Still Playing “No Man’s Sky” · Usu­al­ly be­fore I go to bed, for an hour or so. Id­ly pok­ing around plan­et­s, find­ing stuff to beef up my weapon or suit or ship, chat­ting with alien­s. Ex­cept for I’ve de­cid­ed to head for the cen­ter of the galaxy, so maybe I’ll be “done” soon, what­ev­er that mean­s. This is most­ly to pass along tips and share pix ...
 
Focal Length and Angle · If you care about cam­eras you prob­a­bly like learn­ing about in­ter­est­ing new (and old) lens­es. They’re de­scribed by two num­ber­s: How wide they open (al­so: aper­ture, bright­ness, speed), and how long they are (al­so: fo­cal length­). That first num­ber is gen­er­al­ly com­pa­ra­ble across lens­es: Low­er is bet­ter. The aper­ture unit, “F-stop”, is hard­ly in­tu­itive, but what­ev­er. Fo­cal lengths are hard to com­pare, be­cause how much the lens sees de­pends on how big the sen­sor be­hind it is, and there are lots of dif­fer­ent sen­sor sizes ...
[8 comments]  
Old Geek · I’m one. We’re not ex­act­ly com­mon on the ground; my pro­fes­sion, ap­par­ent­ly not con­tent with hav­ing ex­clud­ed a whole gen­der, is most­ly do­ing with­out the ser­vices of a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions ...
[29 comments]  
The Fixing-JSON Conversation · Last week I sug­gest­ed some mod­est JSON im­prove­ments, and con­ver­sa­tion en­sued. Ob­vi­ous­ly, much was “He’s Wrong On The In­ter­net (again)” but lots was juicy and tasty, and worth con­sid­er­ing fur­ther ...
[10 comments]  
Fixing JSON · I’ve edit­ed a cou­ple of the JSON RFCs, and am work­ing on the de­sign of a fair­ly com­plex DSL, so I think I can claim to have dug deep­er in the JSON mines than most. We can eas­i­ly agree on what’s wrong with JSON, and I can’t help won­der­ing if it’d be worth fix­ing it ...
[35 comments]  
Things About “No Man’s Sky” · Of course I had to pre-order this one af­ter read­ing World Without End in The New York­er. I’ve on­ly played a few evenings, haven’t done any­thing am­bi­tious, but I’ve learned that when you’re learn­ing some­thing is a good time to write about it ...
[3 comments]  
Light Transmission · Lots of pho­tog­ra­pher­s, and peo­ple who teach them, talk about the ad­van­tages of shoot­ing un­der a cloudy sky, or of hav­ing the sun’s light be­hind you. In­creas­ing­ly, I’m en­joy­ing point­ing my cam­era straight in­to the sun ...
[2 comments]  
Home Computer? · We’ve got this big old Mac Pro in the liv­ing room, a 2008 mod­el; I call it “the fam­i­ly mainframe”. I’m think­ing it might get re­placed with a Win­dows box ...
[16 comments]  
Susan and her SQL Problem · As usu­al, it all start­ed out in­no­cent­ly enough. Su­san [ed: names have been changed to pro­tect pri­va­cy] had no way to meet the dead­lines her boss­es had set for her. Bob had re­cent­ly and abrupt­ly left the com­pa­ny, and Melis­sa was on an ex­tend­ed med­i­cal ab­sence, leav­ing Su­san to do the work of three peo­ple. That is, three peo­ple each try­ing to rec­on­cile a few dozen 40,000+ row Ex­cel spread­sheets rep­re­sent­ing the gen­er­al ledger of the For­tune 1000 com­pa­ny they con­sult­ed for. She was about to brush off ever-chatty and an­noy­ing Michael from Com­pli­ance when, for on­ce, he rec­og­nized the stress she was un­der and said some­thing use­ful ...
[4 comments]  
Corporate Pride · There’s this nice video mes­sage in the el­e­va­tors at work, about the Pride Pa­rade. And it’s mak­ing me un­easy ...
[2 comments]  
Vegetables! · This morn­ing we went to the Mount Pleas­ant Farmers’ Mar­ket, which is small and good, if kind of pricey. It’s soup-to-nuts where by “soup-to-nuts”, I mean meat, veg­eta­bles, and booze. I ap­prove of all three, but it was the veg­eta­bles in the sun that want­ed to be pho­tographed ...
 
The REST Report · We were talk­ing at work about Server­less: What’s the right tool­ing for de­vel­op­ers build­ing that kind of ap­p? One of the busi­ness­peo­ple in the room said “Won’t de­vel­op­ers need s spe­cial UI con­struc­tion kit for Server­less apps?” The tech­ni­cal peo­ple all looked blank, be­cause REST. Brows­er code doesn’t care (nor does a new-fangled Re­act thingie, nor an iOS/An­droid ap­p) what’s hid­ing be­hind that HTTP POST. REST is more or less to­tal­ly dom­i­nant among app builders to­day. Is there any prospect of that chang­ing? ...
[3 comments]  
Video and Speed · I’m sure you know the feel­ing  —  you see a link to some­thing that looks in­ter­est­ing, fol­low it, and when it turns out to be a video clip, you shake your head and kill the tab. The prob­lem with video is it’s just too slow. But some­times slow is OK, and maybe video can be fixed ...
[8 comments]  
New British Isles · Fol­low­ing on the Bri­tish EU ref­er­en­dum, some po­lit­i­cal re-alignment of the Bri­tish Isles feels in­evitable. I pro­pose a re-organization in­to three states: Ire­land, Bri­tain, and Dál Ri­a­ta (or per­haps Dal­ri­ada) which com­pris­es what we now call Scot­land and North­ern Ire­land. Here’s a map ...
[7 comments]  
Other American Gods · I just fin­ished read­ing The Li­brary at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, who al­so writes geek books about Lin­ux and Apache and so on. I en­joyed it, it’s a page-turner. One of the re­view­ers on Ama­zon said “This is what Gaiman’s Amer­i­can Gods should have been.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but both ad­dress the tricky prob­lem of di­vine per­son­ae lodged in Mid­dle Amer­i­ca ...
 
A Really Bad Year · I just fin­ished read­ing 1177 B.C.: The Year Civ­i­liza­tion Col­lapsed, and en­joyed it a lot. You might not though, un­less you’re in­ter­est­ed in the an­cient Near East (from Greece to Egypt in­clu­sive), or the prac­tice of ar­chae­ol­o­gy. Wel­l, or the large-scale sys­temic col­lapse of great em­pires ...
[1 comment]  
On the Left · I have a prob­lem late­ly: When I look in the mir­ror, I see a left-wing ex­trem­ist. I’m un­easy about my strength­en­ing be­lief that Free En­ter­prise is gonna ru­in ev­ery­thing good un­less we take a knife to its tes­ti­cles first ...
[25 comments]  
YouTube Addiction? · You hear talk about In­ter­net over­load­/ad­dic­tion, but this very spe­cif­ic form has crossed my radar mul­ti­ple times in re­cent days. In stu­dents, specif­i­cal­ly. To the ex­tent of fail­ing mul­ti­ple cours­es. Be­cause they use lap­tops for ev­ery­thing, and YouTube is al­ways a Cmd-Tab away, and whether your itch is Team Fortress 2 or cat breed­ing or string quar­tets or ten­ta­cles, there’s al­ways some­thing new and fresh there to scratch it. So teach­ers don’t get heard and home­work doesn’t get done. My hunch is it’s a re­al thing. Any­one else?
[8 comments]  
Another JSON Schema Gripe · Re­cent­ly I wrote of my dis­gruntle­ment with JSON Schema. Since then I’ve learned that its au­thors plan more work, and that there are sev­er­al oth­er ef­forts to build a schema fa­cil­i­ty for JSON. This note is just a com­plaint about a par­tic­u­lar use-case, with the hope that it might in­form these ef­fort­s ...
[2 comments]  
Hemlock Ocean · I care most about the ocean, while Lau­ren cares more for the forest; for­tu­nate­ly the Pa­cif­ic North­west of­fers Cottage-Life com­pro­mis­es; il­lus­trat­ed with the help of a gi­ant hem­lock ...
 
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