Mo @mo@nitech.online

It should be a legal requirement that there is free high-speed Internet access available anywhere that parents have to wait around for their kids to do activities. This thought has been brought to you courtesy of a shitty 3G connection at camogie practice.

I *think* I’m now fully on this instance. I did the whole follows/followers migration thing earlier today. Everyone I follow has been quiet today though so it could be completely broken for all I know.

Still doing that split brain thing of having @mkelly and @mo. I think I can do an account migration at some point, but I'll need to get nitech.online upgraded at some stage.

*taps mic*

(I don't schedule it to be annual, it's just that it seems to be that the Christmas break is the only opportunity I actually get to maintain the server.)

Just tried the annual update of this Mastodon server and had to give up because it looked like I was running out of memory. 🙁

Hosting company got back to me and said they could migrate in all my existing devices. For about £7 per device per year. That’s not happening.

Back to using the Cloud Key locally!

It’s Christmas, so that can only mean one thing... HOME NETWORKING TIME!

Except my new UniFi Switch is registered with a cloud hosted controller, and I’m stuck waiting for support to help me out with it. Very tempted to just reset it and adopt into the existing controller pending a full migration.

Merry Christmas nitech.online!

Turns out that Core Data is not very intuitive when you come back to it for the first time in about 3 years.

Following up on my Python build woes last week, I finally got it sort of working.

In the end it was trying to use libraries that were in both `/usr/local/lib` (for `libpython`) and `/usr/local/lib64` (for `libssl` and `libcrypto`), but my existing configuration for the Python build was only looking in `/usr/local/lib`.

Next step is to figure out why Python isn't building/installing to `/usr/local/lib64`.

Have to say though - Docker really makes this kind of thing a lot easier than it used to be. Trying this in the past used to be way harder - when the environment is contaminated with leftovers from previous failed attempts, it can be hard to determine if your process will actually work in a clean system.

Today in "Shouldn't we be past this shite": trying to compile Python to use a non-system version of OpenSSL.

* Can get Python to compile and work, but it pulls in the system OpenSSL.
* Can get Python to compile, link against the non-system OpenSSL, but can't find libpython.
* Can get Python to compile, link against libpython, but is unable to find libssl/libcrypto

I’ve been working in the software industry in Belfast for over 17 years, and I’ve been to a lot of university careers fairs in that time. I got to attend more at UUJ and QUB over the last couple of days and it got me really enthusiastic about the future of software engineering in Belfast. As a hiring manager, there were so many people that I wanted to take on straight away, and can’t wait to talk to them all in the upcoming interviews.

That said, I definitely find it harder to get moving with VS Code. Some of it is overcoming muscle memory, but some of it is a clunkiness that I thought they’d have sorted out by now. The extension installation UI is abysmal for a start, and opening a new window results in a soup of stuff on the screen that doesn’t feel conducive to getting started.

It was time. Atom has become so damn slow and kludgy for everything I'm doing these days that I've given up and am given VS Code another whirl.

Apparently it’s a lot easier to make a Mac app support Dark Mode for Mojave if you don’t have hard-coded colours in it. And if you’re not forced into using hard-coded colours because of the way you draw your app window.

Looks like I’m spending a bit of time rewriting this app.

Much of yesterday was spent bashing my head against #python not being able to find it's packages when invoked as a subprocess from another Python process. Every time it was run it would report an `ImportError` for the module `site`. We even set up the `PYTHONHOME` and `PYTHONPATH` through the env with no luck. Today we're hoping that using a `venv` gives us more luck.

That said, I reckon that the problem is that we rely on too many abstractions for this whole thing. NPM, Brunch, Elm, Phoenix and so on. It all adds up to me not knowing what exactly is being done on my behalf.

I suspect there's a bit of spelunking in my future to figure out how the plumbing is actually hanging together. Then maybe I'll appreciate what is broken.

I think I'm close to giving up on #elm with #phoenix. After trying the upgrade to 0.19 again, I can get the Elm code compiling but it seems like Brunch doesn't like compiling it.

I don't understand why this sort of thing has to be so opaque.