The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Pigeons roosting, etc.

A few of them have come home or are en route:

Finally, climate change has made your favorite hot sauce more expensive, and will continue to do so until pepper farmers adapt their vines to the new reality, or move them.

End of day reading list

The XPOTUS continuing to get indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election wasn't the only bit of authoritarian fuckery this week:

Finally, Michael Oher, the subject of the book and film The Blind Side, says the white family that he lived with not lied to him about adopting him, but also used their positions as his conservators to screw him out of compensation from the story of his own life. Which, if you remember, put the white folks up as the heroes. I wish I'd been more surprised and shocked, but no, it tracks.

Temperature 26, dewpoint 22

I just got back from walking Cassie for about half an hour, and I'm a bit sticky. The dog days of summer in Chicago tend to have high dewpoints hanging out for weeks on end, making today pretty typical.

Our sprint ends Tuesday and I still have 3 points left on the board, so I may not have time to give these more than a cursory read:

Finally, Andrew Sullivan adapts a column he wrote in August 2001 asking, "why can't Americans take a vacation?" One reason, I believe: all the time and money we spend in and on our cars.

Post-concert hangover

Every time I perform a major work like a Mozart opera, I'm tired and uncreative for about two days afterward. I often forget this. So yesterday and today are more for recharging than creating, which is fortunate as the story I'm working on at my day job just requires changing a label to a text box and adding a Save button. (I should have all that done in a couple of hours.)

I expect regular posting will resume tomorrow.

Incremental improvements

i just pushed a new build of Weather Now that corrects a problem no one else knew about in the way it managed time zones. The work took about 3 hours over several days this week, sneaking half an hour here and there between rehearsals, performances, and my day job.

I also worked on some code to interface with my home weather station. I've gotten it to download and parse reports from my Netatmo devices, and to refresh (and securely store) the API access token. I figure it'll take about 3-5 more hours to hook that code into the Azure Functions that download and store weather reports from other sources.

Today, however, I have one more performance of Die Zauberflöte. So...maybe next weekend?

Lunch links

I love it when something passes all the integration tests locally, then on the CI build, and then I discover that the code works perfectly well but not as I intended it. So while I'm waiting for yet another CI build to run, I'm making note of these:

Finally, WBEZ made me a shopping list of locally-produced hot sauces. First up: Cajun Queen—apparently available about a kilometer away.

Wait, it's August?

While I fight a slow laptop and its long build cycle (and how every UI change seems to require re-compiling), the first day of the last month of summer brought this to my inbox:

  • Who better to prosecute the XPOTUS than a guy who prosecuted other dictators and unsavory characters for the International Criminal Court? (In America, we don't go to The Hague; here, The Hague comes to you!)
  • After the evidence mounted that Hungary has issued hundreds of thousands of passports without adequate identity checks, the US has restricted Hungarian passport holders from the full benefits of ESTA that other Schengen-area citizens enjoy.
  • The US economy continues to exceed the expectations of people who have predicted a recession any day now. (Of course, every dead pool has a guaranteed winner eventually...)
  • After an unprecedented 31 consecutive days enduring temperatures over 43°C, Phoenix finally caught a break yesterday—when the temperature only hit 42°C.
  • Jake Meador explores why about 40 million fewer Americans go to church these days than in 1995.
  • Remember how we all thought Tesla made cars with amazing battery ranges? Turns out, Elon Musk can't do that right, either.
  • American car culture not only gives us unlivable environments, but also discourages the exploration that people in other countries (and I when I go there) do all the time.
  • We should all remember (and thank) USSR naval Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, who vetoed firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at an American destroyer during the Cuban Missile Crisis 71 years ago.

Finally, Chicago historian John Schmidt tells the story of criminal mastermind Adam Worth, who may have been Arthur Conan Doyle's inspiration for Professor Moriarty.

Stuff to read later

I'm still working on the feature I described in my last post. So some articles have stacked up for me to read:

And while I read these articles and write this code, outside my window the dewpoint has hit 25°C, making the 28°C air feel like it's 41°C. And poor Cassie only has sweat glands between her toes. We're going to delay her dinnertime walk a bit.

Oh, right, there's another sub-feature

I finished the main part of the feature I've been fighting since last week, only to discover that a sub-feature needs refactoring as well. Basically, before implementing this feature, the user would recalculate their model every time they changed its parameters. Calculation usually takes 5-10 seconds for most models, but (a) for some models it takes up to a minutes and (b) the calculation engine uses a first-in-first-out queue when calculating. But the calculation engine caches on a most-recently-used basis (meaning it flushes the least-recently-used calculations when it needs to free up space), so generally, it's just a quick call to retrieve the same results.

In actual user testing, we realized that users often want to go back to a previously-used set of parameters. The calculations for any set of parameters should always return the same results, so in theory this isn't a problem. But we only stored the URL of the most recent calculation for any model. So to get previous results, the users had to recalculate the model with the previous parameters.

I've spent the last 5 days refactoring all of that so that all calculation results are stored, even incomplete ones, and users can simply flip between them with a drop-down. Only, there's a second step, whereby the API takes the results and transforms them into a different view. That calculation is very quick—just a few milliseconds—but also subject to the queuing mechanism, and requiring a second call from our UI to our API, and then from our API to the calculation engine, after our API looks up the results of step 1.

All of this has pushed our sprint out a week, as well as made me very cross with myself for not anticipating this workflow a year ago when we built our current UI.

Anyway, it's past 4pm on a Friday and I will probably spend another 90 minutes on this tonight to get it to a point where I can finish it Monday morning without having to rethink the whole API. Good Omens II will just have to wait.

Nailed to the perch

This Twitter is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. Bereft of life, he rests in peace.

John Scalzi has my favorite take so far:

Twitter was its own specific thing, whereas as “X” is meant to be a number of different things, of which microblogging will be only one part, and, one suspects, the part Musk will care the least about. He’s really about finding ways to have people give him their money, either through subscriptions or taking a cut of transactions. It’s a fundamentally different beast, or at least, plans to be.

Twitter isn’t Twitter anymore. He’s destroying the value of the brand name. Even if at some point X fails (and it probably will), and Musk sells off the microblogging part for pennies on the dollar, even if the new owner calls it “Twitter” again, too much damage will have been done to the brand identity, and most of the power users (who aren’t incel bigots either by inclination or for pay) will either have moved on or will have done what I’m planning to do, ie., reduce their reliance on the service. Historically, social media sites get sold twice, first for a whole lot of money, and then for very little. When they’re sold for very little, it’s understood they’re damaged goods, unlikely to rise again to the prominence they had before. And in this case, the new buyer wouldn’t even get the value of the name.

To be clear, Musk’s microblogging service will persist, until it doesn’t, and people will use it, until they don’t. But whatever it is now, it’s not Twitter, and there’s no percentage in pretending it is. It was nice to have Twitter when we had it. But it’s gone. Now we get to find out what’s next.

Is Musk evil? Yeah, but mainly he's just a narcissistic failson. I mean, Eddie Lampert is evil and a narcissist, so he actually profited from killing Sears. Musk's evil comes more from his upbringing as an unrepentant beneficiary of Apartheid. (Yes, I'm linking to a partial debunking of Elon Musk Apartheid rumors.)

As someone said when Musk bought Twitter, I know a lot about software, so I'm staying away from Musk's cars and rockets.