I was not blogging for some time. In the meantime, both Gfycat and Koji have been acquired, and their services shut down.
These two occurrences reminded me the ephemerality of life on the internet again. A struggle against it does require being proactive. As I have learned with a harsh lesson, Internet Archive’s fights against this decay is a cornerstone of modern internet. Even though you can rely on it to save the old web to an amber, internet technologies are a mobile target.
David Thompson shares his favorite commit from his time on GOV.UK. The post has introduced me to the idea of coding in the open. Here is why he likes it: explains the reason for the change searchable tells a story makes everyone a little smarter adds an extra bit of human context Joel Chippindale talks about telling stories through your commits. He tells that VCS is kept forever, always up to date and searchable.
Years ago I had difficulty in taking notes and capturing information, and couldn’t find anything to fit my needs. I tried to create a cross-platform application to fill the gap: NotAra. I faced technological problems, life intervened, and the project just got stuck. Today, I am not even sure, whether I pushed all local changes to GitHub.
While fixing Content-Security-Policy header, I have messed up the caches. I have accidentally pushed a change to keep all pages in the cache indefinitely. Situation: browsers are now serving stale pages.
It is not that people do not read anymore, but the forms have changed into tweets, WhatsApp messages and blog posts. So what we read is more quickly forgotten. I am going to periodically document what I read and my short highlights. In another post we will be in search of better ways to capture information.
After I have built the site, the next step was checking performance and security. The log, besides being my learning notebook, is also a test-bed for my experiments.Mozilla Observatory security grades
scoop — Package installer — WinGet is not ready for prime-time and Chocolatey while has a larger database, it is too slow and harder to automate. scoop install a package to install an application. updates and uninstalls are straightforward too. It has even a ‘Unix which’ alternative to find out path of an executable scoop which.
It seems my attempts on writing an UI library for my homebrew game is more time consuming than I deemed. Considering game will also be available for mobile platforms, I have chosen an enginethat can already be compiled to these platforms and solved the problems I am trying to solve (scripting, events). An that engine is Minko. Here is current state with Minko.
Since I am preoccupied with other projects, and having hard time finding quality time to work on NotAra, I am going to keep it, as much as possible, simple. There is going to be two types of capture method: Highlighting and clipping. For now only PDF files can be shown. Using html rendering power of Qt, displaying formats such as html and epub is also planned.
