Reminiscing of days with Sublime Text
The text editor remains snappy and fast as I navigated through a large codebase and made a few changes. Sublime Text was never a slouch when it comes to performance. It was always fast for me, even on larger codebases.
Intrigued, I turned to Sublime Text's package control to see if there were packages there for Ruby and Rails and general web development. While I don't really need these, there are nice to have in the text editor. What I found was quite disappointing.
Most of the packages that I have used in the past on Sublime Text have not seen much in terms of updates, with a few packages listed as missing. Clearly, VS Code has impacted the number of actively maintained packages as developers migrated from Sublime Text to VS Code when it first hit the scenes.
Although I'm pretty much baked into the VS Code ecosystem thanks to its huge library of extensions, I wouldn't be against going back to Sublime Text. Maybe one day I will. For the moment, I'll leave it on my Macbook and see what I get from it as a wee change to VS Code.
First hit of the year
First hit of the year for me and Drew at Paisley Golf Club today!
A glorious afternoon of weather and a welcome change to the snow and rain we’ve had the last few weeks. I was a bit rusty but Drew has managed to find some extra yardage to his drives over the winter. I’ve got some catching up to do!
Don't forget that text is everything
Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.
— Always bet on text
Hello Dingbats
In a change from my regular Leuchttrum notebooks that I use, I wanted to try something different. Last week I ordered a Dingbats Wildlife notebook.
It’s a bit bigger than the Leuchttrum notebook which I don’t mind. It also includes a single bookmark as opposed to the Leuchttrum’s three. Hardly a deal-breaker as I can add my own bookmarks.
Aside from being eco-friendly, the notebooks come in many colours.
It's been a code and coffee morning
From a presentation perspective, the problem looks easy. Any number of widgets for a page can be modelled to be presented as a complete web page. It doesn't matter how the data is put together, e.g. flat files, canned models, hard-coded HTML.
What complicates the problem is how the user creates and manipulates these widgets to their needs. I've seen enough back-end interfaces for various products to know it can be done. The Mailbrew interface, which has similar functionality, is how I want this feature to work.
Instead of sitting at the text editor and blindly coding my way out of this, I've been using my iPad to sketch out a few ideas of how widgets of different shapes will relate to the page, and how a page will assemble these widgets. The problem is starting to unravel now.
Might be time for another coffee.
First paragraph: Troy
Troy. The most marvellous kingdom in all the world. The Jewel of the Aegean. Glittering Ilium, the city that rose and fell not once but twice. Gatekeeper of traffic in and out of the barbarous east. Kingdom of gold and horses. Fierce nurse of prophets, princes, heroes, warriors and poets. Under the protection of ARES, ARTERMIS, APOLLO and APHRODITE she stood for years as the paragon of all that can be achieved in the arts of war and peace, trade and treaty, love and art, statecraft, piety and civil harmony. When she fell, a hole opened in the human world that may neve be filled, save in memory. Poets must sing the story over and over again, passing it from generation to generation, lest in losing Troy we lost a part of ourselves.
— Troy by Stephen Fry
Can SAAS build a better vaccination system?
Clinic workers in Connecticut, Virginia, and other states say the system is notorious for randomly canceled appointments, unreliable registration, and problems that lock staff out of the dashboard they’re supposed to use to log records. The CDC acknowledges there are multiple flaws it’s working to fix, although it attributes some of the problems to user error.
— What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system?
Imagine for a second if GitHub had the resources to build this, or even Basecamp or Shopify. Not only do they have the experience of websites that are heavily used every day by millions of users, but they also have the knowledge of building for the public. Their websites are used by millions of people every day, and they have to ensure that design changes need to be clear to the people using it.
Could these companies build a better vaccination system?
The open web we let slip through our fingers
With the internet shifting into huge companies' hands, we’re losing the fight against the open web. Heather Burns reminds us of those times and why it’s down to Generation X to fight for that free open internet once more.
Today’s young tech policy professionals are are, quite rightfully, responding to the only internet in the only world they have ever known. The awful one. The one where the internet was and is a handful of billion-pound companies. The one where the internet has only ever been petrol on a fire. The one where the internet has been essential infrastructure like water and heat, not a thing you had to request and master. The closed internet made for them. Not the open internet I got to make.
I've already taken Brave for a spin as a replacement browser for Firefox on a Windows laptop. I wasn't completely convinced that Brave was for me. I'm now curious to see Vivaldi can offer.
Tweetbot 6 is here
The trade-off here is that you can take the subscription out for the app and get a chronological timeline with a few added features or use Twitter's own app, which brings with it its own benefits and drawbacks.
After spending more time than I care to admit on Twitter's own client, I've plumped for the annual subscription for Tweetbot 6. Over time I hope that we'll get to see more features added to Tweetbot.
NFL Championship heartbreak once again for the Packers
Heartbreak for the Packers once again. Starting to wonder if there's ever been a better quarterback than Aaron Rodgers with only a single championship title. Anyway, last night's game seems to be a recurring theme with the Packers when it comes to the big game. It was definitely a game of two halves with the Buccaneers being on top in the first half and the Packers rallying in the second half. However, the Packers offence in the second half couldn't capitalise on those turnovers, and the Buccaneer defence was first class.
In the other game, the Chiefs came out on top over my AFC favourites, the Bills. The Bills have been great to watch this season, and the Allen & Diggs combo is one that I hope provides plenty of playoff opportunities for the Bills over the next few years.
The humble checklist
Checklists are great because they are an easy way to get my brain thinking about the details. They force me to think about all the things that need to happen. They force me to think in time and sequence: this needs to happen before that and this other thing will take a while so that’s probably another checklist. Checklists force me to think about dependencies and who is going to do what part of a project. For example: Bob has access to all the welding tools, so he needs to do all the metalwork which means Alice and Chris are stuck with all the woodwork and painting.
— The unreasonable effectiveness of checklists
The Couch Console
I like having a reason to get up and get some nibbles or a drink, but this makes it much easier to sit and enjoy my movie, the American football, the golf or the lastest PlayStation game.
One thing I do know is that my boys would love one each!
HT to Tools & Toys for sharing this.
Looks like I’ve missed the release of Edition 2 of the bullet journal notebook. I hope they get more in soon. Almost at the end of my current notebook.
I’m always torn between how picturesque it is when it snows and when it will melt enough to get back on the golf course. I’ll enjoy this view for the moment though until it clears.
Ultimatum for WhatsApp users
WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messenger that claims to have privacy coded into its DNA, is giving its 2 billion plus users an ultimatum: agree to share their personal data with the social network or delete their accounts.
— WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using the app
Facebook has really backed everyone into a corner with this one, but I suspect that amongst the millions of users, there won't be much of a revolt against this. There are other options to WhatsApp like Signal, but for most people, they just can't see beyond Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.