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It's safe to say that The Wheel of Time TV series, streaming on Amazon Prime, has divided fans of the source material, namely Robert Jordan's enormous, sprawling, epic book series of the same name, spanning 14 door-stopping volumes published over a period of 24 years (1989-2013).

I would not call myself a great connoisseur of fantasy, but I do know something about these particular books, having been introduced to them as a teenager by a high school friend in the early nineties. I have warm memories of the series, and less warm memories of the tense, multi-year waits in between installments.

I recently finished watching Bodies on Netflix and the concept of free will comes up a fair bit given that the show involves a predestination paradox. One of the characters voices the opinion that, in his words, "free will is an illusion" because human choices are ultimately the result of physics and biology. Humans choices, in other words, are predetermined, and that means that the free will doesn't exist.

The character in question is acting as a mouthpiece for the notion of incompatibilism, the idea that free will and determinism are mutually exclusive concepts. It's the most common way that the free will debate is framed. If you accept the idea of incompatibilism, then you can either believe in determinism (usually considered the rational choice) or you can believe in free will (usually considered the irrational or emotional choice). But you can't believe in both. The character, being a scientist, believes in determinism, hence his assertion that free will is an illusion.

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with productivity systems. I usually don't bother with them but on those infrequent occasions when my life gets a bit hectic, I will sometimes make use of one. When that happens I always fall back to David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD). I read his book a long time ago and, at the time, found myself impressed.

The fundamental feature of the system is that it downplays the classic, detailed, prioritized to-do list in favour of the so-called next action list. When considering a particular goal, instead of allowing yourself to become overwhelmed with all the myriad things you know you need to do in service of that goal, you instead focus only on the very next thing you can do to move closer to your goal. The end result is an unsorted list of things you can do "in the moment", across all the various goals in your life at the moment.

My blog is 16 years old. I've rotated through several blogging engines in that time (Bloxsom, YAWT 1.0/2.0, Pelican and finally Eleventy) but they all have one thing in common: they all process blog entries stored as plain text files.

The fact that all my blog entries are stored as plain text files on my computer is, I believe, one of the main reasons my blog has lasted this long. Text files are trivial to back up. Text files don't really crash and rarely get corrupted. Text files are readable and writable on any computer manufactured since the 1980's - hell, the 1960's if I let punch cards into this conversation. When you contrast this simple durability with, for example, a MySQL data store (used by several blogging engines, including one of the most popular ones, WordPress), with all of its attendant version compatibility and data corruption issues, the superiority of plain text becomes undeniable if you're trying to write something that lasts.

I recently saw Umberto Eco: A Library of the World, a documentary about Umberto Eco's extensive book collection. At first blush this doesn't sound like the sort of topic that would make for an interesting documentary but with something like 50000 books spread over two libraries, a significant number of them dating from the medieval era, there's actually a surprising amount of stuff to unpack here. If you like books, you'll like the film. I thought it was great.

In my case, I found myself thinking less about the books themselves and more about the subtext surrounding them. Eco was unsurprisingly disdainful of e-books and valued the physical durability of paper. It's an opinion with which it's easy to sympathize given how e-books are often saddled today with restrictive DRM and competing formats. Ink on paper doesn't have a "format" problem and often lasts centuries. Do you think you'll be able to read your Kindle 100 years from now?

I enjoy writing software more than I enjoy using software. I'm not berating myself over this, nor am I proud of it. It's just how I am.

What this means in practice is that I will often write a whole bunch of code before I even start trying to debug it. Writing code tickles what I imagine is the creative part of my brain, and it feels good. Running and debugging code tickles the "chore" part of my brain and it doesn't feel as good.

(Yes, programming is creative. It's an act of creation. I'm emphasizing this point because there is a tendency in non-technical circles to view programming as something sterile or clinical, like accounting. I would imagine, however, that there are very few accountants who do accounting in their spare time, whereas you can easily find tons of programmers who do coding in their spare time, myself included).

In 1931, a book was published in German under the title "100 Authors Against Einstein", attempting to refute the Theory of Relativity. By some accounts, when Einstein was confronted with this book, he is reported to have said something along the lines of:

Why a hundred? If I were wrong, one would have been enough."

I have no idea if this is for real. Still, though, it's pretty good, right?

To be clear, Einstein was talking about physics, not politics or philosophy, but even in the social sciences I find myself sympathetic to the spirit of this quote, fake or not, especially when faced with people who harp on an idea like the popular vote.

A while back I started going through a phase where I would buy any reasonably well-reviewed bottle of Italian amaro I could find at my local liquor store, in a halfhearted and somewhat misguided attempt to reconnect with my Italian roots (my mother is from Sicily). I can't honestly say that it worked (what would that even look like? I already talk with my hands, I don't need to do it more) but it did result, as you might expect, in a small collection of Italian amari being added to my home bar.

Fifteen years ago today, I published my first blog post and I wanted to mark the occasion with - you guessed it! - a blog post. I didn't really have a strong sense of what I wanted to say but, anniversaries being a chance to reminisce, I found myself revisiting what I've written over the years.

It's definitely a mixed bag. The tone and content vary quite a bit. For this reason, when people ask me what this blog is "about", I don't usually have a ready answer, and this sometimes catches them off guard because common wisdom states that blogs typically have themes. People will manage a cooking blog, for example, or a programming blog, or a reading blog. Among other things, it's a way to collect followers - people seem to place greater trust in a blog when it focuses on one subject.

It always amazes me to think that Prohibition in the U.S. was implemented via a Constitutional amendment, as was its repeal.

In my head I think of a Constitution as a country's legal axioms - the foundation of its law system. From this perspective it makes sense that the prohibition of alcohol, having no Constitutional basis, had to be passed by adding another axiom. And when people realized that this was just a bad idea, it makes sense that getting rid of it required adding yet another axiom. It's funny, when you think about it, like a big legal "oops!" that you can't erase.

Webmentions are the way people have conversations on the Indieweb, but integrating them - or, indeed, any kind of dynamic content - into a static site can be a little tricky. Luckily, many people have run into this issue before and so there wasn't much for me to do but steal.

To be clear, I'm talking about receiving and displaying webmentions here, not sending them. How I ended up sending them will be a separate topic, as it is tied into how I manage POSSE and backfeeding on my site.

The previous, pelican-based incarnation of my blog used a homegrown system involving a webmention listener that handed off data to a redis server and ultimately resulted in a new webmention being committed to my site's repo, causing the whole thing to be rebuilt. It certainly worked, but it required a fair bit of maintenance. It also failed to take into account certain edge cases that I hadn't previously considered (like a commentator's avatar image going missing).

I'm a pretty big fan of TypeScript, probably best described as a statically typed language that transpiles to standard JavaScript. I've written about it before.

People who have worked with me in the past may be surprised at my admiration, given the rancour I occasionally direct at something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler, which to the casual eye seems to be in a similar vein.

The similarities, however, are superficial; TypeScript and GWT are quite different beasts. Something like GWT is used in web development in order to avoid writing JavaScript. TypeScript, on the other hand, is best viewed as JavaScript extended with an optional static typing system. The optional part is key; in theory, any JavaScript program is also a valid TypeScript program. In other words, TypeScript doesn't try to hide the fact that it's merely an enhanced version of JavaScript.

As a participant in the IndieWeb, I publish my share of likes, replies, reposts, and bookmarks. These posts all have one thing in common - they refer to another, external URL and only make sense in the context of that URL.

This being the case, it's nice to give my readers (and myself) some sense of what I'm referring to when I post that content. The process of scraping metadata from URLs for display purposes is called "URL unfurling" and implementing it efficiently on an Eleventy based website is not entirely trivial, especially when you're trying to save your Netlify build minutes, so it's worth sharing what I've learned.

Pagination in Eleventy is bit strange. Out of the box, Eleventy comes with support for something the developers call "pagination", but it might not be the sort of pagination you're used to.

As you probably already know, Eleventy is a static site generator. It generates output HTML files from input template files. In the simplest case, one HTML file is generated for each (non-layout) input template.

The feature known as pagination in Eleventy is basically a way of getting around that limitation, allowing you to generate multiple output files from one template file. If you squint, you can see how this maps to the traditional idea of pagination (i.e. we want to break down a long list of items into smaller sized pages, writing only one template for the page) and although this is, indeed, a common way to use pagination in Eleventy, it turns out that the feature is much more generic than you might think - and, paradoxically, less useful than you might think.

After some consideration I've decided to remove the articles from my "Posts" feed and rename it to "Notes". It now contains just my notes and photos (and videos if I ever start posting those). As before, my articles are available in my "Blog" feed.

Initially, my reason for mixing articles, notes and photos into one "posts" feed was that I suspected at least some of my readers would want a feed just for "original content", and the "posts" feed provided that. I still think this is true, but some other insights have led me to reconsider the approach.

As mentioned previously, I recently converted my website over to Eleventy. I'm an IndieWeb participant and, moreover, my website is fairly complex so I ended up writing (or, in some cases, pilfering) a fair amount of code to make it all work together in an acceptable manner. I thought I would document the process via a series of blog posts in case anyone else finds it of value.

None of this is intended to be an Eleventy tutorial and you'll get the most from these posts if you already know something about how Eleventy works.

After roughly five years, I've finally decided to switch my blog over from Pelican to Eleventy. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't at least partially swayed by the fact that all the cool kids seemed to be doing it but, with that in mind, I do have some (hopefully) legitimate reasons for making the switch.

Pelican bills itself as a static site generator, and so it is, but one that focuses more on traditional, single user blogs. Pelican can, of course, be used as a CMS, and you can certainly use it to create arbitrary, standalone pages and websites, but the features in support of this usage seem more bolted on than organic. There are certain assumptions built into Pelican that stem from its original purpose as a blogging engine that are occasionally irritating to circumvent.

Like many Indieweb participants, I post bookmarks, likes and reposts to my website.

From a technical standpoint, there's virtually no difference between these kinds of posts; they're all permalinked h-entries which house another, usually external, URL and which often contain no other content beyond that link. They differ solely in the microformat which annotates the link, indicating the intent of the post.

And intent make all the difference here. A like is supposed to convey that the author actually enjoys or appreciates the content to which the post is linking. A repost is supposed to convey that the author wishes, for some reason, to share that content on their own feed. A bookmark is supposed to convey that the author...ugh...err...

If you're a programmer of a certain age, you've either read or know about Design Patterns, a book on software architecture popular in the 90s and early 2000's. The book was sort of like a repository of TV tropes for the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) world in that it provided a convenient vocabulary for describing what were usually eminently recognizable software engineering techniques that nonetheless often lacked punchy, easy to remember names.

Notably, the book was more descriptive than prescriptive. It described preexisting techniques that were already in use in the "wild", so to speak.

If I say that my professional life has spanned RCS, CVS, Mercurial and Git, this tell you something (depressing) about my age.

Like everyone else, I'm now a git user, but I still say that Mercurial was the most elegant of the bunch, at least in terms of its emmiently predictable and well-designed CLI, even if the software itself gave up the ghost years ago.

Back in the day, when version control systems were still duking it out, I used to try and defend Mercurial to rabid git fans, mostly to no avail. I always felt that I was at a bit of a disadvantage in those conversation (cue the git fans yelling "Yeah, cuz mercurial SUCKS!"), because I was always willing to concede, despite appreciating Mercurial's virtues, that git actually did have its strengths as well as its weaknesses, while the git fans were rarely so magnanimous with any other VCS.

While it's perhaps inaccurate to call the current Covid-19 crisis "unprecedented" (given that the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918 led to many of the same measures), I think it's reasonable to say that it's unprecedented in my lifetime - and I'm not exactly young.

Accordingly, in these heady times, I don't think it's uncommon to discover a thing or two about yourself. Hell, introspection is almost inevitable, given the circumstances.

In that vein, this is my "Things I Learned In Lockdown" post. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Not long ago, I joined an Italian cooking group on Facebook. I thought it would be a good opportunity to pick up some tips and recipes. I left the group a couple of months later, after some members became...oh, let's call it "agitated"...over whether Sunday ragu was a "sauce" or a "gravy".

It sounds like a joke, doesn't it? Personal attacks stemming from disagreements over culinary terminology seem like such a cartoonish Italian stereotype that you almost think it just can't be true. Or maybe you just don't want it to be.

When it comes to food and drink, I tend to lean towards the simple. Or, more accurately, I tend to lean towards the simple and well-made.

One of my favourite memories of the Dominican Republic, for example, was the coco loco - literally just a coconut with the top sliced off and rum mixed into the milk, served with a straw and maybe a squeeze of lime. When the coconut is fresh, the drink is amazing.

Another example would be Marcella Hazan's (in)famous tomato sauce. It literally has only four ingredients (canned tomatoes, butter, onion and salt) and notably no garlic or herbs, so the sauce doesn't really have anywhere to hide; it tastes like buttery, slow cooked tomatoes which is, well, you know, delicious.

I attended my first IndieWebCamp session last week, on the subject of "gardens and streams", otherwise known as wikis and blogs. Given the current global situation, the entire thing was remote; I participated via Zoom. It was fun! I'm glad I got to meet everyone.

Wikis, and how they differ from blogs, is a topic that interests me. You may not know it, but my domain sports a wiki, powered by MoinMoin. I mostly use it to store technical notes and recipes.

I'm no historian, but it seems obvious that wikis were created mostly in order to make certain kinds of websites easier to build and maintain. In the days when "webmaster" was an actual job title and when traditional websites were maintained by an elite group of technical people, using arcane languages like HTML, wiki powered websites:

Jan-Lukas Else recently asked the Hacker News community why most of them don't have blogs, and published his thoughts on their answers to his own blog. The conversation was interesting and got me thinking about my own motivations for maintaining this site.

The first thing that stands out for me in the responses is the number of people who said that they quit blogging because they didn't have any readers. It was more than I expected. I don't think I fully realized how important readership was to some people in the technical community, probably because I think can safely say that it's not of great importance to me.