What does it mean to have respect for someone? To demand respect? To object that someone is not being respectful towards you? Unfortunately, this is another case of multiple meanings. Respect can be: Mutual. Treating others with dignity, trying to understand their viewpoint even when you disagree. Earned. People see how you act, and decide how to treat you in response. Hierarchical. Obedience,…
You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although “synergistically” had probably been a whore from the start. — Terry Pratchett, Going Postal There’s an art to speaking without meaning. To talking for minutes at a time, without ever communicating a position. Giving the…
There are two popular definitions of strength, of what it means to be a strong person. Unfortunately, to someone who values one of these definitions, someone who values the other is probably going to look weak. When you see someone described as “showing strength” or “being strong”, consider that this says much about the person saying it and what they value, and relatively little about some…
I’m perplexed by one particular piece of user interaction design: the subscribe-to-my-newsletter popup. Not that it exists, but rather the timing with which people choose to deploy it. Substack is the worst example here, because they show it pretty much as soon as you start scrolling. This is (a) deliberately interrupting me in the middle of a task, so my motivation is to just close the box and…
LLM powered chatbots are pretty big, these days. There’s constant speculation about the big LLM companies putting these chatbots into devices that’ll just let you talk out loud to them, and they’ll chat back to you and do your bidding. Recreating “Her”, as Sam Altman unsubtly yearns to do. I hate it. Putting aside any qualms one might have about the underlying technology, of which I have a few,…
Forget the myths the media has created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand. – All The President’s Men (1976)
The only time I’ve ever been pulled over by the police was when I was driving from California to Missouri back in my mid 20s. It was a long, straight freeway in the middle of Kansas, and I was definitely speeding. The police officer wrote me a ticket, and then told me that it could go away without any moving-violation associated with my license if I mailed a check to the “Sherrif’s benevolent…
There’s been a lot of drama with WordPress lately, and the way Matt has been behaving has left me less than confident about having this blog using WordPress. Particularly not with automatic updates turned on. As such, I decided to move this back to Jekyll. My original reason for returning to WordPress was that the workflow for updating jekyll was much less user-friendly. But these days,…
The Battle.net client has a very irritating bug that only really affects people who’re actively developing World of Warcraft addons on Windows: it can get stuck checking whether the game client needs to be updated, stopping you from launching the game. If you’ve ever seen it stick on “Updating” with its status message just saying “Initializing…” for minutes at a time, followed by it asking for you…
Last year, after almost a decade of using them as my host, WebFaction started shutting down. They’d been sold to GoDaddy back in 2018 and had mysteriously stopped working on any feature-development about then, so it wasn’t a huge surprise. So, I bit the bullet, and switched to Linode . This isn’t entirely something I’d recommend to everyone who’s used to using a service like WebFaction.…
I wrote about addon-packaging a year ago , mostly in the context of wanting to package addons for Classic. Since then, the environment has shifted a bit due to Overwolf buying Curse , and also GitHub Actions being released. There’s no particular reason to think Overwolf will be any worse a steward of Curse and its addon-tooling than Twitch was, but controlling one’s own packaging and thus being…
UPDATE: there’s a sequel to this post, which tells you how to do this with GitHub Actions instead . If you’re writing an addon which needs to work in just the retail version of WoW, or just in Classic, this post doesn’t really apply to you. But if you want to maintain versions of your addon that work in both environments, you may want some tooling around that. Or you might just want to handle your…
WoW Classic is launching in two days time, and it’s stirring up some memories. Possibly tinted by a delightful haze of nostalgia. The vanilla WoW memory that most jumps to my mind these days is the first time I really fell off the rails of playing cautiously. I was playing with my spouse, and we were questing through Stranglethorn Jungle; I as a Warlock and them as a Priest. I did not yet…
I like WebFaction , and have been using them for years now, but I’m the first to admit they’re a bit less… friendly… in some regards than many hosts. I referenced a few of these unfriendly matters back when I mentioned switching to them , with an offhand “so I solved that”. But I’ve decided to go into a little more detail now on one of these issues – common site redirections. Specifically, adding…
I have some fairly popular open source packages up on GitHub. Happily, I get people submitting pull requests, adding features or fixing bugs. It’s great when this happens, because people are doing work that I don’t want to do / haven’t gotten to yet / didn’t think of. …but I’m pretty bad at responding to these. They tend to languish for a while before I get to them. There’s a decent number which…