Olivier Forget

I used to merrily sign up to any new service that Google created. The company still espoused its “Don’t be evil” motto, and the concept of privacy had yet to feel like something we had taken for granted. Things are different now. We’ve become more aware of how much of our private lives are floating from server to server, trading between data brokers to make a whole bunch of people – but not us – rich.

Los Angeles is starting to lift its stay-at-home restrictions, and hiking and cycling trails are among the things reopening. Whew, just in the nick of time. I haven’t really exercised since March (I don’t count doing a few pullups as “real exercise”), and my irritability is getting bad. I need to get out and exhaust myself in some way at least once a week or I am prone to moments of anger and a general sense of angst.

I wrote my first nine posts for #100DaysToOffload in one day without starting from a draft. Many bloggers leverage a well stocked drafts folder, and the really rich ones might be sitting on 30 post drafts and ideas! I also have a folder full of partially written posts, and you would think I’d leverage that to get me through this nerdy take on Century Club. But that’s not how I’ve been doing it.

A tweet about an Antonov heavy lift aircraft at LAX reminded me that one such beast had landed in Mojave when I was working there. I set off to find pictures of the event in my old files, but we’re talking about early 2000s here, and I came up empty. It’s very possible I didn’t have a camera with me the day they let us look around the inside of the beast.

Last night’s blog post on Home Automation took a lot of work to close up. I started writing before dinner then tried to polish it off quickly after our meal and episode 1 of Waco. My goal was to finish quickly because I’ve learned that going to bed late, especially if I stay up in front of the computer with my mind engaged, is bad for my sleep and for the next day’s productivity.

I’m intrigued by home automation but I haven’t taken the plunge yet. Here are some thoughts on where I stand. Internet of 💩 I follow @internetofshit on twitter for a daily dish of how internet connected devices fail their users in absurd and painful (and sometimes expensive) ways. Generally speaking, devices that connect to the manufacturer’s servers are iffy. Servers go down or companies pivot or go out of business. Others may just want to push their newest offerings by sabotaging their older products.

Today is my day off for the week. Unlike many people being at home all the time is normal for me. I’m used to it. Over the years I’ve learned techniques and patterns that make this life work well. How many years you ask? Thirteen years. In the Spring of 2007 I stepped out of my cubicle at the small aerospace engineering office that no longer employed me, and have not been back to a “place of work” since.

I was working on a project today and found myself struggling to keep a mental model of the architecture. The project has been growing for many months and it’s gotten a bit hairy, particularly since I am constantly rethinking how it needs to be put together. The code itself is fairly readable since Go lends itself well to that, but the high level view is not always clear in my head.

I’m finding myself in need of a protocol to communicate between two processes, and I can’t find what I want. The two processes will communicate over a Unix Socket in a peer-to-peer fashion. This is a very straightforward situation that I thought I would be able to handle trivially. It is, of course, very easy for two processes to exchange bytes over a unix socket. The web is full of tutorials on writing various “Hello World” and echo services over unix sockets.

There is a situation developing on the World-Wide-Web that runs completely against its ethos. I am talking about the growing number of news websites that require that you are signed-in, and possibly a paying member to read their articles. From the web peruser’s point of view, it’s a terrible experience. You might be reading your feed on social media and decide to click on a link to read the actual article (instead of just piling on in the replies) but then, bam: