Progress

Started a weeklog, thanks to inspiration by ephes -- let's see how long this one will last... I've always liked the idea of extensive notes, like in a daily diary, or a Zettelkasten or weeknotes or whatever. I've tried many different tools, too, like Simplenote or Obsidian or NotepadAn old colleague of mine always has Notepad open and will write whatever he does/finds/needs/uses into it. That file is an amazing record of all the passwords he's ever seen. or Emacs/Org-Mode or so many others. Nothing stuck for me. So let's see how long this one will last...
I'm also trying to keep more precise and complete notes of what I do with my time. Let's see how long that one will last...
I had to battle a bit with Jekyll again, to get this collection working and rendering, just as I did for another secret collection already. Also, I still don't like the annoying code I have to write for side-notesI mean, just look at the source code. That stuff is not conducive to my writing-flow.. So, again, I've thought about switching to Hyde, but, again, will defer to some other time.

Did work for a customer, increased test coverage beyond all reasonable bounds. Feels good!

Created some tooling for another customer, also feels good.

I finally got around to working on the pull requests I put in to django-channels. That pull request would allow a consumer to handle all types of messages they receive. I did that because I stumbled over the behaviour when I implemented a "monitor" channel that would receive messages that are meant to be handled only by certain types of consumers. The PR was closed by Carlton Gibson of the django team. While I still think the behaviour I implemented is a good idea and I'll continue using it, Carlton is absolutely right in his decision to reject the PR, and I'm grateful to him for reviewing my changes.

I've reinstalled my VR setup, so I can VR again.

Still not sure about the composition of my weeklogs. Is there a neutral and good place to link for book descriptions? Goodreads is neither good nor neutral. I've looked at Openlibrary and at Librarything, but I'm not happy with either.

Articles

• What the mock? - A cheatsheet for mocking in Python
  Describes python's built-in mocking facilities and how to use them.
• Swallowing the elephant (part 6): The author of "Physically-based rendering" (the book) describes how he updated his renderer and had to fight with Disney's Moana example scene to get it to render.
• Part 1: It will think you are crunching bones: Robin Sloan on monsters and books and books about monsters.
• Derek Lowe's Sand won't save you this time, Things I won't work with: Peroxide Peroxides, Things I won't work with: Dioxigen Difluoride and Things I won't work with: Triazadienyl Fluoride: These wonderful excursions through dangerous chemistry are a classic and always going back to.
• My 10 Year Side Project Story
• The Metaverse Has Always Been a Dystopian Idea: What a silly article! Looking at the current VR landscape and the breathless announcements of giant corporations and then going: "Wait a second, the place where The Metaverse was originally described is a bleak dystopian novel, so that's what they want to build?" Essentially, it is saying that anything that has been described negatively must turn out negatively, which is just silly.
• Ring laser gyroscope: I did not know about these devices and the Sagnac effect they're based on.
• # Comparing SQLite, DuckDB and Arrow with UN Trade Data: More data storage and query engine options are always great, and both DuckDB as well as Apache Arrow look fantastic. As far as I understand, DuckDB can also use parquet and arrow formats as its backend, so that's nice!
• Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020): As someone who has never actually looked into the Fielding dissertation, it was very interesting to read that it doesn't concern itself with REST very much, but instead merely defines HTTP/1.1, then goes on to say that with HTTP/1.1 you could make all kinds of APIs, like REST. Also, what was described in that dissertation is not what we mean by REST today, which is essentially JSON-over-HTTP.
• Which stars can see Earth as a transiting exoplanet?: "We identify 1004 main-sequence stars within 100 parsecs, of which 508 guarantee a minimum 10-h long observation of Earth’s transit."
• Book Design Basics Part 3: Running The Numbers: Always good to read a bit about typography!
• # The Unceasing Cessna Hacienda: How the longest-flying-plane record was broken in 1958 in Las Vegas
• Non-transitive dice: everything and more about non-transitive dice, which are fascinating
• How Tadayuki Watanabe Disproved a Major Conjecture About Spheres. Ah, maths! So good!
• CT scan of a pumpkin: 't is the season! Lots of wonderful pumpkin pictures, sadly no raw data.

Libraries, programming, etc

• DuckDB: "is an in-process SQL OLAP database management system". A columnar database-in-a-file, like SQLite but apparently more powerfuller.
• Arrow: "A cross-language development platform for in-memory analytics". Has a lot of stuff, but could be quite useful for handling volumes of data. One of its advantages, if I understand correctly, is that the data format is defined to be machine-independent, so you can simply take an Arrow buffer, save it to disk or send it through the network or put it on a GPU and continue using it on the other side without serialization/deserialization.
• Polars: a "Lightning-fast DataFrame library for Rust and Python" that looks really nice. I'll have to look into this more.
• Flunn: A CBOR encoder/decoder. CBOR is defined in RFC 7049 as "Concise Binary Object Representation", so it's like JSON but smaller and faster. It's a bit like MessagePack, but apparently better and more standardized.
• SLY (Sly Lex Yacc): "SLY is a 100% Python implementation of the lex and yacc tools commonly used to write parsers and compilers. Parsing is based on the same LALR(1) algorithm used by many yacc tools." Define grammars, then parse strings, all in a pythonic way. Very nice!
• List-of-Dirty-Naughty-Obscene-and-Otherwise-Bad-Words
• awesome-tunneling: The purpose of this list is to track and compare tunneling solutions. This is primarily targeted toward self-hosters and developers who want to do things like exposing a local webserver via a public domain name, with automatic HTTPS, even if behind a NAT or other restricted network.
  Like, ngrok alternatives.
• Announcing Open Source Babelfish for PostgreSQL: An Accelerator for SQL Server Migration: huh, PostgreSQL speaks MSSQL/T-SQL now?!

Books

• An old friend wrote a children's book: Ada und Zangemann. Not sure whether it's "too educational" for my tastes, but I'll have a look when it comes out.
• Continued with A Philosophy of Software Development, still very interesting. Huh, there's a German version in the making.
• Finally finished Der Bücherdrache by Walter Moers(2) after having started to read that some years ago. Still very nice worldbuilding, but it feels quite flat. This is not the first Zamonien-Novel I read, so the world feels kind-of repetetetitive now.

Games

• Children of Morta, with Dominik: Nice little dungeon-slasher rogue-like. Playing roguelikes is weird, because you play the same part of the game over and over again, until you're good enough to see another part, and then you play that, over and over again. I'm not sure how much time I have for these kinds of time sinks. 6/10
• Horizon Chase Turbo, with Dominik: A retro-inspired arcade racer, like the good old Lotus game, but different. Nice little distraction, but I'm not going to finish any of it. 6/10
• Craftopia, with Anton, Bison and plant: It's very anime, and that's about the most critical thing I can say about it. It combines action, building, anime, (a very small bit of) survival, crafting, action, anime and, at some point, automation, so it's quite a good fit for me. Except for the anime. 9/10
• 112 Operator: that one was in Humble Monthly, and it sounded just so ridiculous. And it is. You play as an emergency services operator, which means two things: taking calls (which are a simple dialog game) and sending units to places on a map (which, nicely, can be in any place in the world). Both are... not super-interesting. Additionally, it's very obvious that this game was made for the American market and just transplanted overseas. "Public drunkenness", or police chases or "do you have a weapon in your home" just aren't things that appear here. 3/10

Other media

• The mistake every new game developer makes by GMTK (YT): An ode to game prototyping. The basic hypothesis is that game design is foundational to making games, because a game is only good if it is fun. To find out whether a game is fun, you need to try it out, but if you put too much effort into it, it's too late to change the game. So, create a bare-minimum prototype and try it out -- in fact, it'll help generate even more new and good and already-validated ideas.
• Smarter Every Day: Firing supersonic baseballs at stuff: Yes, it is interesting to watch a supersonic baseball cannon shoot at stuff.