Symbolic Forest : computing

Refactoring

Or, making the site more efficient

Published at 9:31 pm on May 31st, 2024

Back in March, I wrote about making my post publishing process on this blog a bit simpler. Well; that was really just a side effect. The main point of that post, and the process behind it, was to find a simple and cheap way to move this site onto HTTPS-based hosting, which I accomplished with an Azure Static Web App. The side effect was that the official way to deploy an Azure Static Web App is via Microsoft Oryx, run from a GitHub Action. So now, when I write a new post, I have a fairly ordinary workflow similar to what I’d use (and do use!) in a multi-developer team. I create my changes in a Git branch, create a GitHub pull request, merge that pull request, and the act of doing a merge kicks off a GitHub Action pipeline that fires up Oryx, runs Wintersmith, and produces a site image which Oryx then uploads to Azure. Don’t be scared of all the different names of all the steps: for me, it’s just a couple of buttons that sets off a whole Heath Robinson chain of events. If I was doing this in a multi-person team, the only real difference would be to get someone else to review the change before I merge it, just to make sure I haven’t said something completely stupid.

Modern technology

Or, keeping the site up to date

Published at 7:23 pm on March 14th, 2024

Filed under: Geekery, Meta.

Well, hello there! This site has been on somethng of a hiatus since last summer, for one reason and another. There’s plenty to write about, there’s plenty going on, but somehow I’ve always been too busy, too distracted, too many other things going on to sit down and want to write a blog post. Moreover, there are more technical reasons that I’ve felt I needed to get resolved too.

Going through things one by one

Or, a coding exercise

Published at 4:12 pm on June 25th, 2022

Filed under: Geekery, Technology.

One of my flaws is that as soon as I’m familiar with something, I assume it must be common knowledge. I love tutoring and mentoring people, but I’m bad at pitching exactly where their level might be, and in working out what they might not have come across before. Particularly, in my career, software development is one of those skills where beyond a certain base level nearly all your knowledge is picked up through osmosis and experience, rather than through formal training. Sometimes, when I’m reviewing my team’s code I come across things that surprise me a little. That’s where this post comes from, really: a few months back I spotted something in a review and realised it wouldn’t work.

Keyword noise: coding, software, .NET, .NET Framework, computing, C#, development.

Code archaeology

When things become relevant again

Published at 3:33 pm on October 23rd, 2021

Filed under: Geekery, Technology, In With The Old.

One thing I have been doing over the past few weeks is: finally, finally, taking the hard drive out of my last desktop computer—last used about 8 years ago at a guess—and actually copying all the documents off it. It also had stuff preserved from pretty much every desktop machine I’d had before that, so there was a whole treasure-chest of photographs I hadn’t seen in years, things I’d written, and various incomplete coding projects.

Keyword noise: coding, Linux, Unix, computing, C, daemon.

Hello, Operator

In which we consider switching OS

Published at 6:34 pm on May 27th, 2010

Filed under: Geekery, Technology.

Right, that’s enough of politics. For now, at least, until something else pops up and ires me.

Brokenness

In which things go wrong in hard-to-diagnose ways

Published at 4:16 pm on March 24th, 2009

Filed under: Dear Diary, Geekery, Technology.

We go away for the weekend. We come back. And the house is cold. Turn on the hot water tap: freezing. The boiler has given up the ghost.

Keyword noise: boiler, British Gas, broken, central heating, computing, disk drive, heating, pc, sata.

New World

In which we jumble the letters up

Published at 12:31 pm on March 9th, 2009

Filed under: Geekery.

K was digging through her boxes of zines last night, hunting for something, and came across one she thought I’d find interesting. She passed it over. It was The Dvorak Zine – “changing the world, one keyboard at a time”.

Keyword noise: computing, Dvorak, keyboard layout, The Dvorak Zine, typing.

Lost terminology

In which a word is snappy but fails to catch on

Published at 5:06 pm on June 18th, 2007

Filed under: Feeling Meh, Geekery, Technology.

Jargon changes over the years; bits of it get picked up, some bits become mainstream, and some wither away.

Keyword noise: Charles Babbage, computing, CPU, jargon, language, linguistics, mill, terminology, words.

Grumble grumble

In which we have problems

Published at 10:30 pm on December 18th, 2006

Filed under: Feeling Meh, Meta, Technology.

Well, in addition to not being able to find any of the Christmas presents I want to buy in the shops; the computer has started misbehaving. It crashed in the middle of an update, and hasn’t been working right ever since. For those of you who have been on the internet since the early 90s: I’m posting this using the text-only browser Lynx. because it was the only one I could get working quickly whilst getting the rest of the machine back on its feet.

Keyword noise: computing, crash, IT support, Lynx, problems, Wordpress.

Tick tock

In which the ancient Greeks can calculate

Published at 9:06 pm on December 1st, 2006

Filed under: In With The Old.

In the news recently: the Antikythera Mechanism, a cunning ancient device which, it turns out, could predict planetary positions and eclipses. It was first discovered around a hundred years ago, but it has always been little-known. Partly, I’m sure, because of the domination of Greek archaeology by classisists and historians. The Antikythera mechanism is unique, and its purpose unclear without careful analysis, so it’s not too surprising that for most of the time since its discovery it lurked, little-known, in an Athens museum.

On sucking

In which we discuss some design flaws in Lotus Notes

Published at 12:52 pm on September 13th, 2006

Filed under: Geekery, Linkery, Technology.

Spent quite a while last night reading Lotus Notes Sucks^***, a collection of reasons why, as you could probably guess, Lotus Notes sucks. I have to use the thing at work every day, and it is indeed truly awful; but I didn’t really like the site. It lists 80-something superficial bad things about Lotus Notes, without listing any of the truly awful things about it.

Keyword noise: computing, databases, email, Lotus Notes, software.

Masochism

In which we go back to BASICs

Published at 10:37 pm on June 22nd, 2006

Filed under: Geekery, Technology.

No, I’m not a masochist.

Friday

In which things are uncompleted

Published at 10:59 pm on June 15th, 2006

Filed under: Dear Diary.

We had a computer that was working fine. We switch it off. We move it. We plug it in. And it doesn’t work. At all. So dead, there’s nowhere to start looking for what to fix. God knows how we killed it.

Keyword noise: computing, IT, projects, shopping, todo list.