Avocadia

Progress on my micro publishing setup - bookmarks are now being synced to Pinboard. Next step should be notes.

Mute

They’re saying Charlie Brooker has announced that all Black Mirror episodes take place in a shared world. That doesn’t annoy or frustrate me, I can’t quite get agitated about it. But it leaves me a fraction more exhausted. Fandom exhausts me with its neediness, like a dog constantly going back to the bowl between meals just in case something it missed materialises. So I could have done without the scene tying Mute to Moon, but all in all I recognise that it could have been much more contrived. Its pretty good but definitely flawed. Skarsgard is really good; Rudd was ok. I don’t know how I feel about a constant stream of all-male casts in movies revolving around the murdered woman. Whatever I feel, winking at the women-in-fridge trope was on the nose. And yeah, why the Moon connection? Did they not trust that Duncan Jones would have enough reputation to bring an audience? I preferred Moon but I think the critical reaction is harsh.

The Culture

Speaking of fandom, I don’t believe Amazon, a rapacious capitalist organisation set on exploiting every aspect of humanity and sucking the human community dry to get a few more dollars into the pockets of a oligarchic few…

I don’t believe that kind of vampire squid can possibly produce an adaption of The Culture books that doesn’t end up being basically Star Trek,

So despite being leery of the news that , the vampire squid will be creating Star Trek by another name, I started reading the books again. I skipped Consider Phlebas but remembered why I liked Player of Games so much. I’d forgotten most of Use of Weapons, and I just stumbled across a detail in Excession I had never noticed before, so that’s nice.

My Teen Diary

Not quite my teen diary, but D had a joke about me finding and restoring the 2002-2006 version of this blog.

So @gilmae has resurrected an old blog. It’s the modern equivalent of reading your teen diary

— Donna (@randomknits) March 1, 2018

What I found was, hidden away in a folder, a zip pf the code from my blog engine. It was the first project of any size I created for myself. And the database is still siting out on my host, so I just took a snapshot and restored everything on my laptop. It was all broken, but getting it up and running again was a lot easier than I had anticipated - wasn’t the weekend long project I thought it would be, it was all over on Friday night.

Yeah, baby. Friday night spent fixing 16 year old PHP code to make it work in v7. Rock on 🤘!

Anyway, not a single character of the content will see the light of day. The worst bit was being reminded what I thought of Mark Latham. Ugh!

Scratch

However, I have been writing things in PHP again. Partially because I am reacting to Contempt Culture but I was also intrigued by another blog post, Stop writing PHP like it’s 2009… – Florian’s Blog. I can’t say that I am completely living up to that call to action - because I was also inspired by Gary Bernhardt to start writing a web framework from scratch. I was writing a simple reference site to test out the framework I created. I will still finish that, but I think I will try and re-build my old blog in this new framework. Because why not?

• code
• media
• movies
• books
• tv

This would probably work better if I wrote daily. Probably beyond my limitations.

Altered Carbon

I am seven episodes into the show, so it’s clearly doing something right.

I really enjoyed the book. This is more or less the spirit of the book while not being a straight retread of the story. My favourite parts of the books were always the Quellisms, Falconer appeals to that part of me that is pretty sure I’m not a communist but is angry enough about our variably distributed crapsack world to idly dream about revolution. So I was happy they managed to get Quellcrist into the show.

North Sydney

I no longer work in North Sydney. The product I work on was sold to another company, and they moved the team into new office space. I’m not a fan of North Sydney. I believe I will be adding to my list of Jobs I Don’t Want “Anything north of the bridge.”

New laptops

Part of the move was replacing our aging (5ish years old) desktop computers with new laptops. While I was setting up the laptop, I was musing…

New laptops for everyone in the team today. As I download and install all of the tools I use, I am wondering why software engineers expect employers to provide tools. Why don’t we have our own that meet our specific needs?

New Laptops

It’s a thought that makes more sense for freelancers, I expect, and particularly those in the open source space. For employees working with the dotnet stack, providing my own copies of something like Visual Studio would be a hell of cost.

I tried to work out what it would look like for my employer to just provide a pre-baked VM with the required tools, an I could just run that on my own laptop. That might work. EC2 instances with the toolset that the company needs to provide for me to do my job probably works out more costly than the laptops.

I stopped thinking about it when I realised there really isn’t a reason for me to even be using the costly full-on professional version of Visual Studio. The free version is actually all I really need.

Shhh, don’t tell the people shelling out thousands on me and my team.

(Why does my dog like to lick the soles of my feet? What’s in it for her?)

• work
• media
• tv

Lots of my friends are trying to re-focus on blogging this year. Ok. One of my friends.

She says recommendations are an easy win. She has certainly done some of that. Recommended a game that came chillingly close to eating my life. Thanks for that, Kris.

One of the things I wanted to get out of last year was finishing things. One of those things was going to be a tool for writing, storing, and publishing my reactions (“review” seems like too strong a word for what I write) to things I read, watch, and listen to. It didn’t get finished, I kind of got sidetracked by also trying to build a web site framework, as a way of relearning PHP. If it had, it would have been the perfect tool for creating a blog post of recommendations.

On a side track, Gary Bernhardt did a live coding session on Twitch earlier this week, Build a web app and framework from scratch, and I have been inspired to take another run at that PHP framework again. I had to stop watching that video so that I didn’t just re-implement his own thing.

Anyway.

I can’t do a full on media diet post like Kottke. I never did write down most of what I thought about the thing I was consuming. Maybe a lot of it just ended up making no real impression on me. Like, Game of Thrones and The Magicians show. They’re ok in the moment, but they’re pretty and empty. About the only albums I really remember were from Halsey, Lorde, and Cherry Glazer. Surely there were more albums I listened to and cared about , even if only in the moment?

I apparently didn’t read much either if you go off Goodreads; pretty sure I didn’t even rate let alone review about half a dozen books. Latest entries in Laundry Files series, The Expanse, and from Max Gladstone were welcome. I really need to re-read the last. I also need to re read Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young by Helen Razer because I just didn’t grasp finer points. October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville was great. Pretty sure I’m not a proper communist but quite certain I’m not even a little bit here for late stage capitalism.

I enjoyed the hell out of two shows, The Americans and Halt and Catch Fire. The slower season of The Americans wasn’t too popular, but I thought it was fantastic. It could go a few ways in the final season and I’m hoping for something blemish, because apparently that’s my thing. It can’t be completely my thing though because Donna and Cameron becoming friends again was the Best Thing of 2017 and made me cry.

• media
• tv
• books
• music

The text book for my CS101 class at the University of Queensland (1). Within this textbook was a problem set that started with rendering the Mandelbrot set, and then delved into Julia Set variants, and assorted fripperies hanging off the sides. It probably wasn’t the first time I had encountered the Mandelbrot Set render - that would have been a science show on Chaos Theory, of all things - but it stuck with me for years. Every now and then I would go back and build something to render it.

I mean, it’s not like it is a particularly difficult algorithm.

@randommandelbot is a twitter bot I wrote in early 2016. The bot randomly generates a rendering of the Mandelbrot set. A centre point on the real and imaginary axis is generated and a zoom level. If the result passes a rudimentary boringness filter, it is added to a queue and eventually tweeted. Most do not pass the boringness filter. They are zooms into a zone with no variation, either in the main bulbs or out near the edges of the set. The best images are found very close to the event horizon. So how to find them?

I took a really naive approach at first with a crude histogram. I had a tool that scanned the entire image and summed the total red, green, and blue values for each pixel, clumped into 16 rows. It was kind of effective although albeit allowing some very marginal renders through.

Because while to me it is boring, to my crude filter it is good enough.

I then moved onto using the identify -verbose tool that comes with imagemagick which seemed like it would be a better choice. Why wouldn’t it be, it wasn’t a crude tool I smashed out like a Stone Adze (2) However it turned out it would let have let that smoggy sunset image pass as well. And it got much worse when I started playing with random gradients.

Clearly I need a better approach. Too many false positives getting through. So wasteful as well. Only 5% of the renders actually pass the test, so to ensure I can keep to the schedule I have to be attempting a render every minute. That also requires me to keep the bounds of the randomisation at a fairly low zoom level or I risk too many deep zooms deep in the black hole or too far out.

Finding the edges?

I had been considering some sort of ray casting solution to find edges of the Mandelbrot set. Cast rays from a random spot on the edge until they either strike the edge of the image or they strike the Mandelbrot set. Then I went to my thinking room (the shower) and my brain laughed at me, called me an idiot and said “Why not something like a Flood fill algorithm to find all of the edges.”” Using this I should be able to find the entire edge in any image I have and then randomly pick one of those edge points

1. Generate a plot in memory
2. Find a spot in the plot that is not part of the Mandelbrot set and then recursively visit the neighbouring pixels. If that pixel has already been visited, exhaust that particular search and continue. If the pixel found is part of the Mandelbrot set then record it, but also exhaust immediately.
3. When all threads exhaust, you’re left with a record of all the points in the plot that are the edge of the mandelbrot set. Randomly pick one of those recorded points and a random increase in zoom.
4. Iterate until the entire image is the Mandelbrot set, or none of it is. I don’t think it is possible to do the later and I am unsure of the former, although I have some renders that are a distinction without a difference.

In practice what I am doing now is actually just doing 20 plots with randomised increases in zoom (x2-6), and discarding anything with a zoom less than x50. I can do this three times a day and end up with about as many images than I need to post every 30 minutes, based on a rule of thumb of 16 images per run being at greater than x50 zoom. Which I am sure you will agree is much better than running it 1440 times a day.

The real benefit is the imagery produced by being able to zoom so much further into the set. In practical terms most images produced by the previous method were at 1 to three orders of magnitude of zoom. Anything greater than that required the centre point to very close to the edge of the set which was unlikely. Now I get images like this.

Source

• Mandelbrot set renderer.
• Twitter Bot.

1) I’ve become a little obsessed with taking a look at this book again. So much so I am paying money (~$16) to get it via an interlibrary loan. From the University of the South Pacific. In Fiji.

2) Seriously though, go watch that. That guy is something else.

• projects
• coding

A Tweet.

Meetings with franchise operations are like complete graphs of hate. Everybody hates everybody else.

Particularly us.

— dead gar (@gilmae) May 10, 2016

Allow me to explain.

The Franchiser

The franchise operator distrusts the franchisees and asks us, the vendor, to build in restrictions and convoluted rules to protect the data (the precioussss) from the franchisees. They hate the suppliers because the suppliers are gouging them but attempting to change suppliers is a fool’s errand and besides, the CEO enjoys the wining and dining and general fawning, and is never going to stump up money for a new supplier. They hate us because we’ve promised to do things that are no longer, or were never, actually achievable and they suspect we knew it when we made the promises. In some cases they are even right, although if they’d all listened to me…

The Franchisee

The franchisees hate the franchiser because who wouldn’t hate people who so clearly distrust and patronise and belittle you, treating you like children. The franchisees make all of the revenue and then have to send chunks of it to this mob of shiny bums in central office who make it their business to make your life hard. They hate us because we enable the shiny bums. They’re most likely indifferent to the supplier, except for those moments when the supplier’s tool is a complete brain dead piece of garbage. Which is to say they loath the supplier at all times.

The Supplier

The supplier hates the franchiser because in coming to us for a third-party piece of kit to work with The Product, the franchiser has stepped out of the eco-system which is the first step to finding another supplier. They hate us because we might become that other supplier, which like all fears is mostly built upon a paranoid fantasy. They barely know the franchisees exist and if they think of them at all, it is with disdain for being unable to afford The Product themselves.

And us, the vendor

We, the vendor, hate the supplier because the supplier deliberately plays a dead-bat against everything, obscures what they can, gouges money where they can’t. We hate the franchisees because we blame them, absurdly, for the Gordian Knot of business rules and requirements that makes the whole project a fragile mess likely to fall over any day now. We hate the franchiser because they took so long to work out what they wanted and then expected it yesterday so we rushed and now we have a system that mostly hangs together but is scarcely monitored and maintained, and any day now we’re going to be exposed – by something going wrong – as the frauds we are.

Fear leads to hate. Ever was it thus in the Kingdom of Agency.

When it comes to blogging, I clearly have a problem with commitment. Part of the problem is I am all heat of the moment reaction; so much better suited to Twitter really. Says the man with fewer than 20,000 tweets even after nearly nine years on the service. My point is though, any time I have something to say, a snarky 140 characters is at my disposal now.

So at least let’s try something else. If nothing else, let’s make this blog the director’s commentary for my twitter and pinboard feeds. To borrow a phrase.

Imagine a beach. Turns out many people are weird in that when you ask them to imagine a beach, they actually have a mental image of a beach. Seeing it in their mind’s eye isn’t a figure of speech, they experience a visual component to their imaginings. Which is some sort of mutant power, because people with aphantasia don’t. I’m still not 100% sure I believe that people without aphantasia actually ‘see’ the beach. D assures me she does. D assures me when she dreams it is like being in a movie, that this is not, in fact, something that just happens in movies.

I thought everything in this movie was Hollywood bullshit. Turns out it was only the bit where people can control your mind? Please, tell me you jerks aren't really getting photo-realistic hallucinations when you sleep.

I don’t ‘see’ the beach. I think. If I close my eyes and imagine the beach, all I see is nothing. I’m mostly convinced that I’m still just not getting the metaphor, that I don’t have aphantasia, because I’m too boring to have something that interesting. I am running out of ideas though on how to make myself the weirdo with the super powers of visual imagination.

David Bowie and Alan Rickman dying mostly passed me by. I appreciated all of their works, but there was nothing personal for me. I was mostly expecting the same from Prince, and yet there I was on the train home that day, watching some videos of assorted performances and shedding tears. D and I saw him on his most recent tour, and it was the closest I’ve ever come to an ecstatic experience.

I won’t go on. Except, while I have a clear memory of George Harrison’s son being part of his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction, but no idea Prince had played. And played that at about 3:25.

How have I not been soaking in that for the past dozen years‽ I don’t care what Tom Petty thought - I can’t quite work out if he was non-plussed during Prince’s leaning back stunt or if he just has resting bitch face - I was totally with Dhani Harrison.

I have been on holidays since I left work at 14:00 December 23rd, 2015.

Since then I have:

1. Hosted Christmas[1], roasting three chickens and a pork, and constructing a trifle.
2. Constructed a garden shed, which was a pleasure[2].
3. Had three and a half tonne[3] of garden soil delivered, which I then moved from the driveway to the garden.

So…finally something got finished.

1. Only one hospital visit required, and the thing was ok enough afterwards.

2. Two person job with just me and D with her injured shoulder; had to re-drill many holes; got sunburnt; only one mistake; it still stands.

3. And googled tonne vs ton more times than I care to admit because I just can’t get which is which to stick.

I can’t remember how this came up. I think it might be because I mentioned I had applied for a public service job. One of us probably made some flippant remark that that would require losing the t-shirt and jeans and wearing a suit.

Q: Would that be a deal breaker for you?

No, not exactly. I think, for a professional, t shirts and jeans very easily become taking the piss. I have stepped over that line, regularly, and have had to get a hold of myself. What I find objectionable, however, is the notion that you can measure a person’s professionalness as a direct correlation of the formality of their attire. There are plenty of fools out there wearing suits. I’m quite sure that no one would accuse Steve Jobs of being unserious because of his uniform of high quality jeans and turtleneck.

So suits are not a deal breaker, but an attitude that demands suits, or even just ties, would be. I find it difficult to imagine a culture that has that attitude and does not also have all the other staid, mid-twentieth-century ideas that the Suit is emblematic of.

• culture
• work

I was at a meet up last night and a question was asked, who considers themselves a tech leader versus a people leader. It went about 1/3 the former and 2/3 the later. Nobody was asked who thought themselves neither, but a friend copped to thinking she is shit at both. I’m only just good enough at tech leadership to know how much I leave to desire, and not good enough at people leadership to have a good gauge on just how appallingly bad I am at it. Ok, that’s the introvert and the imposter fear speaking. I’m actually pretty good at tech leadership, probably, if I trusted myself a bit more. I have been known to build trust and respect with people and help them get through shadows of valleys of death. I do need to work on my inability to maintain good cheer in the face of fools, and my willingness to be confrontational when the need comes.

My friend also said she thinks she’s leveraged an ability to fake it when it comes to people and tech. In the midst of redundancies where I work, I am quietly confident I am safe. A designated survivor. Partly because circumstances but partly because, I like to tell myself, of faith and trust in me. It’s more than designated survivor though; when things get real, eyes often swivel my way. Far too often if you ask me. It’s sure as hell not because I am shit hot, although in a small pond I’m a good sized fish. It’s almost certainly because I care and I wear that on my sleeve. Well, really on my face and in my body language; it’s rarely a secret when something has got on the wrong side of my caring.

I put it to my friend that it’s not faking it that got her to her amazing job. It’s that she cares enough to fake it, otherwise known as trying to make it. There’s plenty that won’t, that’ll just let it all wash over them. Caring: it’s what drives you to do the best you can at you’re doing. It’s what gets you through the frictions. It’s what lies at the root of passion, it’s why you will allow yourself to suffer. And boy, how you will suffer. Your super-ego will use that care like a scourge if you’ve not yet yoked it the will of your sense of self.

It is a powerful tool though. More generally useful than mere knowledge, in the same way as imagination is ¹. It’s what you’re looking for in interviews after separating the obviously unsuited. If let people see it in you, there’s a lot of omissions and sins they’re prepared to forget.

1. Knowledge transfer is technology humans have had since the savannah. There’s a thousand speakers out there promising to imbue their audience with care and motivation, but I’d bet claiming a strike rate of as little as 1% would be an over-sell.

UPDATE: And as if summoned by my words, a giant douche appears. One weekend can change everything…if by everything he means the bank balances of everyone involved.

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• work
• life
• culture