August 2020

I’m not a predator looking for them either

/ local / ,

This article suggests a few techniques for finding personal websites on the Internet.

Source: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

I’m here and I’m not being that quiet either.

It’s not that I’m invisible. It’s that we don’t even figure into the Peasant Internet anymore(1) even though there’s a lot of activity on the twitters, facebooks, and instagrams of this here planet.

(1) Peasant Internet: Those who surf the waves thinking they’re safe in the embrace of social media or corporate firewalls.

I’m not a predator looking for them either Read More »

Tacaño

/ local /

The last valid comment on this here blargh was in 2008, even though the blog had been running for longer than that.

Time flies when you’re doing other things.

Tacaño Read More »

Mind your own business

/ local / ,

Anyone who knows me knows that I was among the biggest Apple Evangelists to ever live. Apple was in my DNA.  I believed in Apple’s products, Apple’s services, and Apple’s mission (or at least what …

Source: Dear Apple: Your Services Are No Longer Required. | Low End Mac

I agree with everything they say but this entire fucken thing could have been avoided if someone hadn’t been a nosy person.

I thought of using stronger language but hopefully she knows what her stupidity begat.

Mind your own business Read More »

Shadow cities, rising

/ local / , , , , , ,

I love NYC. When I first moved to NYC, it was a dream come true. Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me. So much personality, so many stories.  Every subculture I loved was in NYC. I could play chess all day and night. I could go to comedy clubs. […]

Source: NYC Is Dead Forever… Here’s Why – James Altucher

Is NYC truly over? For the longest time it was the place to be in this entire planet but now it certainly feels like it’s spiraling downwards, and we say this from my relatively comfortable perch in the Midwest, which does have problems of its own.

City government is still throwing billions into its police department even though nobody living in the city wants that anymore. Nobody likes De Blasio, who keeps thinking salvation will come from somewhere even though Trump has repeatedly said he’s more than willing to let NYC die. NY state government have their own issues, which depend a lot on the economic might of the city. Landlords are about to start throwing themselves off roofs—let them, no one stop them!

It reminds us of Tijuana when I arrived there so long ago. I was told Avenida Revolucion would be teeming with people, people who would be drinking, laughing, partying; usually loud boisterus Americans, yes, but they’d bring along people from all over the world. It all came crashing down on 9/11 and the economy of the city took a big hit when the border closed entirely. After that, there would only be light crowds and those usually on the weekends.

We worked on La Revo for years. We remember. It took nearly a decade for the city to recover, and then that stopped with the cartel drug wars.

Reading this article about NYC reminds me of all of that. It also takes into account the availability of broadband for most everyone, which changes things when you can do your job from anywhere on the planet that has the bandwidth to let you.

Other cities are suffering from the same issues. London is seeing this compounded by Brexit. Hong Kong, compounded by the hostile takeover by PRC. San Francisco, compounded by sky-high rents. With broadband you don’t have to deal with any of these issues; You can now have your dream house in the country and have good wifi.

NYC will recover first but it will take decades.

Shadow cities, rising Read More »

Never write documentation hangry, e.g. this post

/ rucksack / , , ,

I find I Love MDN demeaning to technical writers. It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs.

Source: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action – QuirksBlog

Another article related to the fall of Mozilla. Back in the day we relied heavily on quirksmode.org and doing that sort of data mining, collating, writing and publishing is not easy. For a while myself helped out writing documentation for WordPress during the <.09 era and we found out for myself exactly how hard technical writing is. It’s something we’re good at and, more importantly, enjoy. We appreciate the skill, nuance, talent and even luck that goes into writing good documentation.

It is something that we complain about often on teh twitter derp corn; often using ultraviolent language cos most developers are assholes. We’ve mentioned on this here blargh of using vimwiki. Their documentation looks like… actually, not even going to bother with a screenshot because they don’t have anything on their github or wiki that actually says “Documentation”. They take the easy way out and tell you “oh run :h vimwiki in vim”.

No, fuck you, lazy assholes.

Another few great examples of technical writing gone wrong:

  • Pretty much any plugins for vim. Most of them are just the same text file you’d use :h for, except without hyperlinking.
  • VirtualBox coming in with the one-page User Manual
  • Nextcloud, with documentation full of gotchas that should be mentioned prior or during installation, but aren’t.
  • Apple: Documentation? What’s that? Also there never was any documentation here.

Agent J: Move along, nothing to see here

I just had to use a gif for Apple. It’s that bad. Most Android apps don’t have any documentation of any kind whatsoever. Windows applications used to have documentation built-in but now they just direct you to their website, where documentation changes and disappears depending on the A-level goals for the quarter.

There are many more examples out there but these are some of the ones I can think of right now. The gist of it is this kind of thing is hard and people who do it should be paid for it, and if they’re good at it they should be paid well. If a developer doesn’t want to write proper documentation then… they should either have someone do it for them and listen to that feedback, or get their ass handed to them so they get on writing it themselves.

Going to go eat something now before the hunger makes me angrier.

Never write documentation hangry, e.g. this post Read More »

All for a fistful of dollars

/ rucksack / , , , , ,

FOSS is dead. what now?

Source: Post-Open Source | boringcactus

the gods fucken damnit, Mozilla. This is but one article out of so, so, so many out there that are talking about the death, dearth, and zombification of open source projects. And that’s before we even bring in the tweets.

But sure, those Mozilla Corporation executives deserve millions of dollars so they can look preen themselves when they have to prostate themselves before their capitalist gods making hundreds of times their salaries.

All for a fistful of dollars Read More »

I’ll stick to regular cow’s milk, thanks

/ local / , , , ,

What actions has Oatly taken that would make us trust them? They’ve built an incredible marketing engine and raised 100s of millions of dollars convincing you that you should put sugar and vegetable oil into your coffee each morning, while hand-waving away evidence that they’re harming you.

Source: Oatly: The New Coke – Divinations

I personally prefer my coffee without oil but if other people want to do that to theirs, sure, go for it.

I’ll stick to regular cow’s milk, thanks Read More »

dafuq does RSS even mean, seriously

/ local / , , , , ,

Source: How would I improve RSS? Three ideas (Interconnected)

We rely heavily on RSS to find things to read and keep up with The Noise on the Internet. We also tend to shun newsletters cos RSS is a much better tool for them and en’t nobody got time for yet more email.

We’re aware of other initiatives like JSON Feed but they require re-implementing RSS into something else. Maybe the solution is an evolution of what the protocol currently is?

Start with a proper name for the protocol though. Bonus points if someone figures it out how to make it recursive.

dafuq does RSS even mean, seriously Read More »