Matthew Lang

A look at the different techniques used to make the lightsaber work on screen through the different Star Wars movies.

Enter the sequel trilogies, which would achieve the pinnacle of lightsaber effects by merging the various techniques from over the years. Like the prequels, the blades of the lightsabers on-screen would be added digitally, with the on-camera fights taking place with plastic prop stand-ins. Also like the original trilogy, the battles were still fought on actual sets as part of the Star Wars sequels’ commitment to trying to embrace more practical effects.

The Star Wars sequels finally got lightsabers right

Of course, you’re bound to hit on the right combination after numerous attempts. The sequel trilogy does get it right though with the lighting effect from the lightsabers.

It’s just a shame though, that we haven’t yet seen any other colour of lightsaber than the blue and red done with this effect.

Nighthawk sounds like a good Twitter client with its smart filters, close friends and a chronological timeline.

Standing on the platform waiting for the train this morning l, I opened up my Kindle app and started reading through another chapter of James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

In the chapter that I was reading James clarifies the difference in behaviour that leads to habits. There’s motion which is a behaviour that doesn’t yield a result and an action that does produce a result.

Outlining a handful of articles I want to write is motion but writing a single piece is an action. Actions are steps towards a defined outcome. Not only did I find this insightful for building habits but also how I categorise tasks.

Much of the coding work I am doing just now can be put in the action category. I implement a feature or a bug fix, and I deploy it. Deploying the change is the result of the action.

Then there’s the marketing work that I am preparing. I say preparing because that is all I seem to be doing right now, preparing. This is motion. While I am planning out something, I’m not getting any closer to the desired outcome.

The difference between the two is clear now, and it sheds new light on what I need to do to move forward.

I had one of those mornings on the train where I could have just kept writing and writing. Sadly, it came to my stop and I had stop and head to work. I hope I can pick up tonight where I left off this morning.

I’ve been using a similar form of this Gitmoji for a couple of weeks now. It’s good because you can identify commits a lot easier in your history.

Life reminders continue with Nicholas Bate.

I didn’t realise how amazing and creepy the autosuggestion is on the iOS keyboard. It managed to suggest most of my usual message for a WhatsApp group message.

I don’t tend to comment on political news, but I thought it would be a good chance to round up some of my own thoughts on the UK general election.

It was touted as being a night that will change the British politics in a huge way, but honestly, I don’t see anything that grand other than the big gains made by the Conservatives and the SNP. There’s been a mild shift of power, nothing more.

Brexit is happening

With a clear majority, the Conservatives will now see Brexit through. There will likely be months, probably years of negotiations ahead, but the first step in leaving the EU will be done by the end of January.

Nationalism is here

There’s a growing sense of nationalism between England and Scotland. Voters in both Scotland and England want what they think is best for their own country, however the results are wildy different.

With a huge landslide in Scotland, voters are still backing the SNP who will now push for another independance referendum. It’s clear that Scotland wants something different that Westminister isn’t offering.

In voting for the Conservatives, voters in England want Brexit done.

Labour leader woes

Labour needs a new leader. It’s hardly suprising that the Conservatives got back into power this morning with Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour party. He has been continually criticsed for his leadership, policies, and lack of stance on Brexit.

What’s ahead?

In the past I voted in the Scottish independance referendum to remain in the UK and in the EU referendum I voted to remain in the EU. If I had to do both votes tomorrow, I would still vote to remain in the EU, but my vote on Scottish independance may be changing. If I were to vote today on Scottish independance, then I would probably vote for it.

I don’t have all the facts about Scotland being independant, but it’s clear now that Scotland wants something very different to England. Going independant is a big step for Scotland, but perhaps it is time for a change.

Nicholas Bate reminds us to keep our lists under control.

Micro.blog has arrived as a recognised community. We have a Font Awesome icon!

A big day tomorrow for the UK. I’m not holding my breath for a positive outcome though.

I sat down last night and managed to get three-quarters of the way through a feature for a Rails app.

This morning I realised there was an easier way to delivering the feature. I trashed my original idea and wrote the full feature on the train in ten minutes.

This happens so many times in programming.

Honoured to have made Kurt’s 25 blogs list again.

Despite my ups and downs of blogging, it’s good to have made this list once again.

Pretty productive morning already.

Read a chapter from my book using the Kindle app and pushed a code change up to a Rails application using Textastic and Working Copy.

All from my iPhone.

We had a great time this morning having breakfast with Santa at The Bothy restaurant in Glasgow. A hearty breakfast was followed by a story with Santa, and then there was that all-important matter of seeing if you were on the naughty or nice list. Thankfully, Drew made the nice list!

The decision by GitHub to renew their contract with the Immigration and Customers Enforcement agency is still a significant point amongst developers. Despite several GitHub staff who have quit over the decision, it still looks like the company will not back down.

There is now an open letter and petition from many of the open-source contributors and maintainers who chose to host their projects on GitHub. In it, they are asking GitHub to cancel the contract and commit to a higher standard when it comes to making business decisions that have an ethical impact.

I think it’s excellent that organisations are being called into question about their business dealings. However, what happens if a company doesn’t change its position on an ethical stance.

If GitHub doesn’t cancel the contract, will we see a mass migration of projects away from GitHub? That’s an option. That is until the next source code hosting is called into question about a business deal.

Took a day off from work today, to well, do some work of my own. Pretty productive day.

With the help of Claire Barlow from the University of Cambridge and John Durrell, a specialist in superconductor engineering, The Verge’s Lewis Gordon goes through the components and materials that go into the Playstation 4 and go over their impact on the environment.

They start with the console’s top lid, which is made from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). This is, in fact, virgin plastic and isn’t made from already recycled plastic. From the lid alone, there is a huge cost in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced from only manufacturing the lid of the console alone.

Let’s hypothesize that the 511 grams of ABS spread throughout the machine are actually virgin plastic. How might it have been produced? This is where things get trippy. Like almost every form of plastic on the planet, ABS is made from petrochemicals that are derived from petroleum, the fossil fuel we commonly refer to as crude oil. The substance materialized over millions of years as fossilized organisms like zooplankton and algae were covered by stagnant water and further layers of these dead animals and plants. Try to imagine not only how slow that process is (geologists call this “deep time”) but also the near-instantaneous speed at which the oil was extracted from the earth. Now consider its carbon residue just sitting in the atmosphere, slowly helping make the planet hotter. As I stared at the plastic, these head-spinning thoughts flashed through my mind.

— The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4

Materials such as gold and tin are used on the circuit board of the console. While only a small amount of of these materials are used, the mining process means that vast amounts of water are needed to mine the gold as well as the use of chemicals to make the gold easier to mine. If you think your console only contains a small amount of these materials, then consider the fact that Sony has sold over 100 millions units of the PS4 since it’s launch. Now you start to realize just how much goes into mining the gold for these consoles.

Low-cost thinking extends to the limited use of more expensive metals. Occasional pieces of gold materialize on the main circuit board where various components are held in place by a tin-based solder. When it comes to the open pit and hard rock mining, the extraction methods responsible for some of the world’s gold (as well as the copper and neodymium found in the machine), there’s the actual blowing up of the earth. But enormous quantities of water are also required for mineral processing, dust suppression, slurry pipelines (to transport minerals in remote areas), and, last but by no means least, employees' needs. Another extraction process called cyanide leaching sprays the toxic chemical over mined ore to dissolve the gold, thereby making it easier to extract. This comes with its own ecological and health risks if the cyanide leaks into the local area. Each method is grim for the environment where metals are often scattered diffusely throughout the rock.

— The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4

Finally, there’s the lithium-ion battery in the console’s controllers. It too has a damaging impact on the environment.

The PlayStation 4’s 8.9 billion kilogram carbon footprint leaves out other environmental impacts like pollutants that don’t end up in our carbon-soaked atmosphere. Take the controller’s lithium-ion battery, the same kind of chargeable technology powering electric cars. Lithium is produced by drilling holes into salt flats — usually found in massive crater-like lakes — and pumping brine to the surface. The important bit, lithium carbonate, is subsequently extracted through a chemical process. In recent years, pollution from the extraction process has led to the death of animals and crops, severely impacting local communities in countries like Argentina and China. The lithium that makes our controllers wireless is just another material that scars not only the landscape but the lives of those who call it home.

— The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4

This piece by Lewis Gordon really hits home the cost of technology on the environment. The manufacturing impact of technology devices isn’t going to change overnight. With such a huge market, I wonder if it would take pressure from consumers to make any kind of difference. I certainly would consider other environmentally friendly options if they become available.

As for running costs, we have two PS4s at home. I play for a few hours a week, and my eldest son probably plays for longer, but my wife and I encourage him to take breaks. We have a smart meter at home where we can monitor just how much energy we are using, and we always try to reduce our demand for energy, but it’s not easy. Especially during the darker months of the year where we don’t really go out that often.

Can we ever get to a point where we can balance the demands for technology so that they don’t impact on the environment?

The book reading continues this month with Conn Iggulden’s Shiang: Empire of Salt (book 2) and Jame Clear’s Atomic Habits. I’ll also read A Christmas Carol just before Christmas, like I always do.

Curtis McHale has some words of wisdom when it comes to deciding to work towards something more than just a 9 to 5 job.

The things we want are hard, we may fail.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother trying.

— Good Things Are Hard and Have High Failure Rates, We Should Still Try

I enjoyed working for myself. In faact I loved working for myself. But it came with a risk. The risk was that I focused on long term contracts with fewer clients, so while the long term looked good, I found it difficult to maintain that run of long term client work. Eventually I found myself unable to sustain the work and I started looking for full-time work.

Now, two years later, I’m building a product on the side for a market that I have some knowledge of. There’s no guarantee that my product will be a success though.

Every week I spend a half hour going through some RSS feeds and a Twitter list of organisations that are the target market for my product and a Twitter list of competitors. The market is healthy and there’s plenty of worldwide opportunities for my product, but there are times when I doubt myself and I think the product will fail to take off.

It usually lasts for a couple of days and then I find myself shaking off the thoughts of risk and I through myself into the backlog of work I have to do for the product.

I have to at least give it a try.

Grammarly for iOS. One of those great apps that I use daily but rarely give it a second glance.

It’s a question posed by the tech team behind the seach engine Cliqz. Sure, they might have a vested interest in seeing more traffic going to their own search engine, but I think they’re onto something.

We need more search engines.

Google has a huge share of the search market but it has hardly lived up to it’s long running ethos of don’t be evil. What started as a great search engine with a range of good products around it, has turned into an ad platform that hoovers up data on every Google service you use.

I’m starting to wonder though if it’s not so much more generalist search engines we need, but more specialist search engines instead.

We’re at the point where we have billions of web pages, but depending on the search we want to do, even filtering through the search results can be difficult. We will always need generalist search engines, but what about search engines that focus on a particular type of search or information?

We already have a number of these specialist search engines. I’ve used job search engines over the last few month to look for specific roles in the contract market. I’ve had some success with my results on these specialist search engines but not much more than using a generalist search engine like DuckDuckgo. That’s only one example though.

There has to be more examples and matching specialist search engines to match them. And if they don’t exist, why can’t we build them?

I’m really impressed with Fathom’s website and analytics app. The landing page to sign up to analytics dashboard is one of the most fluent and easy to do sign up processes I’ve ever had to do.

I’m looking for a domain name for a junior golf event. The name is quite long so I’m using just the initials of the event name for the domain name. My first choice of the typical .org and .net TLDs has already been taken.

I’m considering using the .golf TLD. It’s more expensive but it has the benefit of standing out a bit more. But then I could go with .org.uk and save some money.

Decisions, decisions.

A favourite saying of mine is Phil Karlton’s quote about hard things to do in computer science.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

— Phil Karlton

I can’t say that cache invalidation has given me major issues in the past but naming things has always been a challenge. If I was to take this beyond the realms of programming though, I would say that naming anything is a difficult thing to do.

My portfolio of web applications include DailyMuse, Markcase and WriteAbout. I find it hard to get away from the compound naming theme. It’s just a way of naming things that I stick with. It’s easy to do, but it feels like it lacks imagination. I would love to come up wth alternatives that don’t follow this convention but everything I have come up with didn’t feel like a good fit.

The other thing I don’t like about compounded product names is deciding whether to upper-case the second word or leave it as lower-case. GitHub’s branding is clear that they favour upper-casing the second word, but there are examples of other brand names that are made of two words that just user a lower-case word for the second word. Take Feedbin for example.

For my bookmarking service, Markcase, I choose to use the lower-cased form instead of MarkCase, and I have to say I prefer it.

I’m working on something that is bigger than anything I’ve worked on in the past. I’d like it to become my full-time gig eventually so it’s quite important to get the naming of it right. I do have a name for it, but I’m torn between whether to use the upper-case form or the lower-case for.

I am edging towards the lower-case form. It reads easier and looks better in the different styles that I have for it.

I find all aspects of branding and marketing quite a challenge. I’m creative to an extent, but I’m definitely not well-versed enough to launch a huge marketing campaign. To get my product off the ground though, I’m taking little steps in executing it and learning as I go. I might not always get it right to begin with, but adapting the product and the marketing as I go, is better than not doing anything at all.