August 2019 Notes

Inspired by yenzie to add a point estimate UDA to my Taskwarrior tasks.

Yeah, I know. I need to add a post to the series. I will. You can see I have some catching up to do.

There’s been way too much “it just works (more or less)” in my desktop life lately, so I started using the awesomewm tiling window manager.

Disappointingly, it works just fine.

Still, good chance to learn enough Lua to customize my setup. Looks like I’ll be revisiting Kitty terminal and a few other tools that have been on the task list for a while.

1. write a site weight script that prints a report to the console
2. make the script write the report to a file, and include the file in /now. Now site building looks like:
   1. build the site
   2. weigh the site
   3. build the site and include the new report
   4. upload!
3. (today) make the script write the info as JSON instead
4. throw in some vue.js to fetch the JSON and reproduce the original report format almost exactly.
5. profit?

But hey at least I don’t need to rebuild the site after weighing it. And when free time next allows I’ll learn a little more Vue.js and make the report prettier.

Seattle’s homeless sweeps are contentious to say the least.

From The Seattle Times, on July 9th:

Seattle removed 75% more homeless encampments in the first four months of this year than during the same period in 2018, even with this February’s record snowstorm slowing clean-ups.

John Curley pointed out the NIMBY — “Not In My Backyard” — aspect:

What they’re doing is they’re trying to push them out of view. So they’re sending them back behind railroad tracks, back behind buildings, back away from the general view.

Mostly I’m curious who’d be so offended by this wall art that they’d remove part of its message.

John Siracusa, on the Diving for Perl episode of the Command Line Heroes podcast:

My hope for Perl 5 is that people don’t dismiss it, because despite all the other more popular languages, there are still problems today to which Perl 5 is the best solution. Very often those are sort of glue type problems. If you find yourself ever writing a shell script, and you’re like, “Well, I’m not going to use my ‘real programming language’ for this.” Whether it’s Python, or Ruby, or whatever. But a shell script can let me connect together a bunch of stuff. Perl is a better tool for that job. It is easier to write a correct Perl script than it is to write a correct shell script.

Having written a few glue tasks with GNU Coreutils and some shell scripts, I agree with that point. Even just glueing together Coreutils can be easier with Perl.

And Perl 6:

That’s the great thing about open source, and programming languages. No one’s going to make you stop. You can just keep working on Perl 6 the same way you have been.

I won’t say whether I installed a fresh build of Rakudo and played around with Perl 6 after listening to the podcast, but — I installed a fresh build of Rakudo and played around with Perl 6 after listening to this episode.

I’m done with zombie movies.

watches trailer

ok I’m not quite done.

Reminds me of Shaun of the Dead. Not in any specific notes, just the slapstick gore and “what sort of hero could a (slacker, kindergarden teacher) be?” angle.