2020, week 45

Table of Contents {: .h2 }

[TOC]

Meta Note

I have settled on this “weekly log” format (“%Y-w%U”) to capture ongoing things that are interesting in the long run as “breadcrumbs” of memory, but not “blog posts” or articles in themselves. “Working with the garage door up” is another habit I’m trying to develop, and hopefully these notes are a part of that.

Books

Got “The book of life” by J Krishnamurti. It is setup as one observation per day spanning 365 days of the year. The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday is another book that follows a similar format (366).

Software

Texts.io is a markdown editor for Mac. I had purchased a license for $14.95 back in 2015. I never really used it much. Today (2020-11-10), I rediscovered it when running open against an .md file launched it. While it does have “WYSIWYG” features, the most useful things about it appear to be:

1. understanding YAML headers

2. WYSIWYG table editor, which is reason enough to keep using it to edit blog posts and such (like this one).

On the downside:

1. it doesn’t appear to be suited for editing “fenced code blocks” using triple-backslashes and lost all code formatting when I tried it.

Typora doesn’t do YAML headers, but it does show YAML headers as plain text at the top. It’s table editor is pretty good with support for resizing tables and setting alignment on columns. But the biggest advantage over texts.io is its ability to handle code blocks including showing line numbers (via settings) on the code blocks.

OpenBSD Router

OpenBSD router guide and associated Discussion reminded me that I have to get back to putting OPNSense on my PCEngines apu4d4 unit I bought back in 2018.

PCEngines

2020-11-11 I dusted off my apu4d4, downloaded Opnsense, wrote the bits to a MicroSD card. Connected to the serial port from my MBAir using Serial app (under a 7 day trial). The settings for connecting are: 115200 baud, 8.N.1. Soon realized that I might need a more permanent disk to install the OS on. I do not want to install it on a MicroSD. Ordered a 32GB Dogfish MSATA SSD Disk. Should be able to continue this on Nov 13 or so. I’m excited to try out the ETPro telemetry Ruleset.

Goodbye, Adobe Flash

2020-11-11 Uninstalled Adobe Flash the MacBookAir. End of an era. I did quite a bit of Flash/ActionScript programming 2010-? for Enthenergy to display energy data on a dashboard. It was a productive GUI development environment. Perhaps the last time I did “desktop” application development. It was indeed a transistion/hybrid from pure desktop based application to web based applications. ActionScript3 wasn’t a bad language to program in as I remember. It felt even better than Java at that time.

Zig 0.7

2020-11-10 ziglang v0.7 came out this week. I started sponsoring the development of zig again, to the tune of $5/mo on their github sponsors page.

Java Oreilly Humble Bundle

2020-11-12 Found a couple of interesting books by browsing through the collection on O’reilly. I created a O’Reilly Play List that you can look at.

• Learning Java, 5th Edition By Marc Loy, Patrick Niemeyer and Daniel Leuck
• Java Cookbook, 4th Edition By Ian F. Darwin
• Java Performance, 2nd Edition By Scott Oaks
• Quarkus Cookbook By Alex Soto and Jason Porter
• gRPC: Up and Running By Kasun Indrasiri and Danesh Kuruppu
• 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know By Kevlin Henney and Trisha Gee
• Think Java, 2nd Edition By Allen B. Downey and Chris Mayfield
• Real-World Software Development By Raoul-Gabriel Urma and Richard Warburton
• Kotlin Cookbook By Ken Kousen
• Semantic Software Design By Eben Hewitt
• Java in a Nutshell, 7th Edition By Ben Evans and David Flanagan
• Continuous Delivery in Java By Daniel Bryant and Abraham Marín-Pérez
• Technology Strategy Patterns By Eben Hewitt
• Java Threads, 3rd Edition By Scott Oaks and Henry Wong
• Java 8 Lambdas By Richard Warburton

Everything is an X

Everything is an X is a good catalogue of programmers’s refrain “in Python everything is a dict”, “in Lisp, everything is an s-expression”.

From Around the web

Slava’s How I Read is latest in the series of well written blog posts. Some interesting takeaways from this post:

• If you are one book about a new topic, you might know more about it than most people because most people don’t read. Reading two will put you in rarifie air.
• Reading goals in the form — “Study X through Y” is good advice. Example: “Study American history through technological expansion”
• Read books in cluster. Choose five books on a topic with a goal of the form “Study X through Y”

On Writing

David Perell, “The Writing Guy” has good and insightful takes on the practice of writing. Always something fresh to read on his twitter.

When you start writing, aim to publish consistently and never miss on follow-through. Once you’re experienced, aim to never miss on quality.

Happy Deepavali

• Important ritutals of Deepavali — specifically naraka chaturdashi and lakshmi puje

Links

• Introduction to Linear Algebra for Applied Machine Learning with Python — notes with python code. Apparently there is now a solution for Jim Heffron’s Linear Algebra book. (via).

• This list of Java books from O’Reilly on Humble bundle is a nice collection to over using my newly subscribed ACM membership.

• The 97 things every ‘X’ should know project.

• Linux Command Library - oneliners — a cool collection of oneliners.

• Evidence-based software engineering: book released. via HN and lobste.rs. Related read - “Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It” by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson.