I’m currently working on a suite of programs (which sounds a hell of a lot fancier than, “a couple of apps and a database,” — word to the wise, &c.) that deals with people. A person record has, as an option, a birthdate. You never know, someone, somewhere, might like to commemorate great-great-great-uncle Ralph’s birthdayContinue reading “Data Representation”
Category Archives: Intellectual Curiosity
Type Safety
If you don’t care about programming languages, feel free to skip this entry.
Vacation Nerdsnipe
We bought into Disney Vacation Club some years ago, because having a timeshare would mean we’d have this incentive to take vacations. We are bad at taking vacations. There’s always stuff to be doing, after all. But if you don’t use your timeshare, that’s effectively money you just gave away to be burned. So…take aContinue reading “Vacation Nerdsnipe”
Sturgeon’s Law
My Audible subscription just renewed and I got all enthusiastic. Back when Netflix was DVD only, we had a, “go ahead and try it,” policy: stick whatever recommendations in the queue, and when they showed up, pop ’em in and hit play. If the movie wasn’t compelling after the first 15 minutes, we’d put itContinue reading “Sturgeon’s Law”
Insightful Or Obvious?
A friend just passed this interview along, and it got me thinking. Every so often, this sort of thing pops up on my radar: lone individual / tiny group doing things on their own rather than using the commonly available mass-produced thing, and they’re doing it for Reasons. I find something seductive in these stories.Continue reading “Insightful Or Obvious?”
Concurrency, Closures, and SwiftUI on Mac OS X
Puzzlin’ Code
Okay, here’s some SwiftUI code: Why, why, do I need to prefix tipPercentages with ‘self.‘ once we’re in the third closure but not inside the second or even the first? What’s magical about this situation? I know there’s something, but nobody is saying what.
Harbinger, Party of Some
A friend pointed out this paper about, “harbinger ZIP codes.” It is fascinating! Geography as destiny, and the likelihood is that cranks live near each other. Wow.
Right Thing, Wrong Time
Cryptocurrency, quantum supremacy, imminent death of the Internet. So, Google recently announced that they’d achieved quantum supremacy. One of the things that quantum computers are supposed to be really good at is cracking crypto really fast. The past couple of years have seen an explosion of cryptocurrencies, which are one application of blockchain, which reliesContinue reading “Right Thing, Wrong Time”
Greatness Abides
Okay, so when I looked at Google news this morning, this story was in the “For you…based on your interests” section: Gremlin Brings Chaos Monkey Testing to Spinnaker CD Platform. Now, I’m a respecter of Dev Ops, but I’m not really a practitioner of Dev Ops. So I think this is cool, but the coolestContinue reading “Greatness Abides”