This is the web site of Joe Johnston [
resume ], a software architect and team leader
in the Greater Boston area with over two decades of industry
experience developing web applications for the Cloud, Intranet, and
Desktop using many Open Source tools.
This site embraces indieweb. Take back
control of your content.
Mulberry is a classic from my childhood that I read to my kid too, as well as If I Ran The Zoo and Scrambled Egg Super. These are wonderful books and will be missed.
However, I won’t miss the racist images which always required a reminder that they were the product of ignorance.
Rather than hide from historic racism, perhaps we can use these examples to show why fear and hatred of the other is bad.
You may think you are the Fanciest Dan with your 88-key MIDI controller, expensive synth patches, and Logic Pro, but Vangelis is laughing at you and your childish toys.
I had no idea such MIDI kit was available and I am abashéd in my ignorance.
#midi#vangelis
Let’s do remove to power to end life on this planet from whims of just one person. In the age of instant communication, getting three people in a chat room to make a decision should be quick and efficient.
This restructuring is long overdue.
This is an exceptionally inspirational story from @jmacdotorg about designer hubris and the hope that we sinners can, in the twilight of our careers, mend our ways.
Also see Chesterson’s fence: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/#design
This tweetstorm gets it right. Cyptocurrencies are all comp sci projects that escaped the lab.
I see few of the promises of this “currencies” coming true. It does not scale. It consumes hideous amounts of power.
Your crypto wallets will, trust me, be used against you.
h/t to Aaron Parecki via https://aaronparecki.com/2021/02/14/24/bitcoin#bitcoin
I picked up Cultist Simulator (on the Switch), which is a kind of real time card game. Great narrative. No tutorial mode. Reminds me of an IF game. Definitely has overtones of Echo Bazaar. Needs buckets of time to play.
Prophet of Zod tries to explain the mindset of many Trump-Won-ers from the point of view of an ex-evangelical in a Dec. 6, 2020 vide.
His concerns would be validated on Jan. 6, 2021.
Perhaps we should take his concerns seriously.
https://youtu.be/0lqaqp5TwnU
Although this is about how the average German in the 1930s quelled their morality for “law and order” promised by the Nazis, this rationale applies equally well to many Republicans in 2020.
https://youtu.be/kEdnwpo28NM?t=973#godwinslaw
Following Jmac's lead BUT MORE SO, I have deleted all my tweets made before summer 2020.
No one with beneficent intentions is looking back that far anyway.
#twiiter
We have begun our “Hogwarts at Home” staycation tonight by decorating the kitchen like the Leaky Cauldron and having butter beer, pumpkin pasties, and official chocolate frogs.
Tomorrow: A virtual tour of Potter movie locations and dinner in the Great Hall of Hogwarts itself.
“Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.”
—Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address
I think the last time I wait four years for a particular day to arrive was the day I turned 21.
Good luck, President Biden. Your challenges are enormous, but you will not be doing them alone.
Jason outlines some ugly truths about how Twitter has suborned our better instincts in the quest for social validation. In response, he has limited his Twitter use and I have logged out of the site indefinitely.
Fun presentation about the rise and fall of computer languages from the 60s until now. I didn’t appreciate how popular Pascal was in the 70s and 80s.
https://youtu.be/UNSoPa-XQN0
This December 2020 article from Pew: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/12/17/voters-say-those-on-the-other-side-dont-get-them-heres-what-they-want-them-to-know/
I carefully read ALL of the Trump voter quotes. I agreed with 2-3.
Most fall into:
* "stop yelling at us for supporting fascism"
* "Trump has done a lot! [never specifics]"
* "Biden is corrupt! [no specifics, but fine]"
* "Follow the constitution! [which they claim to understand better than Biden voters]"
* "You have to do your own research"
* "I work hard, you need to too! [denying implicit bias and systemic racism]".
And there is a lot, A LOT of self-pity coming from the right.
There is one spectacular self-own:
"We don’t go on a rampage and have riots, unlike the Democrats and
Antifa and Black Lives Matter, if we don’t win an election."
The Dems have to get better at explaining how their policies will help
these folks and then deliver on that promise.
I am proud to release Runnel, the brain-dead MP3 streamer.
https://github.com/taskboy3000/runnel
It's version 0.0 (which means you will need to read the source
to figure it out). It's perl, HTML5, and JavaScript.
Call this the "it works on my desktop and on my mobile devices" release.
When oily-skinned old white dudes my age (or slightly younger) complain on youtube that the new series of older franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, or Doctor Who have become preachy with identity politics, I scream at my mobile device.
These shows have always explored contemporary social issues, you nimrod. Maybe, you were too stupid to notice when you first watched the shows?
I am slow, so it took until this morning to understand at least the pretense of why some Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen: few understand how long it takes to count mail-in votes.
The dumb drama of watching states flipped from red to blue created by the media doggedly reporting likely winners of states when no state should have been called at all until the all the votes were counted. Many in the media itself said, given the vast mail-in votes, all reporting should refrain from calling any winner, but just report on the progress of counting the votes. Those pleas when unheard.
I have seen many elections lost by the Democratic challenger where states flipped as the last few votes got counted. I suppose if you had never seen this demoralizing form of failure, you might well believe in a conspiracy.
Of course, none of this applies to the GOP Congressmen and State reps who know better and are fanning seditious lies for political gain. Unclear what pot of gold these characters think they are chasing.
#politics
I totally added a search engine to an MP3 streaming app using perl’s Tree::Trie in under 2 hours. Trie is fast and fairly good on memory. I indexed on song title, artist, album, and genre. Search terms are ANDed together (a feature I had to add).
Current mood: 😲
(From @szabgab)
When programming languages turn into cults, their culture has failed.
Perl and Python share common DNA and common vision. Please denigrate neither, although thoughtful criticisms of both are always welcome.
Such a grim-dark novel written today would feature crowds cheering as the robots/aliens/wolf-things devour babies in the streets during a Saturnalia celebrating the world’s “return to the Glory Days.”
Been using Fraidycat to follow folks Twitter (h/t @jmacdotorg).
Worth noting that taskboy.com's articles and notes each have feeds Friadycat can consume.
Here’s a photo of my 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 powering two 5” displays configured as one logical desktop. Two small screens is actually quite useful for development (if I wear my glasses :-)
https://www.taskboy.com/img/dual-micro-rpi-displays.jpg#rpi
So far this year, I have:
* Written a blogging system based on Plerd
* Ripped dozens of CD
* Started writing my own mp3 streaming service
2020, you are an insane version of 2000.
I am taking a trip in the Way-Back machine by installing ampache on Mac OS X so that I may have a local MP3 streaming service.
I have to deal with PHP dependencies and everything! Weee!
#osslife
Was rereading HPL’s Cool Air and, oh boy, it is racist A.F.
The racism is casual and completely unneeded by the story, which is pretty weak anyway.
I need a shower.
The Affordable Care Act was a GOP initiative before it was passed by the Dems under Obama.
By attacking it, the GOP validates Sanders’ position on Medicare for all, which will never be undone by SCOTUS.
Can’t stop progress.
Growlers are big jugs of beer that come with their own caps. Boston Beer Works used to sell them. Using stoppers works, of course. You can buy the Big Boi bottles too without feeling overcommitted.
This summer, I read two adult, nonwork books: Ringworld and Jesus, Interrupted.
Ringworld’s sexism was off-putting.
Erhman’s content is excellent, if a bit repetitive.
#summerreads
I am currently reading ORA’s _High Performance MySQL_, a book last updated in 2015.
The book is most useful to me for re-orienting the way I think about hows and whys to measure performance.
I have been using MySQL for more than 20 years now. It’s been good to me.
#dba#sql#mysql
Jason continues to reap the benefits my pestering him to learn the very excellent Mojolicious framework.
Since there is only twitter and rss in my life, I have no need to consolidate chat streams.
Teddy Roosevelt called the U.S. Presidency a bully pulpit, as anything the said by that office is reported by the press.
It is unfortunate that the press continues this tradition when the office is used to disseminate demonstrable fallacies, infelicities, and frauds.
Since 1971, only three incumbent presidents failed to get re-elected. Two of them were Republicans.
Two presidents have been elected without the majority of popular votes. Both were Republican.
There is still time to register to vote in November.
There are more pressing issues, but the number of white dudes over 30 hating on Disney Star Wars on YouTube vexes me.
Would the prefer no Star Wars? Because that’s what they are going to get.
It’s not all bad:
2012 - GOP female VP nom
2016 - Dem female Pres nom
2020 - Dem female VP nom
This trend was unthinkable when I was a kid.
#politics#amendment19
The are many funny things about Qanon, the Russian-sponsored disinformation project.
The funniest is holding up DJT as someone who will *find and destroy* a nest of pedophiles.
Just like suggesting Reagan was a master planner.
Last night, I had an Unomare, which is a variety of stress dream named for a certain Pizzaria where I used to work.
This one involved being a waiter at Disney, where some of my Cape Cod friends were and exotic animals.
Somehow, I made $1000 in tips.
Only on the doorstep of 50, do I feel like I am thinking more clearly, more rigorously than at any previous point in my life.
I believe I might have gotten here much earlier if either I had less trauma as a kid or had I aggressively treated it (and my dyslexia).
Do not neglect your bowels, er, mental health.
#life
I really need to advertise that taskboy.com accepts web mentions and come up with some help on posting web mentions on my content.
Need to add WM summaries to notes pages.
#plerd
Using duct tape and gum, I have stitched together a system that publishes the notes I write for www.taskboy.com/notes_roll.html to Twitter. There is some latency between when the note appears on my site and Twitter, but that is a feature.
#indieweb
A lot of fighting with apache SSL offloading last night.
This plerd wants to use the whim site I set up as a REST
resource.
This means that the SSL blog pages need to request SSL
resources from whim. Whim is just a mojo process running
HTTP. Apache can handle the SSL part and forward the HTTP
part to whim (that's what SSL offloading is).
This mostly appears to be working now, but I find that the
little whim server can get overwhelm by requests from the
blog. I think I need some caching here, but not sure the
what the best app is for this sort of architecture.
Working on:
* Updates to my plerd fork to support web mentions via whim
* Various small Layout tweaks to plerd
* Getting bridgy to post my notes to twttr (need more discovery on this)
* Finishing the RPG/racism set of posts. Obviously, this needs to have the right tone and that’s tricky
Looking at the covid numbers in Massachusetts (https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/massachusetts),
our state has made enviable progress in reducing deaths since mid-April.
However, we are somewhat plateaued at where the disease was April 1.
Put another way, without PPE and state-mandated closures, MA could see covid deaths soar back to its peak levels in about 2-3 weeks.
Man, I really have come to love using Bear as a text editor on iOS.
There is a lot of competition for editors on the desktop,
but Bear feels just right on mobile.
Excellent work, Team Bear.
#blogging#bear
Dear Jason,
Long-time reader; first time commenter.
I am concerned that your algorithm may cause integer overflows
even on 64 bit hardware.
Are you single-handedly attempting to move the industry to more
quickly adopt 128 bit CPUs?
I'll take my answer of the air. Thanks.
So, you **can** create a text file from Dropbox directly!
But it’s not a great editor. Good, perhaps, for quick, dumb notes, like this one.
I’d give it 3/5 stars for plerd-purposes. As in “editor of last resort.”
#plerd#editors#dropbox
Twenty Five Thousand.
That's the number of tweets and tweets I produced for Twitter since 2008.
More than enough words to have written a book instead.
I am appalled.
As a further commitment to slow thinking, I backed down the cadence of my plerd to check for new posts/notes every 3 minutes.
There is nothing that urgent that I write that cannot wait for three minutes to publish.
I have whim installed on taskboy.com. The installation was straight-forward.
Configuring apache’s reverse proxy was more challenging, since I do not do that often.
#plerd#whim
Start using this https://goaccess.io/ to monitor web traffic, which is what I used to do in the late 90s with perl and other tools.
This version has a cute ncurses interface and is written in go.
#unix#cli
#bear is working out well for my plerd needs.
Actually sprang for a subscription (renting software is terrible
but it’s a naughty world and devs gotta eat).
This plerd fork turned into a substantial rewrite.
What I feared would be a week of work is closer to that
of a month.
Still wrapping my head around microformats and web mentions.
Mostly there conceptually, but how to implement this with my
plerd is going to take some trial and error.
#plerd
