pwaring

mart_brooks, 4 days ago to random

@pwaring Don't suppose you have any local intel about the likelihood of a 2024 BarCamp Manchester? 2023 was announced and then fizzled out.

pwaring, 5 days ago to random

Looking through search results and referrers today, I found that my 'Life as a coin-operated monkey' talk on freelancing has been cited in a guidebook produced by a lecturer at the University of Manchester:

https://www.cdyf.me/choosing

pwaring, 5 days ago to random

Had to switch over to mobile data to complete an online task today, because the large national company's website and app has extremely poor JavaScript that blows up if it can't load tracking assets (which I block on my local network). No fallback or error handling, just a stream of console errors and exceptions. The non technical user sees a button that you can click but doesn't do anything.

pwaring, 10 days ago to random

Just spent longer than I should wondering why a query wasn't producing the result I wanted, before remembering that you can't do something like this:

WHERE column = ?

if the placeholder value is NULL, you have to change the clause to:

WHERE column IS NULL

#sql

pwaring, 15 days ago to random

If you enjoyed the good weather today, especially in the North West, I would like to take full credit for organising a Geek Walk (it's a running joke that it almost never rains on our walks because the weather gods are on our side).

seawall, 15 days ago to random

The existence of the term "con crud" really should have been a greater indicator of how spaces are constructed and managed to exacerbate or mitigate the spread of illness.

I'm glad @kiwipycon and #PyConUS have been #COVIDcautious and doing things about it, but what other #conventions organisers are?

pwaring, 16 days ago to php

Finished client work for the week so spending a bit of time on side projects. Just closed two outstanding issues on my repository for bootstrapping PHP applications using the Slim framework, bringing the total down to zero.

#php #SlimFramework

pwaring, 16 days ago to random

If I'm ever feeling a bout of imposter syndrome, or feel like I've screwed up (e.g. with a bug deployed to production), I like to remember the time that an outsourcing company failed to provide enough security guards for the London Olympics and the gap had to be made up by the Royal Marines and paratroopers.

None of my mistakes have involved the armed forces being deployed.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/24/london-2012-olympics-g4s-military

pwaring, 17 days ago to random

Is there an equivalent of regex101.com for SQL queries? The way it breaks down regular expressions and tells you what each part does is incredibly useful, and I have a complex SQL query with a window function that I'd like to do the same for.

pwaring, 17 days ago to random

Today has made me realise how reliant I am on a decent search engine to do my job effectively. DuckDuckGo is down and Google results are full of garbage articles nowadays (DDG often highlights a StackOverflow question in the type of things I search for, which is super-useful).

I have toyed with the idea of running my own search engine based on a hand-picked list of computing sites - maybe it's time to push that forward...

pwaring, 17 days ago to movies

Tonight's film club choice is Silent Running. When I bought it on DVD, the salesperson at Fopp said it was a classic and that I would like it, but I found it very boring and grim (and dated - there are no women other than in music / computer voices, bit like The Deadly Assassin).

7:30pm UK time, remote over Skype - DM me if you would like to attend (we don't publicise the URL widely now as we used to get Zoom-bombed)

#films #FilmClub

Haste, 17 days ago to books

Question for fellow library nerds: I recently found a book from the 70’s which has “Return to Morgue” printed on the side no less than four times.

I’ve see this on correspondence before, but never understood what it meant. Surely they don’t mean an actual morgue (why send a book or letter there?) so I was wondering if this was a library or archivist term.

This particular one is “Investigative Reporting and Exiting” by Paul Williams, which is out of print.

#books #literature #history

pwaring, 18 days ago (edited 17 days ago) to random

If you're sending a card to multiple people (e.g. a couple, parents + children), which order do you write the names?

(I do time known for adults, age for children)

pwaring, 18 days ago to scifi

Just had an interesting discussion with Barra Hart, author of The Cries of Alaere at @mcrscifi

Our next book is Translation State by Ann Leckie on 18th June, 7pm (BST / UTC+1), online so anyone can join.

https://mcrscifi.wordpress.com/2024/05/21/next-science-fiction-book-june-2024/

#mcrsf #bookstodon #scifi

pwaring, 19 days ago to random

Top tip: If you're registering a company, don't choose a name with special characters, especially at the start or end of your name. There are too many systems which can't cope with this and it will cause you pain.

This toot brought to you by me interacting with a very large firm whose programmers haven't discovered bound parameters for SQL statements (assuming they're using a relational database, that might be too advanced tech). Not my business but I have to deal with the fallout.

pwaring, 19 days ago to random

I’ve never understood why some diplomats (or their embassies) refuse to pay the congestion charge in London (and similar fees in other countries). I get that there’s no sanction other than expulsion, but it seems extremely undiplomatic to not just refuse to pay for things in your host country, but to do so blatantly and repeatedly.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/20/us-embassy-owes-15m-in-congestion-charge-fees-says-transport-for-london

pwaring, 20 days ago to node

If you're using NPM to manage your frontend dependencies, remember to use npm ci (clean install) instead of npm install in local development and especially in deployment piplines. ci will install what's in your lock file, whereas npm install will sometimes mutate your lock file (which is utterly broken behaviour IMO).

#npm

mcrscifi, 21 days ago to random

I have just started "The Cries of Alaere" by Barra Hart - I think the page count on https://mcrscifi.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/next-science-fiction-book-may-2024/ is wrong - as my ebook looks shorter.

Anyhow - plenty of time to finish it for Tuesday evening's meeting (I hope).

If you've read it come along to discuss.
Followers will get the meeting URL tuesday afternoon.

sil, 21 days ago to random

Height is often used figuratively to express how good something is: higher is better, lower is worse. One might be of high intelligence, or low breeding, or whatever, which don’t have anything to do with actual height off the ground the way a high mountain does. Is this metaphor ancient? Would the ancient Greeks or the Phoenicians have used “high” metaphorically as we do?

(I think Latin did: dēcidere means to fall, but also figuratively to perish or die, which seems related.)

pwaring, 23 days ago to random

Question that came up at film club last week: I subscribe to 3 weekly magazines (one of which resulted in a suggestion for the club, hence the topic). Can you guess which 3?

Hints: they’re all published in the UK and not ‘top shelf’.