Scripting News: Friday, September 22, 2023
Tease: We have WordPress verbs in Drummer, and they work. Only web Drummer for now, not in Electric Drummer yet. #
When I was a kid I used to think how most of the stars of really old movies were dead. How far removed from my existence. I was watching a clip of Pee Wee Herman and realize he was just as dead as Lucille Ball, Raymond Burr, Judy Garland, Jim Nabors, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. For that matter he's just as dead as Ben Franklin.#
Oh that awful feeling when you come up with a term you know is going to catch on and the domain is available. #
I have a local friend who went to my high school so we have an important cultural reference point, and a local friend who was raised a few blocks from where I grew up, another strong cultural reference point. We can converse about many things without explaining because we started from the same place. I didn't know either of these people when I was growing up, just met them in the last few years. Same sort of thing happened at the Berkman reunion. #
I thought I had caught a second wind at 6PM last night, and rather than watch political nonsense on MSNBC (every day the same freaking boring story about the ancient fascist with orange hair) I went upstairs, rolled up my sleeves and wrote some new code deep in the bowels of the system I'm working on to report on SQL queries that were taking too long or returning too much data. #I was feeling very competent. Unfortunately the feeling was an illusion, the kind of mistake a novice makes. After a long day of wrestling with a codebase, you're in need of relaxing MSNBCisms -- not another tech challenge; and I am most definitely not a novice at making messes of a working piece of software. I've been doing it for 50 years! Half a century of software mayhem. It's even worse than it appears. #
Anyway, it appeared to work for the first few calls as I stepped through the code in the debugger, and then confident (still) I let it rip, and a horrific error message appeared about something called
flQueueAllRequests which presumably I put there a few years ago, and I panicked: "Revert! Time to revert Davey!" I said to myself, possibly in my mind or possibly out loud even. But alas NPM will not let you revert. The version numbers must move forward, never backward. How little the designers of NPM really understood about software development. 💥#Once a very long time ago, in 1976, I thought that they shouldn't put programmers in offices on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building with windows that open. I had a similar desperate empty feeling last night at 8PM. #
I tried to revert as best as I could, but the horrific crash persisted, and I did something I never do, I got up from the computer with the software I'm working on broken. #
Then I woke up in the middle of the night and thought "Davey you're not going to sleep any more, so get up and find the freaking problem." So I did. I got up. But I did not find the freaking problem. I wrote a sad missive to the people I'm working with asking for sympathy and help. And when I finally woke up for real at 7:30AM, with the sun out, birds singing, feeling rested and ready for a new challenge, I sat down, before eating breakfast or drinking coffee, rolled up my sleeves and set about fixing the problem. My first three attempts didn't work, then I finally thought of something I might do that did in fact fix the problem, and now I can breathe again. Whew.#
As a result of this novice move and its consequences I'd like to ask the NPM folks to come up with a way to say "get me the latest version of this package" instead of devising complex ways of saying whatever it was I was telling it to do that it did that made my software behave so badly. #
And yes, it's always fun to blame someone else, esp someone whose name you don't know, for your own mistakes. #
Your faithful reporter, Uncle Davey#
PS: Seriously, once I understood what the problem was I asked ChatGPT for the answer, and it's surprisingly complicated. #
Linkblog items for the day.
Cruise Ships Saddle Red Hook with Traffic 'Nightmare,' Toxic Fumes. streetsblog.org
Nebraska mother sentenced to 2 years in prison for giving abortion pills to pregnant daughter. apnews.com
Your NFTs Are Actually — Finally — Totally Worthless. rollingstone.com
Michael Wolff's Rupert Murdoch Book 'The Fall' Jumps to Top of Bestseller Lists After Fox Succession. variety.com
Biden campaign sending Gavin Newsom to Republican debate. axios.com
Veselka -- Ukrainian home cooking in Grand Central Terminal in NYC. grandcentralterminal.com
2014: The lost art of software testing. scripting.com
Turning an old car into a powerful generator. arduino.cc
Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events. propublica.org
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