Automated updates: 2023-08-07

2023-08-06-code-haunting.md

@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ I forget where I discovered him, maybe through some Polish colleague in a discus
 
 At any rate, among Grabiński's more interesting ideas---particularly in stories such as *Szary pokój*/*The Gray Room*---he sometimes suggests that what we think of as a ghost actually comes from a sort of (presumably psychic or spiritual) echo or imprint of a prior inhabitant of the space.  This works on a literary level, I think, because it only barely exaggerates how we function in the real world.  We often keep objects around past their usefulness, if its imperfections trigger happy memories, and we might want to get rid of a useful thing if those same imperfections trigger unpleasant memories.
 
-And by the same token, we *create* our own ghosts as we live, wearing down an edge of a table that we frequently lean on.  Or, in other cases, we might spend time deliberately altering something to work better for our purposes, and this connection nicely bridges us from memory to haunting.  After all, how else can we describe a "haunted" space than that, no matter what you'd prefer, you can't use a space or object without feeling the presence of this absent person.
+And by the same token, we *create* our own ghosts as we live, wearing down an edge of a table that we frequently lean on.  Or, in other cases, we might spend time deliberately altering something to work better for our purposes, and this connection nicely bridges us from memory to haunting.  After all, how else can we describe a "haunted" space than that, no matter what you'd prefer, you can't use a space or object without feeling the presence of this absent person?
 
 While Grabiński gives this a clear supernatural bend, you can see how he gets there fairly quickly.  If a nicked book spine can remind you of a lost family member, and remodeling by a prior resident of one's home redirects their actions to cope with an odd shape, then---at least in a horror story---we can extrapolate that trend to the idea of an imbued presence that takes specific actions, too.  But as I said, we don't really need the supernatural angle.
 
@@ -58,9 +58,9 @@ I associate this idea with code, because programming revolves *almost* entirely
 
 We have **intention**, because we want the code to do something.  I've talked about this before, in the context of even the best [AI not replacing programmers]({% post_url 2021-07-18-copilot %}), because someone will always need to figure out how to solve a problem and explain that solution---to varying degrees of granularity---to the compiler or AI.
 
-Then, we have **personal imperfections**, where the developers took shortcuts or otherwise had some quirky idea of how things should work.  The colors that don't *quite* match, the form fields that appear in what feels like the wrong order, the odd phrasing of directions, formatting that only acknowledges the existence of one country, and many more small issues build up to give software the imprint of everyone who has worked on it.  And that doesn't even get to the deliberate "[Easter eggs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_%28media%29) inserted into software by developers, for various reasons.
+Then, we have **personal imperfections**, where the developers took shortcuts or otherwise had some quirky idea of how things should work.  The colors that don't *quite* match, the form fields that appear in what feels like the wrong order, the odd phrasing of directions, formatting that only acknowledges the existence of one country, and many more small issues build up to give software the imprint of everyone who has worked on it.  And that doesn't even get to the deliberate "[Easter eggs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_%28media%29)" inserted into software by developers, for various reasons.
 
-And finally, we have **trauma**, because shortly after we start, we start chasing bugs down and struggling to fix increasingly obscure problems, until either we (somehow) finish or determine that the cost to run down the remaining bugs will overwhelm the value provided by eliminating them.  When you write code, particularly code for other people, you mostly work in a state where you either feel frustrated that you haven't gotten something working *or* moving on to the next broken thing.
+And finally, we have **trauma**, because shortly after we start, we start chasing bugs down and struggling to fix increasingly obscure problems, until either we (somehow) finish or determine that the cost to run down the remaining bugs will overwhelm the value provided by eliminating them.  When you write code, particularly code for other people, you mostly work in a state where you either feel frustrated that you haven't gotten something working *or* move on to the next broken thing.
 
 Even more than most art, I would hazard to suggest, software embodies (at least some aspects of) the intentions and emotional states of its creators.  Sure, I exaggerate the suffering aspects of the job for symbolic and comedic purposes, but you can probably see why I might associate these two ideas.
 
@@ -70,7 +70,7 @@ To push this a bit further, let's talk a bit about another now-obscure author fr
 
 While obscure today, Korzybski once had *massive* influence on today's world.  You probably don't know his name, but you've heard his work echoed when people [mistake the map for the territory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation), forgetting that abstractions leave out important issues.  Or you might remember me (or someone else) talking about [avoiding forms of the verb *to be*, for greater clarity]({% post_url 2022-12-04-specificity %}).  You might recognize the references dropped to him in the works of Heinlein, van Vogt, Wilson, Hubbard, and more.  His work helped determine which Nazi war criminals could reasonably stand trial, and (less seemly, through Hubbard) it influenced aspects of [Scientology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology).
 
-In any case, his first book, [**Manhood of Humanity**](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25457), he presents some ideas that come off as oddball, but have some decent points within those ideas.  In particular, the book tries to make the case that it doesn't help us to think of humans as precisely like other animals, because we definitely differ, nor does it help us to think of ourselves as completely different, since we definitely share a lot with the rest of life on Earth.  He tries to thread this needle as follows.
+In any case, his first book, [**Manhood of Humanity**](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25457), presents some ideas that come off as oddball, but have some decent points within those ideas.  In particular, the book tries to make the case that it doesn't help us to think of humans as precisely like other animals, because we definitely differ, nor does it help us to think of ourselves as completely different, since we definitely share a lot with the rest of life on Earth.  He tries to thread this needle as follows.
 
  > The plants have a very definite and well known function---the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define the plants as the chemistry-binding class of life.
  >

2023-08-07-purple-heart.md

@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: Developer Diary, Purple Heart
+date: 2023-08-07 07:08:05-0400
+categories:
+tags: [programming, project, devjournal]
+summary: Progress on assorted projects
+thumbnail: /blog/assets/badge-of-military-merit.png
+teaser: This week's projects include reporting back on Saturday's "office hours," new project Notoboto, and a batch of library updates.
+spell: Lemmy notoboto Jectoons Miniboost Tcl Tk boto botos nonogram Replybrary Slackup Zoea Husnock
+proofed: true
+---
+
+In the United States, today marks the 241<sup>st</sup> anniversary of the creation of the [Badge of Military Merit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_of_Military_Merit), now known---or, arguably, succeeded by---the [Purple Heart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Heart).  While I don't generally go in for militarism, even I can accept that maybe we should at least briefly applaud those who sacrificed their bodies or entire lives to defending their country, even (or *especially*) if they didn't believe that the situation warranted military action.
+
+![A Badge of Military Merit](/blog/assets/badge-of-military-merit.png "Not to derail the topic, but it vaguely surprises that, at least to my knowledge, nobody produces a military-themed parody of Lucky Charms cereal...")
+
+I could get into massive arguments about the specific criteria, as you might guess, but I'll save my pedantry for talking about projects.
+
+## Social Media
+
+As teased for arbitrarily chosen parts of last week, on Saturday, I experimented with an "office hours" format on Matrix and Cohost.
+
+I "only" had one person showed up on Matrix---someone who you might recognize from [**Random Vignettes**]({% post_url 2023-05-13-vignettes %}), now in its third season---but we had a pretty great, wide-ranging conversation for a couple of hours.  To my eyes, that qualifies as a success, but don't fret if you feel left out.
+
+I may do this again in the future, but more importantly, I want to suggest that *other* people (like you, or maybe even literally you) hold their own office hours.  I realize that the premise feels a lot like something that only makes sense if you frequently use the phrase "personal brand" non-ironically, but you can get a Matrix chatroom running in seconds, and it feels like a fairly good platform for casual discussions.  Really, if you have any people interacting with what you do voluntarily, set it up; it can't go worse than giving you time to work on something.
+
+Meanwhile, I appear to have had a *second* problem with Lemmy.  In this case, based on some quick debugging, my server doesn't seem to send the multifactor authentication code to the right location, so I can't log in.  I'll give it another day or two before seeing if I can find a way to report the issue, since I don't know why it changed.
+
+## Notoboto
+
+{% github jcolag/notoboto %}
+
+I finally decided to give up on [Valence Native](https://github.com/valence-native/valence-native).  After more than three years, they still haven't even really updated their documentation, let alone fixed issues or advanced the functionality that they provide.  In addition, I've started to conclude that JavaScript might make a poor choice for "light-weight" desktop applications.
+
+Given that, I have decided to mostly abandon work on my [**Miniboost**](https://github.com/jcolag/Miniboost) note-taking application and develop something that'll actually do the job without much overhead or concerns of incomplete features.  And after more research and discussions than I care to admit, I landed on [Tcl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl)/[Tk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tk_%28software%29).
+
+Why use a programming language and toolkit released over thirty years ago that almost nobody else uses?  I'd call that a good question, especially since I went to the trouble of installing [Qt](https://www.qt.io/) instead.
+
+It started to take too long to figure out how to use Qt's various tools, though.  And short on time, I couldn't work out how to put anything useful together, probably due to prerequisites.
+
+By contrast, Tcl/Tk seems stable, and people have run such applications for long enough that I *probably* don't need to care much about CPU and memory footprints for my notes; in 1988, the [most powerful computer in the world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine) had less than a hundredth of the processing power on modern commodity graphics processors, and a high-end home computer would have had about a hundredth of *that* supercomputing power.  Tcl has a *slightly* more pleasant syntax for laying out user interfaces (to my eyes) than most of the languages boasting Tk libraries.  The ecosystem has a distribution format, so that people can run applications without worrying about installing anything special.  And my note-taking doesn't seem to have any extreme requirements that will make me wish that I had access to the breadth of libraries available for languages like Ruby, JavaScript, or Python.
+
+Currently, the program doesn't do much.  I created the repository and added an empty window.  But I can see it taking shape quickly and feel optimistic that this will survive longer than **Miniboost** did.
+
+Oh, and the name jokingly plays around with the name of [Boost Note](https://boostnote.io/), the original version of which created the notes that **Miniboost** uses and **Notoboto** will use.  Looking for anagrams of "boost," to both retain aspects of the name but also push away from it, I discovered [botos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boto), South American dolphins.  The similar and repeated vowel led me to replace the silent-e in "note" to conform, and drop the plural.
+
+## Library Updates
+
+I needed to bump library versions for the [**Daily Nonogram**](https://github.com/jcolag/picture-nonogram), my [**Mastodon Tool Trunk**](https://github.com/jcolag/tool-trunk), my [**Morning Dashboard**](https://github.com/jcolag/dash), [**Replybrary**](https://github.com/jcolag/library-twtterbot), [**Slackup**](https://github.com/jcolag/slackup), and [**Zoea**](https://github.com/jcolag/zoea).  Somewhat shockingly, that clears out my queue, at least for now.
+
+## Next
+
+Now that the queue of library updates has finally cleared out, I'll probably continue with **Notoboto** and go back to the **Mastodon Tool Trunk**.  Maybe more the former than the latter, since I actually *need* a working program for notes, whereas Mastodon already works, even if not how I'd prefer.
+
+* * *
+
+**Credits**:  The header image is adapted from [Badge of Military Merit, an award in the United States](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MeritBadge.jpg) by [Husnock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Husnock), placed in the public domain by the photographer.  The badge itself would have no copyright, both as a work of the United States government and its age.