Musings about life and code
I had a few free hours recently and decided to have a go at a long-simmering idea: To improve how I manage multiple email accounts. As someone who struggles mightily to cope with distractions (I have the attention span of a gnat), I was hoping to consolidate several separate interfaces into one, simpler, less distracting, more focused client.Sadly, I wasn't quite successful -- my work emails…
One huge and welcome change in the last decade or so for Web development is that secure connections are ubiquitous. Free certificates are available and most hosting providers make it very easy to obtain, use and renew the certificates automatically. This site, for example, runs on Amazon Web Services and enabling https took not much more effort than ticking a few checkboxes.Browsers, like Chrome,…
My last post was my first in a long time and I'd forgotten how hard they are to write. After a couple of days, I got sick of looking at it and just chopped out a whole bunch of detail and posted it. Here's a quick follow-up with some bits I left out.Zigbee vs Z-Wave
Almost three years ago, deep in the pandemic, my kids got me my first Raspberry Pi. That started me on an adventure with Home Assistant, mostly because it was one of the first search results for "what to do with a Raspberry Pi."I'm still going, and learned much since then, so it is time for a quick update.
For the past six weeks or so I've been playing around with home automation. It's a rather large and complex subject and I've only just started, but thought it might be worth writing up what I've found so far.The adventure started when the kids gave me a new Raspberry Pi for my birthday near the beginning of May. I installed Home Assistant on it and, a bit later, Node Red. Then, over the next few…
A year ago, I was told to vacate the office and start working from home. I expected it to last several weeks or a few months, at most. I also expected it to be fun. Working from home is fun. Conducting every meeting, every discussion, every personal interaction of any kind, for months on end, through the virtual keyhole that is Zoom is a bit less so.I've adapted surprisingly well, in some…
I've been volunteering for a couple of years with the Jesuit Refugee Service, which aims to support refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. I'm a volunteer "social visitor." Before the lockdown, that meant regularly travelling out to the Immigration Detention Centres near Heathrow, Europe's largest. (There are two centres, next to each other, called Harmondsworth and Colnbrook.)Several hundred…
I'm fortunate to work for a team that gives its developers time to play -- a day, every other week, that we can use to learn about or try something new. Over the years, a number of useful stuff has come out of those days. Many of them are small utilities that developers have created for themselves -- for example, to automate a task. We've gathered quite an eclectic collection of these, written in…
The extended family members are getting together again tonight, on the usual unwieldy, international Zoom conference with too many people on it. In an effort to make it less cacophonous, we're each being asked to come up with something to share -- a piece of music, a poem, or whatever -- that we liked. We'll each get three minutes.I like the idea, so I thought I'd write my thoughts on my "thing"…
At my work, we are advocates of pair programming. From an organisational perspective, the practice has several advantages. We're often more productive working with someone else -- we keep each other on task and get stuck less often and for shorter periods of time. More importantly, the resulting code is generally better and more robust, in my experience, especially when combined with test- or…
It's now been a few weeks since many of us in the U.K. have gone into lockdown. We're spending a lot more time at home and our social calendar has suddenly freed up, completely, for the foreseeable future. So why are we so tired?When we first moved to the U.K. in 1998 from the Boston, Massachusetts area, my very smart Aunt Kathleen gave my wife and I an abbreviated version of the course she gave…
I took a few minutes last night to add a small feature to Emacs, saving me from some repetitive steps when I'm starting a blog post (like this one). It was a tiny bit of code and nothing exceptional in itself, but it reminded me of why I choose to use an editor that's nearly as old as I am. It is designed for this kind of organic, incremental growth.I often find it difficult to explain to my…
I'm trying to get one of the charities I work with on Zoom before our next scheduled meeting on Monday. This is at least the third time now that I've gone through the pain of getting a new group of people on the app, and it's a very painful process. Every. Single. Time.What kind of problems, you ask? Let me count the ways.
Here's a game to while away some of those long evenings in lockdown: Predict how the pandemic will change the world. What do you hope, or fear, will be different about our everyday life in a year or two?It's likely that very little will change. We're pretty good at getting used to anything and carrying on as before. Eventually, a vaccine, wide-spread immunity or an effective treatment will…
On this site, I want URLs like https://my-site.com/my-page/ instead of https://my-site.com/my-page.html. It's a subtle difference, but the addresses just look a bit neater, a bit more professional, less late-1990s without a filename at the end.Cryogen, which I use to generate this site, can do this and does this by default. I had been overriding this behaviour because it wasn't working with…
Reason #1: My immediate family (my kids, my sisters and my parents) have been using videoconferencing to keep in contact regularly. I think I've seen some of my kids more often because of this. A new tool we're using is Zoom. It allows several of us to have a virtual get-together. I use Zoom at work, which is where I first heard of it, but hadn't realised how useful the free version is. The free…
If I had to put a word on what I'm feeling about all of this, it would be "grief." In a matter of a few short weeks, just about everything we were looking forward to is gone. Holidays, family get-togethers, celebrations -- all put on hold, as everything we once thought stable becomes uncertain. So many people will lose their jobs, their businesses, and even their lives.I see people going through…
As of today, I've joined the hordes told to work from home, for an indefinite and probably lengthy period. It felt weird walking out of the office this evening. I may not see my colleagues in person again for weeks or months, people I've spent the bulk of my waking hours with for the last four years.We are living through an extraordinary, historic time. This compares with 9/11 in momentousness,…
As described in my previous post, I wanted to automate publishing to this site via Github Actions. As a Jenkins user at work, I expected this to take some time, requiring reading reams of documentation and writing fiddly scripts that don't work the first 56 times you try them.
I've had this domain for a few years, letting Amazon's Route 53 auto-renew it each year without actually doing anything with it. I've made a few starts, but hubris would always get the better of me. I'd start writing something overly complicated like, say, a single-page app in React (or whatever the framework du jour was at the time). I kept rediscovering the obvious: I'm too busy, and I'm rubbish…
This is my own web site. There's not much here yet. I'm hoping to document how I get this online.The title comes from a prayer I read once. In any given moment, there is one thing necessary for us to do that will brighten the world. We don't need to solve the bigger picture, we just need leave the world and the people around us a little better off, more compassionate, kinder.