Nerd alert. I was reading a (modern classic) book about medieval costume in different centuries. The book was written in the 1960s, when pictorial evidence was hard to come by. “The British Museum has published a photograph postcard of the tomb effigy, which is rather good.” Now, the book mentions manuscript & effigy sources for …
Author Archives: olleolleolle
Ossy: a maintainer’s CLI tool
ossy is a new release, by Piotr Solnica. Solnica releases a lot of software packages, most of it, as Rubygems. Doing that, in the small, one package at a time, is not very time-consuming, and can be wonderfully automated on places such as GitHub: author a Release text in a textarea, press a big green …
Ruby package maintainers in *nix distributions: thanks
A thank-you note to maintainers of Ruby packages in *nix distributions.
Ruby: Concurrent::ThreadLocalVar
An example from ThreadLocalVar documentation, illuminating what it can do.
A note on using parallel RSpec in CircleCI
YAML example for RSpec in parallel on CircleCI with explicit –seed and reproducible CLI invocation
Bike park infrastructure
A new-to-me set of bike parking has been set up at Nobeltorget. They look ordinary, but since they were new, I wanted to show them off here. These larger things are nice, since you don’t have to press the front wheel of the bike into anything to make it work. Just lean against the pollard …
The short stories of Alistair MacLeod, and the difficulty of communication
Having read a handful of Alistair MacLeod short stories on the plane: he describes a hard life of the people of Atlantic Canada’s fisheries, mines and farms. Some of these stories hit you right in the feels. Literature is wonder. On the way to Canada, I read the very meta novel The Hour of the …
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Bryan Cantrill rereads Soul of a New Machine and has excellent comments
I talked to people about blogging this weekend. Words like The Golden Age of blogging were used. (That era passed, if you hadn’t noticed.) Is it quizzical to want to have the kinds of slow, async conversation blogging can offer? Is it tilting at windmills to just do it anyway? Even if my interlocutor group …
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Fantasy Cartography
The conference, oh unconference, had sessions on diverse topics such as “Phone nerding”, “Death Café” and “Coastal preservation”. These were proposed during an agenda session, placed in a matrix on the wall, and ta-da, that’s our schedule. The second day (today, Saturday) will have the DO theme. In a spirit of sharing, and stressing the …
Keith’s retro computers
I walked upstairs in the office I work in this week and I met familiar faces, people who knew my name since a long while. A good feeling, being somewhere and being recognized. I was shown the collection. How some items were handed over in exchange for “a bottle of iced tea” or for another …