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2025-11-26

Week 255: Books aren’t waterproof

I met some old colleagues from my time at the Ministry of Justice – ten years ago now, in those halcyon days before Britain decided to punch itself in the balls – for dinner at Tokyo Diner in the West End.

I don’t know how people who can’t read Japanese are supposed to find the place, as it’s in an area full of Chinese signs and the board above the door says only 東京ダイナー, but I suppose online maps make that less of a problem these days.

We chatted for hours while availing ourselves of endless free cups of hōjicha. It was fun, and probably the cheapest evening out I’ve had in a long time. Despite not having anything alcoholic to drink, I felt terrible the next morning. Perhaps drinking several litres of tea isn’t ideal for one’s sleep either.

The replacement for L—’s damaged book arrived. This is the one that Royal Mail left outside in the rain a few weeks ago.

Well, guess what? They left it out in the rain again. Fortunately, this time I rescued it before it was ruined. The pages were a little wavy from the ambient humidity, but after a few hours indoors it was back to normal.

I think what had happened is that they had hidden it in the electricity meter cabinet. They could do so because the lock is broken. But, because the lock is broken, it can’t hold in a thick hardback cookbook, which eventually fell out onto the plant pot in front.

Quite how we were supposed to know that they had hidden it there, I do not know. I have ordered a replacement lock so that no one can follow through on the same bright idea in future.

I finally found out why the Senegal Road cycle path is closed: works for SELCHP, the South East London Combined Heat and Power plant that burns rubbish to generate heat and power and pollution. According to the notice on Lewisham Council’s website (which explains why Southwark didn’t give an answer, although not why they didn’t even give me the courtesy of a reply at all) it was scheduled to be closed from 26 July to 24 October for a maximum of six months.

It’s been closed since the first week of July; 24 October has been and gone, and it hasn’t reopened. The latest estimate for reopening is apparently mid December but I’ll believe that when I see it.

I released a new version of my htmlentities gem (212 million downloads to date, but that’s probably greatly skewed by poorly-cached automated tests). It had only been ten years since the last one.

And then someone complained that I had removed support for Ruby versions that are past their end of life. Apparently, it’s “bad practice” to remove support without bumping the major version, but I reckon it’s bad practice to be running a no-longer-supported version of Ruby, and honestly SemVer is not really clear on this, and it’s not a religious text, or maybe it is, because one characteristic of religious texts is that they have multiple contested interpretations, so whatever. Anyway, I added versions back to Ruby 2.7 to the support matrix, as they still work with no changes, and pushed another release.

As I’ve already had some discussions about it, I should probably say explicitly that I am open to work. I’ve had a month and a half off and it’s been very nice, but there’s not enough money in fixing broken instruments to make that my full-time job.

If you have anything interesting (ideally, more interesting than yet another web app), get in touch!

This week’s links:

• Hollo is a federated single-user microblogging platform that implements a Mastodon-compatible API.
• Custom Element Examples (Without Javascript).
• Why does nationality matter, anyway? “[T]he current situation means that we grant people different rights based on their genetic heritage and on which scrap of land they happened to be born on”.
• Scientists Say Their AI System Can Scan Your Face to Detect Whether a Company Should Hire You. Get in loser, we’re reinventing phrenology!
• I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. “I received 122 paper submissions … nearly 39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI.”