Weeknotes 150

Only boring things this week, even by the usual standards. Brace yourself.

Two streams. Standard. I spent ten minutes going on about pattern matching.

Good progress otherwise: by fixing stack unwinding and implementing a few commonly-used instructions, mainly call_indirect, I got an unusually large number (seven) of additional test scripts passing, bringing me to a grand total of 27 out of a possible 90. So I’m… nearly a third of the way there? Yes, that’s how it works.

Oh, I also upgraded to Ruby 3.2.0-preview3, which did give me all the little improvements I’d been hoping for. Nice.

I had to briefly turn my oven off at the wall to escape the otherwise inescapable UI state it got into when I accidentally brushed a tea towel against the controls. (I realise an oven door handle is not designed for hanging tea towels. The affordance is stronger than my willpower.) Interrupting the power resets the clock but since I never look at it anyway I was happy to let it sit there blinking twelve indefinitely.

A couple of days later I turned on the oven to preheat (i.e. heat) before cooking. The light and fan came on so everything looked normal, but when I came back I was annoyed to discover that it hadn’t actually got hot because — it turns out — my oven won’t properly turn on if its clock’s not set.

A bit of investigation revealed this is a common safety feature to prevent an unsupervised oven from burning the house down when the electricity comes back on after a power cut. That seems pretty tenuous but, well, if only one life is saved, and so on.

It’s odd that they’ve used “setting the clock” as a proxy for human interaction; I had to do plenty of interacting to tell it to turn on and heat up, but those interactions were clearly unconvincing. It’s also a curious decision to allow the light and fan to operate even when the oven is in a safety shutdown mode, which I assume is intended specifically to wind people up by making them think their oven’s working when it isn’t.

In my haste to just get the bloody thing to heat up I pressed the button to set the clock to noon, so now it’s completely wrong except that it can cook things again.

I’m sure you’ll agree this is an interesting new front in the war on time.

I went to another LRUG meeting and learned about ruby/debug’s scriptable breakpoints which is a cool feature. Unfortunately I’m terrible at remembering to reach for a debugger instead of just sprinkling puts all over the place, but maybe I should make an effort to build a new habit.

I also saw Sungazer at the Jazz Cafe in Camden.

Musically it was an excellent show but the crowd were unusually annoying and the layout of the venue makes it hard to move around and find a better spot. Next time I’d get a seat upstairs.

One hundred and fifty! 🎯