Micah R Ledbetter

Defenders of short lines in source code have won the day when it comes to defaults from automatic formatters, but when I look at the results I don’t understand why. The last 6 lines here are the same as the first 14, and it looks much more readable to me.

I don’t mind this as a proverb, but like many proverbs, it would benefit from an equal and opposite counter-proverb.

Perhaps:

So-called “server-side rendering” is actually “server-side serializing, network streaming, and then client-side rendering”, in contrast to “client-side rendering” which is actually “server-side serializing, network streaming, manipulation by JavaScript, and then client-side rendering”. By this logic, programs that can be built with only a C compiler use “server-side compilation”, while programs that require Make or GNU Autotools use “client-side compilation”.

Enjoying the alternatives to human intelligence brought to us by the Alt Man

Like everyone, I have my own code formatting opinions. Whenever the urge to share them gets too great, I try to keep in mind the senior architect from many jobs ago who believed that the best tab width was 3. I suspect that some state education agencies still run scripts indented to three spaces.

I am somewhat dissatisfied with the comments server on my main website, and have been hunting for alternatives. The most cursed thing I’ve seen so far is this:

I implemented static HTML comments on my website by tail’ing the /var/logs/nginx/access.log with a perl script. No CGI, no database, just the actual text of the comments stored as a single comment per line in a .html file.

To comment a visitor takes any url on the domain and appends “/@say/”. Like notmyurl.com/somepage…. response to somepage. Or “…lakephoto.jpg/@say/Cool fish! How long was it?”

The perl script sees the /@say/ in the logs and adds the parsed out and sanitized comment to an .html file. There’s some nginx location hijinks for matching /@say/ URLs that goes to a confirmation page and redirects to the comment listing page.

…

I’ve used this comment system on my tor onion services sites for the last decade. I get plenty of people trying to exploit it. It’s kind of fun. If the Tor folk haven’t pwned it I doubt the HN folk will. Not for lack of skill but mostly a lack of motivation relative to the tor folk.

I do not plan to do this but I also do not plan to avoid doing this, should the opportunity arise.

How to install programs with homebrew:

• Type brew search PROGRAM and wait for it to show results
• Realize this is taking a while
• Search for the program on the web
• Visit the GitHub release page for it
• Click the download button
• Extract archive to your $PATH
• Run the program

In April, the White House released a memo on a standard for lunar time (PDF). I hope it is not too late to save the country from a terrible mistake: abbreviating this standard as “LTC”.

“LTC” is a jumbled initialism for Coordinated Lunar Time, patterned after “UTC” as a jumbled initialism for Coordinated Universal Time. But why jumble the initialisms? The UTC Wikipedia page quotes a paper which says:

In 1967 the CCIR adopted the names Coordinated Universal Time and Temps Universel Coordonné for the English and French names with the acronym UTC to be used in both languages. The name “Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)” was approved by a resolution of IAU Commissions 4 and 31 at the 13th General Assembly in 1967 (Trans. IAU, 1968).

It’s bad enough that Earth’s coordinated time is abbreviated in a cut-the-baby compromise with the French, but at least the French are actually on Earth. Lunar time should be decided in a symposium on the moon itself. If you want your voice heard, you should have to land there.

Via The Old New Thing

A colleague told a story of how he once broke the entire Office division’s ability to check in code because he accidentally checked in a syntax error to the script that is used to verify that your proposed change has satisfied all the pre-submit requirements such as passing static analysis and unit testing.

…

The error was caused by smart quotes being used by mistake instead of straight quotes. He doesn’t know how they snuck in, and the two styles of quotation marks were sufficiently similar that it eluded everyone’s notice.

I’ve never worked at Microsoft and can only guess how they might have snuck in… and my guess is that they came in by copying/pasting code from MSDN Blogs, which for years seemed to auto convert straight quotes to smart quotes and double dashes to em dashes.

In that era, only a few MSDN bloggers were nice enough to wrap their code in <pre> tags, and it’s not clear to me that the CMS even supported syntax highlighting. We’ve got it pretty good today, is what I’m trying to say.

Perhaps a weird way to put it, but it’s accurate to say that I’ve been enjoying tracking my food intake for the past 6 months. I’ve been tracking exercise for longer, and I started tracking food too when I realized I was mentally reaching for my phone after meals to record the data - I wanted to have a record of how I was doing.

I use MacroFactor, which is thoughtfully designed to do the job and get out of your way. I expected tracking to feel bad, but that mostly hasn’t happened. I set an agreement with myself that I can eat and drink whatever I want as long as I track it accurately, which has been freeing, but also has highlighted food that I wouldn’t have enjoyed enough to be worth its calories.

It has helped to track some positive things too: I’m trying to get a good macro balance of protein/carbs/fat, and in particular eat more protein than I would naturally; I’m not just trying to avoid junk food.

Some things I learned:

• I tend to eat more fat than my targets but often fewer carbs; I expected the reverse
• Alcohol is even higher calorie than I realized, but more insidiously, I am much hungrier on days I drink than days I don’t (I still enjoy a drink most days)
• 100cal of protein feels much more satisfying than 100cal of either carbs or fat when I’m hungry between meals