Rob Fahrni

This is a very welcome sight here in the San Joaquin Valley of California.

It’s raining.

David Rothkopf: “Putin started this carnage without justification. He alone has made the decision to escalate. He has serially violated international laws and committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. He has lied about the threat posed by Ukraine and by NATO and the US.”

A month in. The madman must be stopped.

Who’s next? Poland, Moldova, Slovakia?

Ok, sure, it seems he fears NATO, but he’s also said he doesn’t want Ukraine as part of NATO because it will boarder Russia.

If Ukraine falls, Russia will be boarded by Poland.

Stack Overflow: “All in all, developers value flexibility. Not every work environment works for everyone in the same ways. Still, 45% developers say the ideal work environment is in their own home, while 27% say it’s in an office building.”

I loved going into the WillowTree office, I really did, but I definitely like working from home more.

I don’t have children running around daily, so it’s really easy to focus.

I know many of my coworkers have the opposite issue. Young ones running around the house so they’d like to go back to the office.

I’m glad we now have options.

Axios: “Since Virginia’s booze sales are regulated by the state, it sells Pappy for the manufacturer’s sales price — often hundreds or thousands dollars less than you can find it on the open market.”

I had no idea you could get Pappy at the recommended price in Virginia. That’s pretty cool.

I’d honestly find it difficult to find anything better than Bookers. Best Bourbon I’ve ever had.

I would be up for a Pappys for the sake of comparison.

Steve Beschloss: “It was just the antidote needed after the constant bullying, disruptions and demeaning of this brilliant jurist and Black woman by Republican Senators.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson is more than qualified for a seat on the bench. I don’t give a crap about the color of her skin or her gender. She’s amazing.

She’s earned a spot on the Supreme Court.

I'd say she's qualified.

Source: @washingtonpost pic.twitter.com/u18lPpQh1b

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 21, 2022

CNN: “He leads a team working at a military junkyard at an undisclosed location in Kyiv, repairing and repainting Russian military equipment for use by Ukrainian forces.”

Ukraine is full of resourceful, brave, people.

Even though small teams of Ukrainian defenders are wreaking havoc on Russian tank columns and supply lines I wish we could offer more help.

Truthout: “If Trump runs in 2024, we are opening ourselves up to a world of danger. The Republican Party is setting up a paradigm where if they win, they deem the election as legitimate, and if they lose, they refuse to certify for the Democratic candidate in swing states, offering up bogus voter fraud claims.”

If we’re not careful we’ll end up with our very own Putin in charge, only ours would be dumb as a post.

Not a single cloud in the sky, here in little Exeter, California.

Over the Sierra Nevada. The lack of snow pack is extremely concerning.

FAT 🛬

Arrived. This place is in big trouble now.

DEN - FAT 🛫

Fresno, here I come. Get ready.

You’ve been warned.

Fancy lunch in Denver. 😃

DEN 🛬

I have a little under an hour before boarding.

Maybe I can get some grub?

RIC - DEN 🛫

Headed to California to spend some time with my grandmother while she recovers from surgery.

Daring Fireball: ”The way the Node community works, just blindly slurping in other people’s package updates without knowing what’s in them, continues to boggle my mind.”

In one of yesterdays posts I referred to the React Native community as loosey goosey.

The node.js community is one of the reasons why.

Always pin your dependencies.

Heck, I’ve worked on projects where we’ve committed binaries, after doing a ‘pod install’, to the repo so we wouldn’t get an accidental update. Folks understood not to install stuff in their local build so we wouldn’t get random crap.

Another thing I’ve done is just include the code right in my project, no dependency manager. Especially if the code is really small.

Anywho, enough of the Development World According to Rob. 😄

A dear friend, Richard Caetano, sent me these photos from our time together, as developers, at Paramount Farms in late 2003, early 2004.

I’ve aged pretty hard over the last 19’ish years.

I realized at this time I was not cutout to be an IT developer. I was too accustomed to working with designers, testers, and a product roadmap to fit in. 😂

I was fired in November 2004, days before Thanksgiving.

Live and learn.

Back in my Pelco days I was the lead for what was unofficially the AV team. One of our designers made us a mascot of sorts and I love it. 🧡

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.