A blog
I recently debugged a failing test where the issue itself was trivial, but the investigation of the bug was surprisingly gnarly because inspecting the bug using a debugger changed its behavior 1 . What? I've created a reproduction of the issue below, but the actual class and methods have been modified, so don't get hung up on the exact semantics of the class. The gist of it is that we have a Rails…
Rails is a fantastic tool for building web applications, with a large set of conventions and "batteries-included" libraries guiding the development. One area where Rails does not have great support though is for hosting static Markdown pages along with the rest of the application. Luckily, it's easy to hook into Rails' rendering flow to build out the functionality ourselves. If you want to try…
As you are, we once were. As we are, you will be. Dust —yes— but so much more: The breath you held, though you wanted to speak— confess—scream—profess— why didn't you? is with us now. From your lips: a gift, permeating to trees, who never once knew your kindness, in time. The blood that trickled through your veins, but rarely ran red, is with us now. Percolating, then coarsing, roaring like it…
I have a few useful git one-liners that I reach for relatively often. I don't have them written down anywhere, but just search for them in my shell history (using the wonderful McFly ) whenever I need them. Until now! List the number of commits to a repo by day ❯ git log --date =short --pretty =format:% ad | sort | uniq -c 8 2023-01-07 2 2023-01-09 1 2023-01-10 2 2023-01-12 4 2023-01-13 Create a…
The question that I usually get asked the most about going vegan along with "What food do you miss the most?" (cheese!) and "Is is it hard?" (yes) is "What made you decide to go vegan?" It's a question I have struggled to find a pithy answer to, but it is a fair question, and of a similar ilk as questions I am sure I have asked to others with different habits than mine. My usual response is that…
My previous post on the climate-impact on cryptocurrencies garnered some attention on reddit and Hacker News , and I had originally planned a follow-up to address some of the criticisms I received in those comments. I never finalized the article 1 , but it has been sitting in my drafts long enough now that I decided to post the outline of it anyway 2 . The title and structure of this post is a…
I came across a pretty astounding article the other day. The author of the article conducted a survey, asking a panel of 2,000 Americans familiar with cryptocurrency what impact they believe Bitcoin has on the environment and climate change. The results were as follows: 6% said It is a significant threat to the environment and climate change. 26% said It has a slight impact on the environment and…
If you're on this page, it might be because you received an email I sent that had a file attached with the extension .asc . The file is a cryptographic signature, which you can use to verify that the email is actually sent from me, and that no one has tampered with or altered any of the other attachments to the email. By default, I GPG sign all emails that I send which contain other attachments.…
Git allows you to sign commits using a GPG key, as a way to prove that a commit that looks like it was made by you was in fact made by you. Perusers of the git history can then verify the signature by running git log --show-signature . On Github, it's even easier to verify, as Github will add a green "Verified" stamp next to the commit, giving a quick visual indication that the signature came from…
Over the last few weeks, I've fallen down the GnuPG rabbit-hole. GnuPG , short for "the Gnu Privacy Guard" (long for "GPG"), is a tool for asymmetric encryption, meaning that you can use it to create messages that only a specific recipient is able to read. More concretely, the system relies on private and public keys, where you can use someone's public key to encrypt a message that can only be…
Lately, I've been trying to disconnect from technology in my spare time (more on that soon), and I've found myself reading more as a consequence. One of my favorite literary discoveries of the year is Mary Oliver , the late, great American poet. Oliver's poetry is hauntingly beautiful, but also very accessible for poetry novices such as myself. A few weeks ago, I took a library copy of Oliver's…
Hi, and welcome to my website. Yesterday I received an email from my domain provider that this domain will auto-renew in a week, meaning that I've been sitting on this domain without publishing something for close to a year - time to change that! In the future, I will post some thoughts here about various things that interest me, including finance, the attention economy, etymology and technology.…