I announced notes.billmill.org more than a year ago , but at the time I was still keeping this blog up to date with different content. At this point, substantially all my activity has been moved there and I'm not doing much with this blog and root domain. Notes has its own feed , so if you're interested in reading what I write, you should add it to your feed reader!
In about 24 hours, my dog, Beckett Longdog Woodmill, will go to sleep for the last time. 16 years ago, when she was still a puppy who looked like this, she saved my life from a house fire . I wish I had taken more pictures of her back then, but it wasn't as easy as it is today. As soon as I moved in for the first time with my then-girlfriend, now wife, we got a dog. She was a rescue dog from…
I used to fear and loathe writing bash scripts, but nowadays I enjoy the process. Let's write a bash script . The Prerequisites The #1 thing that has made me comfortable writing bash scripts is shellcheck . Despite being written in haskell (jokes) it's the most useful linter, by far, that I have ever used. Before I had shellcheck, I lacked confidence when writing bash scripts. With the…
The NBA API wrapper by Swar Patel, Randy Forbes et al, is a really nice wrapper around the nba.com API that seems to be semi-officially tolerated by the NBA I love the TIGER_STYLE document from the tigerbeetle database, which lays out their style and the axioms they've chosen to abide by. More projects ought to lay out their stances as clearly as this, and I've tried to start doing so in…
I learned a bit about writing C this weekend Last year Richard Feldman gave a very neat talk at Strange Loop about using reference counting to find palces where a compiler for an immutable language can silently perform mutation for performance gains. Nikolay Dubina has collected a "handy list of well-known and lesser -known tools for Go projects" Raghu R wrote this tutorial for the k language,…
Simon Willison lists some core engineering practices I wrote a little tool for turning youtube videos into gifs with ffmpeg and yt-dlp . Short twitter thread about it here Casey Muratori makes the case that turns are better than radians I've been considering giving the helix editor a serious try, but it's hard to even consider giving up my vim familiarity Music I listened to Hot Rats a…
The Wasmtime wasm runtime hit version 1.0 . I'm interested in the possibilities this offers for sandboxed and portable applications in a variety of languages. Ceej Silverio's short thread about how difficult it is to add engineers at the start of a project matched thoughts I've been having on the topic lately Ben Johnson released LiteFS , a system that distributes SQLite writes to a…
This week Uber got owned , which prompted a lot of thinking about authentication and authorization Xe Iaso saw that and made the case that push 2fa is considered harmful . I think this is where corporations are going, but not sure it's ready yet for wide distribution. (And I'm ready for the "considered harmful" phrasing to be considered harmful...) Phil Eaton's go-sqlite3-stdlib is…
http://http://http://@http://http://?http://#http:// is a legitimate URL I figured out how to build sqlite fiddle with a sqlite extension and wrote up notes alongside code. I learned a lot about compiling C into WASM along the way, and SQLite remains a joy to work with - the aggregate C file is such a great idea. Along with help from a sql.js developer, I added custom aggregate function support to…
Stable Diffusion There was a lot of noise around the open source Stable Diffusion image generation model this week. For kicks, I followed some instructions from the web to install it on my Macbook, but had trouble getting it to work well. I'm very sympathetic to views like these, that Dall-E (and other image generation tools) unfairly abuse the work of human creators for profit: Early days,…