31 May 2025
It's been a little while since my last blog post so I'll once again forgo the tech rambling and focus on the life rambling. The most exciting thing that happened was probably that I made a planter out of wood we had lying around. For someone who hasn't done any woodworking since secondary school I am probably more proud than any man should be over a rectangular box with legs.
I also worked with my partner on a very strange issue where her GitHub account couldn't connect to the Visual Studio Code installation. The problem turned out to actually be that Microsoft doesn't package Visual Studio Code as a proper MacOS app installation, but as a sort of portable application. Removing that and installing it through Homebrew instead resolved that issue. The moral of the story is that Homebrew is an absolute necessity on MacOS, I think.
I attended the London Web Standards GAAD event, along with my amazing partner. The talks were interesting and energising, giving me plenty of ideas for how to improve my own website. I was asked why, as a cloud engineer, I found the London Web Standards talks so interesting. I think it's because you have a great group of people committed to both doing things the right way and also being fun and silly. There isn't an awful lot of that in the cloud infrastructure world!
I was also mercifully bullied about not being able to figure out Mastodon. I took some time to figure it out a bit more and have come to a different conclusion: I just don't like it. Searching doesn't seem to really work across instances and it just isn't as nice to use as Bluesky. I know some parts of Bluesky aren't practical to self-host unless you have a spare bare-metal server in your larder but I prefer it, so that's where I am.
We took advantage of the bank holiday weekend to do a little getaway to Yorkshire. With Weird Walk, The Old Stones and a few Google Map searches as our guides we visited The Druid’s Temple, The Devil's Arrows, The National Video Game Museum, Mother Shipton's Cave, Thornborough Henges, and even found time to visit a couple of garden centres and Sheffield Central Library. My collection of library cards grows ever larger.
This week I had a day off to experience The Suffolk Show. It was a very pleasant day out, and any day I can eat a massive bag of pork scratchings and a couple of bags of fudge is a very good day indeed.
I find myself writing this on Saturday, my copy of Worms W.M.D. has arrived in the post (after playing Worms 2 at the National Video Game Museum it gave me an itch and my partner seemed interested) and there are a few projects I'd like to finish so I'll bring this post to a close. I promise at some point I'll talk about actual tech stuff!
08 May 2025
I usually try to write these blog posts on a weekend, but with the long weekend and being quite busy throughout it I've had to write this mid-week instead. The long weekend was filled with trips to the garden centre, trips to birthday parties and trips to the football. The trip to the football was the one I probably enjoyed the least, it's hard being a supporter sometimes.
Our solar panels were fully enabled last week and the sunny weather has meant all the graphs were looking good for producing more than we were consuming. Now that things are a bit more overcast the graphs are looking... less good. We don't really mind that, though, we got the panels to reduce our reliance on the grid and to be more eco-friendly. From what I've heard you don't really make that much money selling back to the grid, but sending a bit less money to the electrical supplier is no bad thing.
Last week I had a quite involved conversation with my partner where I insisted that I was using "grid" layout in the CSS for this website, only to find out I'm actually not. I am using some CSS statements that made me think that I was using it - but I actually wasn't. I think the way that CSS and HTML is so forgiving, so even if you specify something incorrect it would produce something that was correct, is probably what confounds software developers about it. It's actually a huge positive, but obviously if you compare them to programming languages where if it isn't correct it won't compile, then I can see why some developers are so confused by web technologies.
This blog post has now been written over two days, with some delicious homemade rhubard crumble to push me over the line, courtesy of my amazing partner. She shared with me some very fun indie websites that have me envious and inspired. I'd like to first redesign the CSS on this website to make full use of grid layout, and maybe even grid templates if I can figure them out, and then do a bit of a redesign of the site structure. I don't seem to have much time these so maybe even that is ambitious - but if not then making it a bit more silly and fun would be a nice target. Lots for me to look forward to, I think!
29 Apr 2025
I hadn't really intended this blog to become a "week notes", but I can't say I'm against it. This blog is a little late, on account of a hellish Saturday evening that had me working until 4:30am. Sunday is a blur.
I had thought this blog would have more technical content in it, but I've found my thoughts drawn to other things. A little while ago in Brighton a had a "mulberry crumble". An unbelievably delicious dessert, that started off a minor obsession myself and my partner with mulberries. The first thing to know is that, despite the nursery rhyme, mulberries grow on trees rather than bushes. They aren't native to our shores, but were brought here to try to stiumulate a silk trade as silkworms enjoy mulberry trees.
That effort did not pay off, and unfortunarely a lot of mulberry trees died with their efforts. But in a way mulberry trees have been following me and my partner for a while. Nearby Charlton became the centre of a lot of mulberry tree growing, and there are great mulberry trees to see at Charlton House, Greenwich University's Dreadnought Building at Lesnes Abbey.
There is a huge amount of information on London's mulberry trees on the fantastic Morus Londinium website. They even have a map to find your nearest mulberry tree! One of the most impressive features I've seen of black mulberry trees is there ability to completely grow back, even if cut right back into a stump. You can read more about these "phoenix trees" here. I do wish I had the resiliency of a mulberry tree.
One sort-of tech related thing I can say about last week is how I fear that AI might mean a sharp downturn in the quality of documentation. Let's face it: not all open source projects have great documentation as it is. But I had a situation over the weekend where what appeared to be a very simple setup that should have been just a straightforward change to configuration became a drawn-out battle between human and software.
The documentation included no examples, and the tutorials in the documentation created a configuration that the software complained was deprecated. The only way I found to get it to work was to bash it through a bunch of GitHub Copilot prompts until it worked. That's a terrible experience. I don't really want to support AI, I want to learn for myself, but and if the documentation is so bad I'm forced to turn to AI then I think that is an indictment of the documentation.
Unfortunately, I fear developers will neglect documentation even more if the expectation is that an AI can figure it out for you. Why bother to create a useful set of documentation with tutorials, references and how-tos if nobody will bother reading it and instead will get an AI to explain it to them instead? Are we just writing documentation for the consumption of robots now?