Articles

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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

(Edited 2024/12/25: I no longer use MoinMoin, opting instead for an org-roam based digital garden, but the concepts are the same)

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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.

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If you've read my previous articles on the IndieWeb, you might be forgiven for thinking that its members are, by and large, loners who keep to themselves.

Consider the concept of a "like", for example. On a site like Twitter, a like is an action you perform against another person's content; you click the heart icon next to someone's tweet, and the like counter for that tweet goes up. It's an implicit connection between two people - the one who did the liking and the one who received it.

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One of the themes that crops up again and again in the IndieWeb community is that your personal domain, with its attendant website, should form the nexus of your online existence. Of course, people can and do maintain separate profiles on a variety of social media platforms, but these should be subordinate to the identity represented by your personal website, which remains everyone's one-stop-shop for all things you and the central hub out of which your other identities radiate.

Part of what this means in practice is that your domain should function as a kind of universal online passport, allowing you to sign in to various services and applications simply by entering your personal URL.

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In a previous blog post, I gave a very brief introduction to the IndieWeb, hopefully giving a sense of what it is and why it matters. In this post I'll try and zoom in a tiny bit and explain something of the mechanics of how the IndieWeb actually works and what it means to "like" a post or "share" a status update.

I'm deliberately trying to avoid too much detail in this post because, frankly, there's a lot to write, and it's easy to get lost. So I'm going to try and give a rough idea of what an IndieWeb enabled website looks like at a very high level, without going into the weeds. Further posts will go into more detail.

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I don't think I've ever felt quite as old as I felt when, last year, I discovered the IndieWeb, an online community of people dedicated to resurrecting the personal website.

This makes me feel old because I've maintained some sort of personal web presence/site/blog since around 1998 or so, when I made my first hand-coded HTML pages available online at U of T. Apparently, enough time has past not only for the concept of a "personal website" to have become quaint and old-fashioned (displaced by a cluster of much more convenient social media sites) but also for it to have been picked up again by an enthusiastic band of hobbyists with a taste for the retro and a fondness for old-school fan pages.

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I have a large collection of digital photos dating back over 15 years. An impressively small fraction of them are actually any good, but that's a different conversation, probably revolving around my digital hoarding habits.

Such a large collection deserves a particular method of organization. Or maybe it doesn't. Did I mention they're mostly mediocre? Anyway, I have one! I thought I'd share in case anyone finds it useful (including a future version of myself, my mind being a sieve and all).

The procedure I came up with is strongly influenced by several personal idiosyncrasies. Obviously, not everyone shares these traits, so your mileage will definitely vary - though I think it's always interesting to read about how other people do things.

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As you walk down a typical street in Manhattan the first thing you notice is just how straight it is. Roads in Manhattan have actual vanishing points, like railroad tracks. You walk slowly towards this point that you will never reach, and the cross streets come up one at a time, at perfectly spaced intervals and at perfectly right angles. First you look left, and then you look right, and you're taken aback at how perfectly straight those roads are as well, and how they also seem to go on forever in the distance.

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Google's AngularJS is one of the most popular web frameworks out there, but it comes with its share of criticism (performance around two way binding being one of the more prominent complaints). Google responded by releasing Angular 2 (and, as of now, 4, 5 and 6), which addressed some of the issues but at the cost of being drastically incompatible with its predecessor, with no realistic way to upgrade except through pure elbow grease. Angular 2+ might as well be a completely different framework.

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In an attempt to at least try and get to know my theremin a bit better, I caved and bought Carolina Eyck's The Art of Playing the Theremin. I mean, her instructional videos on YouTube are great, but they don't really give you a proper sense of how to move your fingers when playing a tune. Her book, on the other hand, does.

It's probably obvious to everyone else in the world, and I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, but it turns out that you have to know how to read sheet music in order to fully benefit from the book. Crazy, right?

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In my last blog entry, I talked about theremins. I've known about them for a while, and I've always found them fascinating, but I've never actually taken the plunge and bought one, despite being being tempted on many occasions (they're not that expensive).

At the same time, I've known about Arduinos for a long time, and I've always wanted an excuse to buy one, but I've never actually taken the plunge and bought one. As I'm fond of saying, an Arduino is a solution in search of a problem, and I just never found the right problem for one.

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I am an unapologetic Downton Abbey fan. The series is full of memorable scenes, but one in particular has stuck with me. Daisy, one of the scullery maids, is asked if she turned on the electric lights in one of the rooms and she replies "No. I daren't".

It seems like such a minor, throwaway line, but I feel like it succinctly captures how the uninitiated must have felt about electricity back then. Daisy is downright afraid of it. Steam and fire are very direct and literal sources of energy, but electricity is much more abstract. You never see the electricity moving or burning, even as the motor spins or the lamp shines.

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Pelican is my blogging engine of choice these days. Given that Emacs is usually (though not always) my text editor of choice, it made sense to try and streamline the process of writing blog entries for Pelican with Emacs. What follows is my attempt to document such an endeavour, partly because I think it might be useful to the (undoubtedly tiny) cross section of people who use both Emacs and Pelican, but mostly so that I have something to refer back to when the need arises.

Note that this blog entry does not cover things like actually setting up your Pelican blog. It also doesn't cover my reasons for using Pelican in the first place; for that, feel free to peruse my other blog entry on the subject.

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I've been a programmer by trade ever since I graduated from University. This is a fairly long time, as these things are measured. I still consider myself on a learning curve, but that's a separate conversation.

My career, such as it is, mostly sidestepped the whole static versus dynamic typing debate that roiled in the early 2000's. School, when it veered into software territory, mostly consisted of C and Java, two statically typed languages. My professional life, until fairly recently, has been mostly in Java (with a bit of C++ thrown in for good measure) and hence has almost exclusively revolved around statically typed languages.

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I saw Blade Runner 2049 recently. I have some (not very original) thoughts to share. Spoilers ahead.

The original Blade Runner only really caught my attention in my adult years. Unlike, say, Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Superman, it was not one of my "childhood movies". I saw it once when I was very young, found it boring and weird, and then promptly forgot about it until I was made to watch it sometime in my 20's or 30's with my eyes fully open.

Once I did, though...wow. That movie drips atmosphere. I'd be lying if I said it's one of my favourite movies of all time - I feel like that kind of designation is less about the movie itself and more about my frame of mind at the time I see it - but it's definitely up there as one of the movies I admire most from a visual standpoint. It's still beautiful 35 years later.

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As I've mentioned before, I've recently switched to pelican as my blogging engine.

Pelican is a static site generator. This means that it generates static HTML files using templates and content as input, which can be then uploaded (via rsync, for example) to a plain vanilla web server (I use nginx).

So far the experience has been fairly smooth. The web server setup is much simpler, since there's no application to run. And it's forced me to re-think what kinds of information I want on my pages. For example, in an effort to avoid regenerating the entire site every time I publish an article, I created standalone index pages for tags, categories and archives rather than display the counts on every page.

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