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”

Mirror, mirror

Today I wrote a simple command line utility to mirror the dependencies for a swift project. And it works! That’s pretty neat, in and of itself. Then, because I could, I built a Docker image that has my utility installed, so I can use that image as the base for all my containerized application development.Continue reading “Mirror, mirror”

Characteristic: Overkill

So, we’re refugees. Also, I’ve been thinking about store-and-forward, intermittently-connected networks for a good long while. Looking at where life is going and how we plan to navigate it, I’m only going to be more intermittently-connected, with longer periods of isolation, not less/shorter. So, I want to start solving problems now, before I’m cut offContinue reading “Characteristic: Overkill”

Software Release!

I’m pleased to announce the release of an updated version of Stumpy. Mostly, the differences from the previous version will be invisible; the one user-facing difference being that, since I’m only supporting macOS 12+, I can wrap the list of servers in a ScrollView, so you don’t have to resize the window if you’re runningContinue reading “Software Release!”