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raising nuclear physicists for meat Wednesday, November 28 2018
Today I formally began my work on a project designed to update a crusty old system for processing tax data arriving in an ancient document format where data is provided in a position-dependent manner (as opposed to more modern formats such as CSV that use, say, linefeeds and commas to present columnar data). The original plan was to rewrite it all in C#, but today I explored whether doing it as an Electron app might be a good idea. Electron apps are written in Javascript, where I happen to have some expertise, and, since that would be using web technologies, it might also make it easier to migrate any tool I might create to the web. The downside is a big one, one that makes me die a little inside every time I work on or download Electron apps: their enormous bloated size. The problem with Electron is that every app comes with its own completely independent web browser and web server, all self-contained in a stand-alone software stack functioning as a desktop app. That's a lot of resources committed to doing one particular thing. To my way of thinking this is deeply wasteful, like using a fancy laptop only as an MP3 player or raising nuclear physicists for meat. But it's probably where software development is going. It's also what routinely happens in nature (our bodies, for example, are composed of trillions of cells, each of which, with some exceptions such as red blood cells, contains a complete blueprint for building a complete human being). Maybe some day Electron apps can be designed so that they use a shared software stack codebase to eliminate some of the duplication. But that day has not yet arrived.
On the twilight drive home tonight, I stayed in the left lane as I approached the bridge replacement over the Esopus just east of the Sawkill exit on US 209, because that had been the one lane open (since it had to use the east-bound bridge while the west-bound bridge was being replaced). But then I saw that it was the left lane that was now closed. The new bridge was operational! There were still machines doing work in its left lane (and from a still-closed lane on the east-bound bridge), but it looked like they were down to little things like side-rail work and cleanup. Once that project is finished, my commute will be about 20% improved. Combined with my discovery of the Middle Road shortcut, that commute will be significantly better than it was when I first started doing it.
I'd taken Ramona with me to work today, and (as usual) she growled and menaced Auggie the Doggie when my colleague Alex brought him to work. Some of this might've been aggression related to a rawhide bone that Ramona didn't even really seem to want. Alex and I tried walking the dogs together around the building, and Ramona insisted on bringing the rawhide bone with her. At one point she lunged at Auggie, dropping the rawhide in the process. This gave Auggie (who also wasn't particularly interested in the rawhide) the opportunity to grab it, which seemed like justice to the humans present.
Later, on another dog walk involving just me and Ramona, I managed to step on a huge yellow dog shit with one of my Keen sandals. This had happened once before, and it had been a disaster. Keen treads feature narrow little crevasses from which shit removal is impossible unless one carefully goes over it with something like a toothpick. Today, though, I had the benefit of piles of snow still lingering from the freakish snowstorm of early November 2018. Stomping alternately in gravel and snow got rid of the bulk of the material, though to get some of it I had to take the sandal off (right there by the dumpster) and pick at it.
Back at the house, I ate one of the delicious samosas we'd bought yesterday at Aaojee in Middletown and restarted the fire.
At some point I wanted to download some photographs from my phone, so I connected it to Woodchuck and then went to the Quick Settings panel hoping to make my phone behave like a USB drive. But the setting that had allowed this was no longer present. My phone was built for the Chinese market and runs an Android variant named Miui, and Miui had recently updated itself to version 10.1 (without my permission, of course) and, in so doing, had eliminated this important function. I don't use my phone for much, but one of the main things I use it for is as a digital camera. But that's it; I find phone-based ways for dealing with phones awkward and limiting. I want to take the pictures off the phone via USB and then handle them on a real computer, one with a large screen, keyboard, and, ideally, a mouse. The risk of losing features I depend on is one of the reasons I prefer using operating systems (like Windows 7) where auto-updating can be turned off forever. On some level, my phone is an agent with its own agenda, and losing an important feature is enraging. (I'd root the phone and take back more control, but it's working well and, at least at this point, I don't want to go through the bother or take the risk, though that risk seems smaller now that I know what the risks of auto-updating are.)
Obviously, I was going to have to find a solution to this problem. Unfortunately, there didn't appear to be any normal way for getting control of my phone's USB connectivity. But eventually I found how to enable Developer settings, something I probably should've been using from the start. This allowed me to configure the phone's USB port to use MTP ("Media Transfer Protocol") which made it behave as desired. Now I don't even have to give permission for it o behave that way when I plug it in.
Our Verizon DSL was working so unreliably tonight that after I climbed in bed (at around 9:00pm!) I began watching the movie Embers served from the household media server. it's a movie about a post-apocalyptic world where some disease is robbing humans of their ability to form memories.
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