Yeah, so I’m listening to Surveillance Valley (see previous post) and it’s got me thinking all paranoid and crotchety, as one might expect. So now I’m reminiscing fondly about UUCP, UseNet, FidoNet, and RumorMonger/LACS. Thinking about how, if I were going to try to come up with some sort of communication network that was hardContinue reading “Cranky Old Guy”
Author Archives: pirateguillermo
Book Recommendations
My friend Matt Maxwell wrote The Queen of No Tomorrows and it got published by Broken Eye Books. It is totally worth buying and installing on your phone so you can read it in line at the grocery store, while you’re waiting at the doctor’s office, and any other time you have five seconds toContinue reading “Book Recommendations”
Nonrandom Thoughts on a Holiday Afternoon
Oh, lots of things going through my head. No real coherence to speak of, though. Let’s see, a useful life lesson from Victor / Victoria happy outcome from reading the release notes not everything in the 80s sucked (X still makes me happy) (but most of the 80s sucked) Victor / Victoria Before I everContinue reading “Nonrandom Thoughts on a Holiday Afternoon”
Something They Leave Out
Here’s something the tutorials don’t tell you, but that is kind of important: Flutter plugins add their own CocoaPod dependencies to the iOS project. This is why the installation instructions for Firebase tell you to skip through everything in the iOS installation after you install the GoogleService-Info.plist file. The rest of the installation gets handledContinue reading “Something They Leave Out”
True But Misleading
Oh, BBC, never change. Here’s a quote from an article on the latest recommendations from the IPCC: If you fly regularly, replacing flying with other forms of transport may have a bigger impact on your carbon footprint than changing your diet. A passenger’s carbon footprint from a one-way flight from London to New York isContinue reading “True But Misleading”
Team of One
I have been writing programs of varying complexity since I was in the 6th grade, so, call it 39 years. For a portion of that time, call it 14 years, I worked on code that had other people contributing to it. During that, what, 36% percent of my programming life, I learned many lessons thatContinue reading “Team of One”
I Hate Your Bot
I dunno, something like a year ago, a guy I know started retweeting a client of his who was working on building a chatbot platform. Now, let’s be honest: in customer facing positions, a lot of interactions are going to be the same. People are way more similar than they are different, and so if oneContinue reading “I Hate Your Bot”
It’s Never Easy
So, the Internet of Things is a thing that’s mostly just a security nightmare, but there do exist some services that I find actually helpful. For instance, I put an Ambient Weather station on our roof and hooked it up to Weather Underground and that lets me get ad-free weather forecasts. Lots of people haveContinue reading “It’s Never Easy”
Here’s A Useful Testing Application
So, a few years back, I consulted at NASA doing some work on a really cool system for storing and retrieving documentation on systems in flight. Basically, it was a very customized Bugzilla that winds up saving the American taxpayer millions of dollars every year. There’s a post I wrote at the time about how toContinue reading “Here’s A Useful Testing Application”
VPN, part 2
Well, the configuration I’d put together before turned out not to work when I was at a hotel and trying it out. I got distracted and didn’t do anything about it for a while, but today I had some time and I started digging around. Guess what? Someone solved this problem ages ago and someoneContinue reading “VPN, part 2”