Week 276: Back to reality

After a holiday that was busy, full of new places and experiences, but also very relaxing, going back to sitting in front of a computer all day has been a difficult adjustment.

And as if just getting used to work again wasn’t enough, Tuesday ended up being longer than anticipated. I hadn’t had a chance to check over my bike and pump up the tyres over the weekend, so I took the Overground to Peckham on Monday and Tuesday. That was fine until Tuesday afternoon, when I checked the time of the next train and saw that they had all been cancelled.

Something had caught fire at Clapham Junction, at the end of the line, and as a result trains on the entire Surrey Quays to Clapham Junction branch were cancelled all afternoon and evening. One might naïvely ask why they couldn’t just run the trains most of the way and back again, but I think all the platforms along that branch serve multiple routes, and using one as a temporary terminus would block other services.

I checked the options to get home: 56 minutes on the slow, winding 381 bus, or 58 minutes on foot. I chose to walk, as it costs nothing and it’s a bit more pleasant – on a mild light evening, that is; it would have been different in the rain. I used to walk home from Holborn fairly regularly when I worked there; that was a little further but more picturesque, especially along the river. However, I prefer to walk out of choice than out of necessity.

On Wednesday evening we went to a Green Party fundraiser comedy gig, conveniently located just upstairs from my desk. You never really know what you’re going to get at that kind of event, but the overall standard was good, and it was an entertaining evening.

I saw an unhappy-looking vole in the garden on Friday afternoon. It was just sitting there, looking unwell. It scampered away when I got close, but I put some water out in case that was the problem. I haven’t seen a dead vole, so perhaps it helped, but that’s all I know.

We met a friend for brunch at the recently-opened Simplicity Bakery in old Rotherhithe, in the premises that used to be the otherwise unconnected Simplicity restaurant. The coffee was good, and the leek and potato pastry was delicious. I hope it succeeds; that it was busy is a promising sign.

It’s been a while since I posted any links, so here’s a few:

• A Japanese Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas.
• Advanced Mac Substitute “is an API-level reimplementation of 1980s-era Mac OS. It runs 68K Mac applications in an emulator without an Apple ROM or system software.”
• The Media Let Mandelson Get Away With It for Decades.
• AI’s sinister takeover of British politics. “British laws are already being written by AI.” But of course! Of course those dunderheads would outsource their thinking to a machine.
• picoZ80 is a RP2350-based pin-compatible Z80 emulator plus RAM. It can also emulate a disk controller and other peripherals.
• Kindling is a fast, open source Kindle publishing toolkit that can also compile dictionaries and comics.
• Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii.
• Self-updating screenshots. A simple great idea: capture your documentation screenshots in your build system so that you don’t have to faff around updating them every time you make a change.
• Bring Back Idiomatic Design. Modern web applications are idiosyncratic and lack the consistency, predictability, and consequent usability of older desktop environments.
• AI data centres can warm surrounding areas by up to 9.1°C. Is that good?
• On the foolishness of “natural language programming”. Edgar Dijkstra: “The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.”
• Let’s talk about LLMs. “Very few organizations have the strong fundamentals needed to absorb even a relatively moderate, incremental increase in the amount of code they generate, which I suspect is why so many studies and reports find mixed results and lots of broken CI pipelines. Not only is there no silver bullet, there especially is no quick or magical gain to be had from rushing to adopt LLM coding without first working on those fundamentals.”