Making another attempt at learning to tango, this time at a more-beginner, more-local class. It’s still super hard but he makes me question whether I even know how to walk, let alone dance, but I love it so much!
Kind: Notes
Remembering the 90s Web
This morning I had a lovely meeting with Andreas Marakis, who’s researching the sociological impact of the Web of the 1990s on people who experienced it first-hand.
I’m seeing more and more interest in this period – even, surprisingly, among people too young to be nostalgic about it – as the countercultural “web renaissance” tiptoes out of the shadows and encourages newcomers to take their first steps in building their own Web identity with HTML, CSS, and (maybe) JavaScript.
Anyway: chatting to Andreas was great and it reminded me of quite how grateful I am to have gotten to experience a lot of these seminal technologies when they were at their newest and most-experimental.
F-Day plus 115
115 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what’s beneath and whether it’s stable enough to lay a new floor on top of. Also, somebody’s coming around to quote for the laying of new floors (and we’ll see if their numbers line up with those estimated by the insurance company).
Yodawg
“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm.”
The improvement to code quality that drops the coverage metric 40%!
Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy.
Then I realised the method didn’t have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn’t have any, so my change would improve test coverage. Nice.
But it didn’t. CI complained that test coverage had dropped. Wait, what? All I did was move some code and add a unit test.
Then I realised that the coverage analysis tool was only counting files that actually contained any tested code. By adding a test to part of a previously-untested file, that file became part of the scored codebase. Uh-oh.
Looked deeper. Turns out the code coverage tool was also counting the test files themselves as being part of the code-under-test.
Fixed all of the above. Code coverage score dropped by about 40%. 😱
Now I’ve got more work to do.
Happy Friday. Check what your coverage tool is inspecting, folks.
Optional AUP
Got to say, it’s very sporting of AWS to make compliance with their terms of service and acceptable use policy optional.
Sending a test email from WordPress/ClassicPress using WP-CLI
Note to self: ignore search results that say to install a plugin; the absolute fastest way to send a test email from a WordPress/ClassicPress installation (assuming you’re using WP-CLI) is just to run something like:
wp eval 'wp_mail("recipient@example.com", "Test Email", "A test email from WP-CLI");'
Ground White Pepper
There are many things I don’t like about the kitchen in the Chicory House where we’re living medium-term following our house flood.
But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot for “buying a new one where the last one’s still more than half-full”.
Wikipedia @ 25: Surface plasmon resonance
I think I’m probably done with my blog (and podcast) series of Wikpedia @ 25 posts. It’s been a surprising amount of work.
But don’t think I’ve stopped hitting Random Article! Today I was reading about surface plasmon resonance, and, despite looking at it on and off all day… I still don’t think I “get” it. I’ve even dived into the linked articles to try to get a background understanding of the topics around it, but… nope. It’s still all gibberish to me!
Think I need the ELI5 version!
Twenty Inches
I let the elder kid choose her lunch. She chose a pizza so huge that each slice is larger than her entire face. Needless to say, she needed a little help with it!
My Biggest Fan
As both the UK’s heatwave and my up-and-down England road trip continue, I think I’ve finally found a fan big enough to cool me off.
Pied Wagtail and Coffee
Drinking a coffee while editing a podcast episode in the beautiful Ullswater valley, and this lovely little pied wagtail came by to say good morning!
Self-clear area
I spent a while failing to interpret this sign. It seemed to be saying that if you didn’t clear your tray… then you’d get ketchup poured on your wrist?
It turns out there’s a baby bottle warming station on the other side of the bins.
(It is possible they my brain is struggling from a lack of sleep.)
Note #29298
It’s been too damn hot out, so Ruth, the kids, and I took refuge at the snow park of an indoor ski centre!
Wikipedia @ 25: Milices Patriotiques
My random Wikipedia article of the day was Milices Patriotiques, who were a 22,000-strong communist group and part of the Belgian resistance in the Second World War. Which sounded really interesting, but their article was tragically short so that’s pretty much all I have to say about them!