Posts Archive

It was 1979 and the punk movement wasn’t going anywhere. The music was loud, the hairdos were spiky and a majority of the older generation really didn’t get what was happening.

In order to bring some order to the chaos, Swedish state television, the only one allowed at the time, decided to do a televised concert with what’s now punk legends Ebba Grön.

While the kids ran a mosh pit on the floor, older people were seated in stands behind. When the music was over a journalist asked the older people, “So, what did you think of this”. It was a weird time.

I came upon this awesome TED talk on “Why You Should Make Useless Things” by Simone Giertz thanks to Mikael Pawlo. The talk really resonated with me and articulated thoughts I have had for a long time.

I learned how to program BASIC from a book 37 years ago, one year before I actually saw and touched a real computer. A few months later I got my first computer, a Commodore VIC20. The first year I had it I didn’t have the tape recorder that allowed me to save my programs. So for a year whatever I did was ephemeral - as soon as I turned of the computer the program was gone. Sort of like a Groundhog Day version of Global Day of Code Retreat.

Emacs brings REPL-driven development to SQL using sql-mode, so you can have a SQL buffer running and send commands to it.

Today however sql-mode didn’t show a prompt when connecting to my local dev database. It turns out that sql-mode has a regexp looking for the prompt, which expects the database name to be all alphanumerics for some reason. It seems to be fixed but is not in the version I get from Arch Linux.

I’ve been running Connman instead of NetworkManager for a week since it is supposed to be more lightweight. Lightweight is good.

However, I had really weird problems with DNS, where some hosts wouldn’t resolve.

$ ping outlook.office365.com
PING outlook.office365.com (40.101.40.226) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 40.101.40.226 (40.101.40.226): icmp_seq=1 ttl=238 time=44.7 ms
64 bytes from 40.101.40.226 (40.101.40.226): icmp_seq=2 ttl=238 time=44.6 ms
64 bytes from 40.101.40.226 (40.101.40.226): icmp_seq=3 ttl=238 time=44.8 ms
^C
--- outlook.office365.com ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 44.625/44.755/44.890/0.267 ms

$ ping smtp.office365.com
ping: smtp.office365.com: Temporary failure in name resolution

We use Outlook 365 at work, please don’t judge me.

It might be that pythonistas really don’t like monkey patching, but as I couldn’t find a quick answer on how to mock time in Python I thought I write down here how I did it.

It’s no big deal really, just replace datetime in the module tested with a local implementation. In my case I wanted to to mock datetime.utcnow and to match the call I created a class with utcnow as a static method.

I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon that has a 14 inch screen with a 2560x1440 resolution. While not quite Retina Display quality, it still has enough pixels to make everything on the screen appear tiny with a regular 96 DPI setting. Trying to fix this in browsers by increasing font sizes breaks quite a few sites, while custom DPI settings works better.

Firefox

Open about:config and set the property layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to the desired value, in my case 1.3.

I have once again switched browsers, the pendulum is now on the Firefox side. However when I changed my Emacs config to open links in firefox it didn’t work.

Instead I got the error message “Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.”

It turned out that I had both the firefox and firefox-esr packages installed, and browse-url-firefox tried to open iceweasel instead of firefox. Uninstalling firefox-esr solved it.

Lately I’ve noticed people mentioning the use of system fonts in web design. Supposedly it all started with Medium a year ago, described in this article. The idea is that the web experience should not differ that much from what the rest of the client UI looks like.

I think this is great, I’ve felt for a long time that the web should settle on some sort of UI toolkit for the most common tasks. It’s like the whole world is doing a Kai’s Powertools, if you remember that.

I have translated the talk I gave last week at Agila Sverige to English, it’s available here.

I gave a dinner talk yesterday at the Agila Sverige conference which was fairly rantish about the state of the agile world. The text of the talk is available here (in swedish).