’s a perfect example of that. I could control that in WordPress. It would be a nice to have in Tumblr.

Visio Guy: ”Today I’m sharing a drawing of a local transit station/shopping mall that I made with…Visio!”

Chris Roth is Visio Guy. He was part of a group of interns who were part of making shapes for the launch of Visio 1.0. Chris became a full time employee and was around for a number of Visio releases. I don’t remember when Chris left the Visio team but I’d imagine it was sometime after it was acquired by Microsoft.

Since that time he’s continued creating smart shapes for all kinds of drawing types and has written a number of wonderful how-to articles on SmartShapes.

So, yeah, if you need an expert on Visio, Visio automation, or SmartShapes, you’d be hard pressed to find someone with better knowledge of the platform.

Dave Winer: ”I paid Apple $1300, not UPS. If they screwed up, and it’s likely they did, telling me to go to UPS is no answer. I didn’t choose to use UPS, you did.”

Apple has been slipping in various ways for a while now. I don’t know that it’s unexpected given their monster size.

Their developer relationships have become a real problem. I’ve said for a long time they hate third party developers. I have no doubt they’d be perfectly happy dumping third party developers if it wouldn’t cost them billions in services revenue, but that’s a story for another day.

NBC 29: ”The city of Charlottesville is hoping to get a better look inside a Downtown Mall eyesore. City officials are hoping to hire an independent inspector to make sure The Dewberry building is safe.”

The Dewberry building is a giant turd in an otherwise beautiful downtown.

I wouldn’t surprise me if it collapsed.

What a mess.

The Guardian: ”In a deal struck in late 2020, Marathon, a bitcoin “mining” company, became the sole recipient of the power station’s electricity.”

All cryptocurrency mining companies really need to consider the environmental impact of their business. It would be wonderful if they’d get behind more green initiatives and stop using old forms of energy like this coal plant.

It would also be extremely thoughtful if they’d generate more power than they use and push it back onto the grid. I know. That may be a step too far to expect these power hungry companies to think beyond their own pocketbooks.

Well said, Mr. Zeldman.

My heart goes out to Ukraine—the land of my grandfather—and to all the people in Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the world who oppose this cruel and dangerous act of war. I feel old and helpless.

— zeldman (@zeldman) February 25, 2022

Feeling old and helpless kind of nails it.

Where were you when world war 3 started?

— Derek Powazek (@fraying) February 24, 2022

We’re going to war again, aren’t we?

Putin just declared war on Ukraine, announcing a “special military operation.”

Breaking: massive explosions just now in Kramatorsk. At least four. Very big.

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) February 24, 2022

And so it begins. https://t.co/pRZACHqfpF

— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) February 24, 2022

BREAKING: Explosions are being heard in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) February 24, 2022

I’ve had a Reddit account for quite a while, but I’ve rarely used it.

Over the past couple years I’ve started browsing again, using the excellent Apollo.