1. No matter how sunny it is or how dry the streets are, 15ºC in February means a windy, windy bike ride. It’s cold somewhere and the warm air is hurrying to get there. Still, awesome to be back outside.
2. The Swiss are not nearly as prone to nationalism as the French. This, despite the obvious fact that Switzerland chose to blow a hole in the middle of the EU with their absence while France joined a union with its age-old enemies Germany, Spain and England. The French have a real problem with... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

This is an old post that I never finished when I released earthli WebCore 3.5 almost a year ago. The design analysis is still pretty relevant, as are the conclusions about flexbox.

We released version 3.4 of the earthli WebCore over a year ago, in June 2013. That release introduced a new overall style that was both looked more modern and also conformed to recent design/development standards. See that article for more information about what would turn out to have been stage one of two stages of... [More]

At Encodo, we’ve got a relatively long history with Git. We’ve been using it exclusively for our internal source control since 2010.[1]

Git Workflows

When we started with Git at Encodo, we were quite cautious. We didn’t change what had already worked for us with Perforce.[2] That is: all developers checked in to a central repository on a mainline or release branch. We usually worked with the mainline and never used personal or feature branches.

Realizing the limitation of this system, we next... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

1. Stalker (1979) — 9/10
2. Winter Soldier (1972) — 9/10
3. Je ne suis pas Charlie (2015) — 9/10
4. Hard to be a God (2013) — 8/10
5. Betty Blue (1986) — 7/10
6. Dallas Buyer’s Club (2014) — 7/10
7. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) — 8/10
8. Ant-Man (2015) — 6/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each... [More]

1. Trophy Kids (2013) — 6/10
2. Dark Shadows (2012) — 4/10
3. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) — 8/10
4. Jessica Jones (2015) — 9/10
5. Mr. Robot (2015) — 9/10
6. The Sting (1973) — 9/10
7. Blindness (2008) — 7/10
8. Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014) — 7/10
9. Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983) — 6/10
10. Return to Algiers (2000) — 5/10
11. Ted 2 (2015) — 5/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb... [More]

1. L’Arcano Incantatore (1996) — 7/10
2. Tom Segura: Mostly Stories (2016) — 7/10
3. Lilya 4-Ever (2002) — 9/10
4. Taxidermia (2006) — 8/10
5. The Tenant (1976) — 7/10
6. Straw Dogs (1971) — 5/10
7. Du rififi chez les hommes (1955) — 8/10
8. Shame (2011) — 7/10
9. Vier Minuten (2006) — 7/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve... [More]

I find James Howard Kunstler to be worth reading more often than not. He writes engagingly and his insight into the devolution of capitalist society can be quite valuable, But he’s been more and more prone to going off the rails when he discusses issues of race. It’s usually not out-and-out racism; there’s a kernel of an idea that’s worth discussing, but usually not the way he’s discussing it. His phrasing betrays a tone-deafness that underlies much of his opinion in these areas.

For example,... [More]

1. Men Behind the Sun (1988) — 3/10
2. Come and See (Idi i Smotri) (1985) — 9/10
3. Place Beyond the Pines (2015) — 5/10
4. Lovelace (2013) — 7/10
5. Bad Lieutenant (1992) — 7/10
6. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2009) — 8/10
7. The Holy Mountain (1973) — 7/10
8. Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989) — 6/10
9. House of Games (1987) — 6/10
10. Repulsion (1965) — 7/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and... [More]

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.

Dead Calm (1989) — 5/10

Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill star as couple who’ve lost their child in a car crash that... [More]

I started using Netflix in Switzerland about 5 months ago. I initially made these notes about 2 months after I started using the Samsung TV App. In the last three months, while Netflix has made updates to their app from time to time, the core usability and browsability issues have not changed.

Browsing

Permanent billboard

The browser doesn’t make efficient use of screen space. The top half of the screen is always reserved for a billboard for the currently selected item. This choice makes... [More]

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) — 6/10

Willem Dafoe is Jesus, Barbara Hershey Mary Magdalene and Harvey... [More]

The article Learn you Func Prog on five minute quick! by Verity Stob (The Register) provides a typically twisted and unhelpful overview of the state of functional programming in this 21st-century renaissance—heralded decades ago by Lisp programmers. It includes an honest overview of the major players, including Scala, for which the “pro” and “con” are the same (a “[c]lose relationship with Java […]”) and ending with JavaScript, for which the “pro” is “It’s what you’ll end up using.”

The discussion continues with rules:... [More]

In part I of this series, we discussed some core concepts of profiling. In that article, we not only discussed the problem at hand, but also how to think about not only fixing performance problems, but reducing the likelihood that they get out of hand in the first place.

In this second part, we’ll go into detail and try to fix the problem.

Reëvaluating the Requirements

Since we have new requirements for an existing component, it’s time to reconsider the requirements for all stakeholders. In... [More]

An oft-quoted bit of software-development sagacity is

As is so often the case with quotes—especially those on the Internet[1]—this one has a slightly different meaning in context. The snippet above invites developers to overlook the word “premature” and interpret the received wisdom as “you don’t ever need to optimize.”

Instead, Knuth’s full quote actually tells you how much of your code is likely to be affected by performance issues that... [More]

I haven’t read much about Ammon Bundy and his gang’s standoff in Oregon. I’ve read so little about it that I had to look up where it was actually happening (other than knowing it was “somewhere in the U.S.”). So it’s some Arizona ranchers occupying a federal building in Oregon. This is definitely a step up from the domestic terrorism of the Unabomber or Timothy McVeigh because at least fewer people are being killed. Still, armed men have occupied federal property and are demanding the release... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

Quino 2 is finally ready and will go out the door with a 2.1 rather than a 2.0 version number. The reason being that we released 2.0 internally and tested the hell out of it. 2.1 is the result of that testing. It includes a lot of bug fixes as well as API tweaks to make things easier for developers.

• Made... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

In the beta1 and beta2 release notes, we read about changes to configuration, dependency reduction, the data driver architecture, DDL commands, security and access control in web applications and a new code-generation format.

In 2.0 final—which was actually released internally on November 13th, 2015 (a... [More]

If you’re like us at Encodo, you moved to SSDs years ago…and never looked back. However, SSDs are generally smaller because the price (still) ramps up quickly as you increase size. We’ve almost standardized on 512GB, but some of us still have 256GB drives.

Unfortunately, knowing that we all have giant hard drives started a trend among manufacturers to just install everything, just in case you might need it. This practice didn’t really cause problems when we were still using by-then... [More]

1. Police Story 3: Supercop (1996) — 6/10
2. Dieter Nuhr – Ich bin’s Nuhr (2005) — 6/10
3. R100 (2013) — 6/10
4. Chinatown (1974) — 8/10
5. Lawless (2012) — 8/10
6. Apocalypto (2006) — 7/10
7. Stalag 17 (1953) — 6/10
8. Memento (2000) — 10/10
9. The Wind Rises (2013) — 8/10
10. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) — 10/10
11. El Topo (1970) — 4/10
12. Zack Galifianakis: Live at the Purple Onion (2006) — 7/10
13. Joy Ride (2001) — 5/10
14. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) — 6/10... [More]

A friend of mine wrote a long message on Facebook about how censoring the photo below was the exactly the wrong reaction. he expressed concern that his young daughter would grow up in a humorless, intolerant world.

The worst thing to happen anywhere ever

A friend of his wrote that they should “agree to disagree” on the impact that this picture has. I answered with the following comment (lightly edited to change tenses, pronouns and given names):

My first response

I understand that you’ve used a lot of words to say that you’re... [More]