Let’s see how Mrs. Fahrni and Taylor are doing in California!
Sucks to be them. 🤣 Having to deal with perfect blue sky and sunshine with a high in the mid-70’s.
A few of Kim’s happy flowers.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been an interesting week at the Fahrni household. Kim and Taylor are visiting family in California and I’m holding down the fort. There are of course benefits to this, I can eat whatever I want. But, there are also downsides. I can eat whatever I want. Needless to say, I’ve done a horrible job of eating the right things, the healthy things I should be eating. 🍔🍟🍕🍰🥧🍦
Richard Goldstein • The New York Times
Willie Mays, Baseball’s Electrifying Player of Power and Grace, Is Dead at 93
Perhaps the best to ever play the game. RIP.
Donald Sutherland, who starred in more than 200 movies and TV shows, died Thursday in Miami, Fla., after a long illness. He was 88.
We’ve all seen Donald Sutherland in movies and perhaps you may not be able to name many?
The films I most remember him in were Space Cowboys, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Salem’s Lot.
RIP.
Sinem Akinci • Microsoft C++ Team Blog
This blog post was written in collaboration with Philipp Jeske and Rainer Bauereiss, a software engineer and a software engineering lead we worked with to deliver on these improvements, who shared their story and experience with C++ development while adopting Visual Studio 2022.
Neat interview with a couple engineers from Bosch about their use of Visual Studio in a cross platform environment.
I’m so jealous of this! I’d have loved to have had this in 2005 or even 2009 while working at Pelco.
I used vim, KDevelop, and eventually settled into Eclipse while working on our Linux products. Windows was easy, we used Visual Studio.
Heck, I’d have loved to have had VSCode at that time! 😃
Reading this article brought back some great memories and made me want to ask Bosch if they needed any old crusty C++ devs. 🤣 I do miss it.
If you’ve worked in structural package design, you may have noticed recent changes to Starbucks' cups for cold drinks. If not, here’s a look at the new design features, added to make baristas' lives easier.
While it may seem mundane or boring to some it’s not to me. There is a designer living inside me, but he sucks. At least with sites like Core77 I can live vicariously through amazing designers of all kinds!
There is one glaring problem with these Starbucks cups. Know what it is? Yes, they’re made of plastic. How in the world can we divorce ourselves of it? 🤔
Apple this year announced a series of changes when it comes to the App Store in the EU, as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) antitrust legislation came into force in March. However, the European Commission doesn’t seem satisfied with the changes Apple has made. For the EU, Apple has some “very serious” issues with not being fully compliant with the new legislation.
Well, it sounds like Apple may be at the “find out” part the ever popular statement “F*ck around and find out.”
Of course I’ll be keeping an eye on this. Will I participate in another store? I kind of doubt it. 🍿
Do You Think Honda’s $15,000 Electric Kei Van Would Actually Work In America?
I don’t know but this is the sort of pricing we 100% need here in the States if we want to get folks to buy electric vehicles. I’d buy a lesser expensive electric car for commuting — if I had a commute — even if it had a 100 mile range. I could charge at home and at work. ⚡️
Software developers started having to think not only about how the program was going to get the job done, but also about how the user was going to interact with the program to get the job done. It became clear that a good user interface was something that would sell more software.
This is one of those things that bothered me about web apps. They’re all over the place as far as UI design goes. With native Mac and Windows apps you at least expect, and get, a certain amount of consistency across applications. 👨🏽💻
The team members decided to spend the night in the cells of D Block. However, one of the fellows was a loud snorer so they banished him to crash in the room where mughots were once taken. The next morning, they found him, and his gear, outside the room.
Who doesn’t love a good ghost story?
It makes me want to go spend the night there to find out what’s going on.👻
Excavation unearths cherries in cellar of George Washington’s Mount Vernon
This is pretty nifty. I wonder what else they’ll eventually find? I love American history, the good and bad, and have often thought of becoming a History teacher or historian.
I wonder what those dissolved cherries taste like? Probably really disgusting. 🤣
One of the cool things about the way I designed FeedLand internally is that there are various levels of feed stuff. If you want to start over at any level, you can, and today I’m doing exactly that. But first here’s the stack
A little insight to Dave’s FeedLand service stack.
The Tesla Cybertruck is possibly the most look-at-me vehicle on sale today with its bizarre shape and stainless steel bodywork, but what if you wanted something that stuck out from the crowd even more (in a bad way)? Well, folks now is your chance to do just that, because I’ve just stumbled upon the most attention-seeking Cybertruck to date. Listed for sale in Lincoln, Nebraska is a completely polished Cybertruck. Who knew the center of Hell was Nebraska?
I personally don’t see the attraction to the Cybertruck. I’d imagine they’re mostly purchased by macho men and Space Karen fanboys.
Of course I’d never own one but I will admit I kind of like the way this highly polished version with aftermarket wheels and tires looks. Way better than the factory mess Tesla ships.
It’s gonna be dangerous as heck on the road. Can you imagine getting hit in the face with the glare off of one of these? 🪩
By My Count Trump is Batting .900 on the Ten Commandments
Yeah, the Orange Menace couldn’t tell you the Ten Commandments much less live by them. He’s a fraud when it comes to religion, just like he is at everything else.
Gene Haas to continue in NASCAR with new Haas Factory Team in 2025
This is good news for NASCAR fans, I think? When Stewart Haas announced their closure folks thought there’d be four charters up for sale. Now it looks like the Cup side will be reduced to one team and the Xfinity side will retain both of the existing teams.
I’m really interested to know which team and charter will they keep? E.G. It could be the four car with a different team and driver.
That still leaves three Cup charters and drivers looking for new homes.
I’d love to see these charters go to new homes and see their drivers go with them. I’m especially curious about where Josh Berry and team land. He’s had a good rookie season and he has a legendary Crew Chief. 🚘
UPDATE: I guess we know where Chase Briscoe is gonna land. 🤣
Chase is currently a Stewart Haas driver. Guess he’s going to Joe Gibbs Racing.
Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell’s plan to restore its in-office culture.
Dell employed an interesting tactic and it kind of didn’t really work.
So, if you choose to work remotely you’re basically stuck at your current job and salary. It turns out 50% of the company was fine with those terms.
A former U.S. Supreme Court clerk cast suspicion on the lengthy delay by justices in rendering a decision in Donald Trump’s immunity case.
This doesn’t surprise me given what we’ve been hearing about the court recently.
The thing in most concerned with is their upcoming decision on the Orange Menaces claim he has full immunity. Apparently some group of judges are leaning toward a limited set of immunities for the President. That seems insane to me, unless it only applies to Presidential duties. The Orange Dude didn’t commit his crimes as part of his official Presidential duties. They were the selfish acts of a cruel, narcissistic, rapist, felon.
Besides, the justices need to be really careful. If they give free rein to Presidents the Orange Dude may mysteriously disappear, and if Dark Brandon were behind it, well, wouldn’t that be something.
I know it’s pathetic of me to say stuff like that but at this point I’m hoping the guy just goes away never to be seen again. I don’t care how.
The story, in a way, is that there is any story at all: On Thursday, two sources told The New York Times, in effect, that every liberal critic of Judge Aileen Cannon — every legal analyst who says she has mishandled Donald Trump’s classified documents case, displaying incompetence and prejudice — is absolutely right.
This judge is something else. By all accounts she has no clue what she’s doing, unless of course she really does and it tilting her decisions to Trump.
In other words, Cannon’s own colleagues are openly talking about her bias and inability now that both have been ably demonstrated in case that still has no trial date, a year after she was assigned it, largely due to the fact that she has agreed to hold hearings on just about every issue raised by the defense. On Friday, even outside right-wing attorneys will be given time in the courtroom to argue that it was actually illegal for Smith to even bring the case.
I keep hoping the 11th Circuit will replace her. Regardless, Trump won’t see trial before the election so she will have achieved her goal.
Longest day of the year. It’s 9:04 and still light.
Love it.
StreamKit?
I’ve been thinking about breaking Stream’s inner workings into a separate package.
It would include; networking, parsing(RSS, JSON Feed, Atom, and HTML), data models, database(?), and any utilities around those items. The database bit is a stretch and should really remain outside of the package. It wouldn’t force a storage mechanism on anyone.
I’d like to do this to keep me honest about my separation of concerns and I just like the modularity of it.
It would, of course, use Swift Package Manager to create the package.
The big question rolling around my brain is this: Do I open source it?
Why not you ask? Well, it’s simple. I’m afraid my code will be dragged through the mud and that would destroy me. I love and appreciate constructive feedback and would absolutely take PR’s.
To get where I’d love to have it means creating the SPM and using it internally for Stream for iOS and Stream for Mac. I’d also like to make sure I’m using all the new async/await strictness put in place with Swift 6.
If I can get that far I’d consider open sourcing it. Maybe. 🤣
The other question is, would anyone use it?
I decided to grab coffee at Grit this morning and chill here for a bit.
I think Kim is excited for her and Taylor’s California trip. 😆
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
This week was Apple Developer Christmas also known as WWDC. It’s a time of year we learn what Apple has in store for developers for the next year.
At WillowTree we had a watch party at our Durham, North Carolina office. It was really great to meet folks I’ve worked with on projects but haven’t met in person.
It was really nice. A mini vacation with friends.
The keynote and Developer State of the Union were great as always and we all knew AI would be at the center.
Here’s everything Apple announced at the WWDC 2024 keynote, including Apple Intelligence, Siri makeover
We all suspected Apple would have an AI story this year, but they did announce other things. One that caught my attention was SwiftData allowing developers to use their own backend as a data source. It’s something every app developer integrating with a custom web service has to do. I’m super curious about it.
I’m also way behind the Swift Strict Concurrency train. It’s as if we have an entirely new language to learn.
Apple to ‘Pay’ OpenAI for ChatGPT Through Distribution, Not Cash
This is a classic mistake all developers and designers are warned not to do. The classic “My app is so popular it’ll get you attention for the free artwork you give me.” Uh, yeah, take cold hard cash.
The irony of this is Microsoft is in essence paying Apple to have ChatGPT integration in Apple OS’es.
Oh, most of the intelligence on device will be handled by Apple’s own models. But, when it does have to go off device it’ll make sure you know it’s ChatGPT so if it screws up you know who to blame. 🤣
Apple Intelligence is the personal intelligence system that brings powerful generative models to iPhone, iPad, and Mac. For advanced features that need to reason over complex data with larger foundation models, we created Private Cloud Compute (PCC), a groundbreaking cloud intelligence system designed specifically for private AI processing.
I want to know about the custom hardware Apple built. Sure, it’s running Apple Silicon and the OS is stripped down and buttoned up tighter than a drum to prevent accidentally introducing security holes, but I want to see how the hardware is assembled and see how it’s mounted in racks.
During the crescendo to announcing its name, the letters “A” and “I” will be on all of our lips, and then they’ll drop the proverbial mic: “We’re calling it Apple Intelligence.” Get it?
You may be asking why I included this post? I included it because Daniel called the “Apple Intelligence” name over a year ago. Did Apple take his idea? We’ll probably never know. 😃
Elon Musk has threatened to ban Apple devices from his companies over Apple’s newly announced ChatGPT integration.
Space Karen really is a big baby man. He and the Orange Menace are cut from the same cloth. I get my way or I’m gonna throw myself down and have a tantrum.
Do it, ban Apple products at your companies, baby man. 👶🏼
If you’ve never tried to do work on an iPad, I am genuinely happy for you. I’m writing this story on a Bluetooth keyboard connected to an 11-inch iPad Air M2. It’s a very nice keyboard, and the Air is a very nice tablet, but this would have been so much faster and easier on a convertible Chromebook. And I could still have watched Andor on the plane.
Folks are going to continue to ask for hardware they may never get. Google and Microsoft both offer hardware more akin to what iPad — MacPad? — users want.
The Viticci Monster is still your best bet.
Martin Truex Jr. felt it was time to regain control over his own life and his own schedule.
“I’m obviously here to let y’all know that I won’t be back full-time next year,” Truex said Friday in a press conference with team owner Joe Gibbs, confirming the widely reported news that he will exit the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota at season’s end.
It’s the end of an era. Truex is a Cup Series Champion with 34 wins in his pocket and is always a threat to win on the track.
Here’s to retirement. I hope you enjoy every moment of it Mr. Truex.
A pivotal gathering is reportedly taking place in Montreal today, where Formula 1 team bosses are set to convene to deliberate on the sport’s upcoming 2026 rule changes with F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali. This meeting aims to tackle increasing apprehensions surrounding the profound modifications proposed for the 2026 Formula One season.
Hats off to Formula 1 for trying to do something bold with their racing designs. In particular the motors are meant to combine electric power with a traditional combustion motor.
Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman • New York Times
Donald Trump and his closest allies are preparing a radical reshaping of American government if he regains the White House. Here are some of his plans for cracking down on immigration, directing the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries, increasing presidential power, upending America’s trade policies, retreating militarily from Europe and unilaterally deploying troops to Democratic-run cities.
I’ll continue to beat the anti-Orange Man drum until he’s no longer a threat to Democracy. He must be defeated in November and our system of government must be hardened and prepared for an onslaught of attacks and violence if he is defeated.
The standard library contains a ton of code that we don’t want to write ourselves, including printf, scanf, math functions, and so forth. So, we need to make sure our operating system can link to this library and everything “just works”. This post will show you how I linked our operating system to a standard library, newlib, and the trials and tribulations encountered in doing so.
Wow. Stephen has a lot of stuff to consider while integrating the standard C runtime libraries into his Rust based OS. I really need to keep an eye on his work.
Oladimeji Sowole • The New Stack
Note that at this stage, only certain aspects of the Edge UI have undergone this change. In reply to a Mastodon user who asked about this, Russell confirmed that it is “an ongoing effort” and that the Edge team is “converting surface-by-surface, with ~15% fully done so far.”
At the day job I’m diving into React Native because we’re getting a lot of requests for React Native work.
On the flip side you have Microsoft rethinking their use of React in their browser. It makes sense to me. You want your browser to be as zippy and memory efficient as it can be.
On Thursday 192 House Republicans voted for an amendment which would have required a controversial Confederate monument to be reinstated at Arlington National Cemetery, where it was removed in December 2023.
What an embarrassing time in America. The GOP is fully embracing every mean and cruel law they possibly can. Why do they have to control everyone?
It’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me how the Republican and Democrat party have morphed over the years. Remember it was the GOP led by Lincoln who abolished slavery. Here we are over 150 years later and the GOP wants to control every life in America and Democrats are against it.
Stream for Mac Update
You’d think since Stream for Mac looks this bad I’d get to work on it, you’d be wrong! 🤣
I really do need to get back to it. I started working on the add feeds modal and realized I needed to fix up some of the code that does that to work better on the Mac. It’s also forcing me to look at adding async/await to the app, which is something I really need to do.
Caught a Durham Bulls game tonight with a bunch of WillowTree folk. Unfortunately the Bulls lost in extra innings but it’s a beautiful downtown and the ballpark is gorgeous.
Having a nice mocha at Cocoa Cinnamon in downtown Durham.
I like this city.
I’m in the Durham WillowTree office for a few days for our WWDC get together for all our iOS Devs.
Should be fun!
I had no idea David Sunflower Seeds started in Fresno. Learned something new today.
I couldn’t resist posting this here. 🤣
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Well, it’s been kind of a slow week on the project front. Sure, we’re still plugging away and the React Native devs are actively adding new features. I’m spending most of my time fixing the occasional bug that crops up and working on performance stuff, which is always fun. I love doing this type of work.
Chris Cameron • The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump has in recent days been escalating his suggestions that he could prosecute his political enemies if elected in November.
Defeat him at the polls and be prepared for a shitstorm and massive temper tantrum if the Orangeman loses.
You’re building a fantastic Xojo application that needs to connect to the internet, grab data from websites, or send information to web services. This is where HTTP requests come in. They’re the language your application uses to talk to the web.
I’ve mentioned my love for the BASIC language many times over the years. Xojo is a cross platform development environment with a very modernized form of BASIC.
I’d put money on it being much easier to learn than Swift and Xcode.
Swift is 100% not a beginning programming language.
In all these years, I have never seen the GNU/Linux distribution landscape regress so far away from our needs. It is almost impossible to find a distribution where you can professionally run and set up our most basic tools: Creative software, graphic pen tablet, color calibration. And I tested a wide range of GNU/Linux distributions to make this guide! The choice we have in 2024 is super limited.
It’s kind of sad to see Linux get worse for professional artists.
Any time now it’ll be the year of the Linux Desktop. 🫠
Kevin Turong • The San Francisco Standard
Billionaire entrepreneur Hamdi Ulukaya, the Turkish-born CEO and founder of Chobani, the country’s largest producer of Greek yogurt, has purchased the brewery and its 2.17-acre Potrero Hill home.
This is super nice! I’m so happy for beer lovers everywhere and especially beer lovers in San Francisco. A legend is reborn!
A YouTube influencer is facing federal charges for shooting illegal fireworks from a helicopter at a Lamborghini doing donuts on federal land. On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in California filed charges against Alex Choi for “causing the placement of an explosive or incendiary device on an aircraft.”
I watched a clip of the video and it’s a pretty darned fun video. It’s also my understanding he’s a real jerk and karma ultimately catches up with folks like that.
Sources speculate the vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed north on Franklin. At an estimated 80 mph the car blew through the stop sign , mowed through vegetation, went up the 45% incline, jumped the railroad tracks and was stopped suddenly on the north side of the embankment by a 12″ diameter tree.
This happened not far from WillowTree’s Woolen Mills HQ!
Can you imagine what a wild ride that must’ve been? 😳
Don Estridge broke all of Big Blue’s rules to create the home computer. The company would never forgive him for it.
I love finding stories like this! Computing history I hadn’t a clue about.
She said when he wouldn’t take it she dropped the book at Superintendent Derek Bub’s feet. She believes it may have added more fuel to the fire.
Good for Ms. Jenkins! I’m sure the nutball district is full on MAGA and doesn’t want folks to read the book the MAGA GOP is using as their blueprint for a new America.
Andrew Cunningham • Ars Technica
Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned
I’m still not sure how to feel about this. Hey, as long as I can turn it off I don’t think it’s that big an issue.
And, yes, I’d turn it off right away. Don’t want it, don’t need it.
Heck, if I get another Windows box I don’t really care to have a Microsoft login. Having access to the computer with a local login is good enough for me.
Starting today, Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitor (CGM) users will be able to monitor their real-time blood sugar data straight from an Apple Watch.
I linked to this because WillowTree was involved with the G7 project for quite a while. I was part of a team that worked on a prototype app. It was a super fun project and one of my favorites!
Summer Lin, Joseph Serna, and Alex Wigglesworth • Los Angeles Times
As heat wave envelopes California, 14,000-acre Corral fire burns in San Joaquin County
California, and the San Joaquin Valley in particular, have been fighting high temperatures all week. Over 100 is not uncommon but it doesn’t usually happen this early in the summer.
I use an app called Watch Duty and there are fires burning all over California. My notifications have been firing multiple times a day.
California fire season is in full swing.
Faced with the challenge of how to respond to the increasing enshittification of the web, and fuelled by a night out with Flipboard’s Mike McCue and Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko, Casey Newton of Platformer laughs and says:
This made me think about a post the week from Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko:
I should be able to follow #Cara users from my Mastodon account. You can’t convince me to make yet another account in a yet another silo, but I’d love to see and share more art in my home feed. - Eugen Rochko
I would also love to see this and I believe we’re making good headway.
Talk about a platform that allows flowers to bloom!
The Apple Vision Pro can be used as a display for a connected Mac, but it is bulky, heavy, and uncomfortable. The Spacetop G1, a new laptop from former Magic Leap employees, promises to solve those problems by pairing a computer with a set of lightweight AR glasses that look more comfortable to wear for long periods of time.
I really hope these folks can pull this off. Even if they do I’m sure every Apple blog will pan it for not being as good, or better, than Vision Pro.
If they can pull it off it’ll beg the question: Why couldn’t Apple do it?
I’ll be keeping my eye on this story.
As a kid, I wasn’t in the Pepsi or Coke camp (I liked both about the same), I was fully in the Dr Pepper camp. It was different, sort of weird, like me. One New Year’s Eve I drank so much of it that I got pretty ill and was worried I would have to go to the hospital. Those were different times. As are these, apparently!
It’s kind of crazy to see Dr. Pepper take over second place. I’m a Pepsi fan, always have been, but I have family who are into Dr. Pepper, so I guess it shouldn’t be that big a surprise.
I’m sure Pepsi is doing just fine.
I wonder if he knows of what is now called Dublin Dr. Pepper? The original Texas born Pepper.
My WWDC 2024 Wish List:
- Developer Kit for making custom watch faces.
That’s it. That’s the list.
Old Programming Book
I shared these photos this morning in our Staff and Senior Engineers Slack channel.
I owe my career to Windows and the Windows API. I spent years writing Windows apps and loved every minute of it. Sometimes I wish I was still doing it. C, C++, Win32, and even COM feel like an old friend compared to my comfort level with iOS dev. Even after 14 years of iOS Dev. I don’t know why that is, but there you go.
I built my personal Windows Class Libraries — ACLLib — based on these API’s and they still work to this day. That is an amazing testament to how good Microsoft’s backward compatibility promise has been for Windows Developers.
These are pictures of Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows, 1988.
Got a buddy pair coding with me on the porch this morning. 🐸
Orangeman would never leave
Paul Krugman • The New York Times
There’s a very real possibility that if Trump wins in November it’ll be the last real national election America holds for a very long time. And while there’s room for disagreement here, if you consider that statement to be outrageous hyperbole, you haven’t been paying attention.
A lot of folks believe this, including me. He refused to leave after he lost in 2020, contested the results in multiple states losing 60 complaints brought before courts, and started an insurrection to stay in office.
What makes you believe he’d leave peacefully after serving a second term?
I don’t believe it for a moment. He wants to be a dictator and change the face of American Democracy.
He wants to lock up his political rivals.
Sound familiar? That’s right. His hero is Vladimir Putin. He wants to be just like his hero.
We moved Kim’s gardenia out front last Sunday. It didn’t have a single bloom opened at the time. It’s been busy this week.
I found Mothra.
Epimecis hortaria, the tulip-tree beauty, is a moth species of the Ennominae subfamily found in North America.
I obviously haven’t paid attention to one part of our yard. Now, it’s covered in poison ivy. I’m a big dummy. 🤣
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
We had a lot of fun this week tracking down a bug in the project I’m working on. It was exposed by slow server response, which was because the service had grown. So the bug was icky. Once we tracked it down on the client side we were able to fix it up pretty quickly. I love doing stuff like this! Finding and fixing bugs is part of any developers job along with writing code.
I hope you enjoy the links.
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns' rare warning during a commencement speech about former President Donald Trump, sparked outrage from supporters of Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement this weekend.
People are right to continue to warn us all of the dangers of electing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to the Presidency.
Anyone who reads this site — thanks to both of you — knows I’m a Liberal Democrat suffering from “The Woke Mind Virus.” 😃 So of course I think a man set on destroying Democracy as we know it is dangerous.
Now, former board member Helen Toner is explaining her decision. In a new podcast interview, the artificial intelligence researcher blasted Altman’s lack of transparency and said the board was kept in the dark about key decisions. She accused Altman of “withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening in the company, [and] in some cases outright lying to the board.”
AI will continue to be controversial and it looks like Sam Altman will be the poster boy for the controversy, at least in the short term.
Keeping a full commercial product rollout from the board seems like a bad idea, doesn’t it? No wonder they fired him.
Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers.
TL;DR - Data delivery by pigeon is still faster than the internet. 🤣
In a joint statement issued Tuesday, Tony Stewart and Gene Haas confirmed that Stewart-Haas Racing will cease NASCAR operations at season’s end.
This is a real bummer for NASCAR fans and the sport in general. Stewart Haas had a championship team not so long ago but it’s been a long time since they’ve seen victory lane.
They have four cars on the grid. Three teams field four drivers and it’s my understanding NASCAR is going to limit team size to three going forward.
In 2016 NASCAR switched to a Charter system. In that system teams purchase a charter from NASCAR to be part of the system. Those charters are expected to grow in value so a team would have more than physical goods to sale should they decide to close shop. They’re not cheap. Spire Motorsports bought one last year for $40mm. What will each Stewart Haas charter sell for? 😳
Writing an NVMe Driver in Rust
The link above is to a PDF for Thomas Pirhonen’s Bachelors Thesis. Rust has really made inroads into systems development and I’m happy to see it. Having memory safe code at the systems level seems like a smart thing to do, don’t you think? 😃
I’d be curious to see how much unsafe code exists in the various Rust OS level projects I’ve heard of. But, you gotta start somewhere!
When will Swift be used to build major parts of Apple’s OS level code? Or is it already being used?
I’ve long had a longing to have a Mac Mini as build server in my technics room. After Apple finally updated it to (now) fashionable space grey, it was a must purchase for my company.
I’ve had a hankering to do this very thing. I can see setting up the server much in the way we see here and trigger builds via GitHub Actions to start the process. Heck, I could use Xcode’s built in support for automating builds and kick it off right from within Xcode on my laptop. Yeah, Xcode has a decent enough build system to make it useful. Makes me wonder how much of it Apple is using for Xcode Cloud or is 100% of that custom code?
If you work with sensitive data, and want to be 100% sure that there is no trace of the old data after it has been updated or deleted — SQLite has you covered. The secure_delete pragma (off by default) causes SQLite to overwrite deleted content with zeros.
TIL! I’ve used SQLite in quite a few projects, including Stream. I love it for local storage and still prefer it to CoreData, it’s just straightforward SQL. Anywho, I had no idea you could do this. Another nice tool to keep in the toolbox.
Doctor Who returned to TV recently as a “soft reboot” to attract a new generation of viewers. Yeah, okay, but the older generations didn’t exactly go away, and since I am a member of an older generation, I am qualified to say that the show sucks.
I think we’ve all been here when we see a big change to our favorite Television show.
Heck, I’m torn about continuing to watch The Witcher. Henry Cavil is The Witcher and to see him replaced just feels wrong.
Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down.
You gotta love these hacker folks. At least he’s using his talent for good.
My Home Server Journey - From Raspberry Pi to Ryzen
What’s up with two server based links today? Guess I’m just in a very hardware mood today.
This reminds me I need to setup my $99 Mac Mini I purchased months ago. It’s an x86 based Mini and fairly old but I want it for media streaming and another local backup system.
Those who miss the days of full-time Apple/Microsoft beef will have been heartened last week by bold claims that the latest Surface devices are faster than the M3 MacBook Air. It’s fun to see Microsoft’s marketing department in a combative mood, but part of me wishes the company would stop trying so hard to show it’s better than Apple.
I don’t know that I’d go this far. Microsoft is just trying to lead the industry into an ARM focused world by attempting to create a new standard of PC.
I’ve been on the Mac, almost exclusively, since around 2006(?) and I love the experience from a user and developer point of view.
There’s still that part of me that loves my old development days on Windows. It was also a great platform to build on.
The new Microsoft Surface Pro looks absolutely amazing and I’ve lusted for one of these computers for years. Microsoft has proven for years and years a tablet/laptop can have excellent touch support and a full desktop class OS underpinning it.
It’s only a matter of time before Apple does it. When it happens all doubt around Apple creating a convertible will disappear and folks will think it’s the greatest thing ever.
Each quarter at the University of Chicago includes nine weeks of instruction. In the eighth week, I ask students to submit questions that they would like our ninth and final session to cover. This quarter, a third of the students in the class submitted some version of the question: “How can I use ChatGPT to get ahead in my programming job?”
I know of a lot of developers at work using ChatGPT to their advantage. It’s not that it’s doing their job, no, it’s just another tool to get started with a thought.
The intended takeaway from the “Big Data is coming” chart was that pretty soon, everyone will be inundated by their data. Ten years in, that future just hasn’t materialized. We can validate this several ways: looking at data (quantitatively), asking people if it is consistent with their experience (qualitatively), and thinking it through from first principles (inductively).
I’m not really into backend stuff like this. It seems kind of boring but it’s good to know some folks are really into it.
Declaring something dead is a bit strange to me, because it was never a living thing, but I get the gist.
I’m sure your mileage will vary but this is a small piece worth a read just to understand his declaration.
BigData, it turns out, ain’t all that big.
Donald J. Trump, the former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a case stemming from a payment that silenced a porn star.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.
Donald J. Trump, convicted felon. Has a really nice ring to it.
Why do you stay in Texas?
My heart is broken💔: As friends & family know, my wife was pregnant with our 2nd child, & about to begin her 2nd trimester. A few days ago she had severe pains, & bleeding, and had to go to the emergency room. There, it was discovered that our baby no longer had a heartbeat.… pic.twitter.com/k1INqq94c0
— Ryan Hamilton (@TheRyanHamilton) May 20, 2024
Texas doesn’t care about women. To Texas they exist to incubate and pop out babies, cook your meals, and clean your house.
If you have a woman in your life why are you still there?
Are you trying to make Texas a better place by getting Republicans out of office?
Is it where you grew up?
Do you want to get out of there but are trapped because you can’t afford the cost of moving?
Is your job too good to leave?
Maybe you don’t care because it’s someone else’s problem?
What about it is keeping you there?