Half / Byte @halfbyte@kosmos.social

Already looking forward to just falling into my bed tonight, in case you’re wondering how tired a red eye flight makes me.

The early bird waits in a queue

SaaS pricing is weird. I have this one client with payment issues and I have spent so much time trying to solve this issue with the client and with the payment provider etc. that this client will have to stay a client for a really really long time to become profitable for us again.

Of course that doesn't keep me from trying to help them, but you need a lot of clients that never have any issues for this sort of pricing to make sense.

First thing I noticed is how many of my real life concerns Ubuntu covers very well. While I managed to install both Spotify and Skype on Manjaro, it took me a while to google it and figure out the one way that works in 2019.

OTOH, everything dev related was super easy to install and worked really well.

Since I have a spare SSD in my new PC (An m2 thing I had lying around) I'll use it to test various Linux distros. I could use a VM for that, of course, but that doesn't give you a good gauge on real life performance, for example.

First test, yesterday night: KDE Manjaro. I wanted to see how Manjaro ticks and thought it might be a good chance to test KDE plasma as well, something I haven't looked at in ages.

Results are inconclusive as of now.

Spending my first few hours with Elixir. There are a surprising number of things I instantly dislike aesthetically, for a language that claims to be heavily inspired by Ruby.

(double slash for default arguments? RLY?)

Also, I really, really dislike the idea of the mix.esx file, but that's mainly because I have a unique tool vendor perspective on dependency declarations written in executable code. (My perspective is that it's universally a bad idea)

I'm gonna attend a PHP user group today. Wish me luck.

(Last time I really wrote substantial amounts of PHP was probably in 2002?!?)

Finally feeling almost normal again. Slowly trying to figure out if I can put up with normal food again. Really had enough white bread and thin porridge like slurry.

So, no boardning a bus to CPH for me tomorrow,
instead I'll head to the doctor first thing in the morning. This stomach bug is really annoyingly stubborn.

The upshot is that I can disable that 5:30 alarm for tomorrow.

I don't use calc() in css very often, but when I do, it's an absolute lifesaver.

Surprisingly, first time my new PC ran out of memory, it was on Linux. Two-Three Chrome instances, plus Slack app plus Skype plus Firefox can bring every 16 GB system down.

It now has 32 GB, let's see if I ever manage to get there again.

Also, how in the world did we end up in this place?

(Also, if you're wondering about the Chrome instances: automated JS tests that sometimes for no reason start extra instances)

The artist named "Robot Koch" from my Discover Weekly playlist made me chuckle. Also, Lyra One is a mad tune.

Printing a first draft of probably my most complicated 3d modelling job so far. This was a real challenge.

Explanation: In Rails, time fields on ActiveRecord objects return UTC time, whereas the usual Time.now and Date.today all return local time/date. In a time zone like mine, which is really close to UTC, this works "most of the time".

Had an internal debate with me if I should try fix the tests that fail from 0:00 to 1:00 because they test for dates but don't take UTC into account or if one shouldn't run test suites at that time anyway.

But then I realised that I'll be in a completely different time zone soon and maybe it's worth the hassle :)

At this point I'm just really curious about what this is going to end up in. Which is impossible to predict, because of the quite unique way British politics in all factions has manouveured itself into various corners it now seems to be completely stuck in.

I'm quite certain the end result with just be as much a shit show than the process is, unless a miracle happens, that is.

Wow, some dude from a Venezuelan DSL connection currently tries every variant of SQL injection there is on one of the apps I run.

It was easy to block, but how does a small web application suddenly end up on a shitlist of a random wannabe hacker?

In case you're interested, my monitor choice is a bit of an experiment, because I went for one of the cheapest options with an IPS panel, the AOC U2777PQU. The main reason to go with it was not actually the price but the really good connectivity.

Only downside so far is the flimsy stand which, in combination with the size of the screen *and* my flimsy desk makes for a shaky display, which is not super great.

The panel actually looks gorgeous.