Category Archives: programming

More Disconnection Thinking

Here on the ship, we have satellite Internet. This means that, at a good moment, I’ve got round-trip ping times to google.com at just over half a second (~660ms) and download speeds that seem to average around a megabyte per minute. Furthermore, access to the satellite Internet is on a paid basis, so you haveContinue reading “More Disconnection Thinking”

Hobby Utility

So, we’re on a cruise ship and I got to thinking about the population and the environment and I developed a morbid curiosity. More about that below the fold. The high point, though, is that I’ve written another application — this one for the iPhone — that fills a neat, narrow niche: it’s a combination tallyContinue reading “Hobby Utility”

Here’s a (docker) image for you

We’re getting closer to a long vacation with intermittent Internet, so I’m going through all my developer tools, making sure that everything’s ready. Now that I know how to get VSCode to persist its downloaded stuff between runs in a given container (make sure there’s a .vscode-server/extensions directory in the container user’s $HOME), I wantedContinue reading “Here’s a (docker) image for you”

I’m Dead, We Have So Many Forks

The post title is something one of our kids said, years ago, when our utensils drawer contained the combined tableware of two adult households. They were spoiled for choice. Anyway, since suddenly people I actually want to stay in touch with have started showing up on Mastodon and following me, I have started paying attentionContinue reading “I’m Dead, We Have So Many Forks”

Language Feelings Matter

I just finished a first pass at implementing a new feature in an application I wrote in Flutter. I’ve been working hard at it, not letting myself get distracted with any of my fun programming projects. So, to celebrate handing it off for evaluation and feedback, I just took this morning to do a massiveContinue reading “Language Feelings Matter”

Offline VS Code – maybe?

I just went on a week-long vacation wherein I was programming, among other things, in locations with dodgy or nonexistent network connections. My offline Swift modifications worked great; so, local mirroring of packages is a total win! But here’s a thing: a dinner conversation got me working in Flutter again. And, a few days beforeContinue reading “Offline VS Code – maybe?”

Insidious Arrogance

There’s this problem that comes when one deals with a complicated system or process for a long time — one internalizes all the details and complexity, and starts to factor all the weird inner workings of the system into communication about the system. In human terms, this is where professional jargon comes from. There’s stuffContinue reading “Insidious Arrogance”

Data Representation

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”