Weeknotes 55

It snowed in London today. 🌨

I go back and forth on my feelings about lockdown. On the one hand, it’s utterly miserable and I feel like I’m just marking time until it’s over and I can go back to some semblance of a normal life. But on the other hand, it’s basically fine isn’t it? I just spend more evenings at home watching TV than I used to. How can it be both miserable and fine?

Since June last year I’ve been unable to put my work laptop to sleep because it always crashes on wake. It’s pretty annoying to have to boot it from cold every morning and remember to shut it down again every evening, so after I did a clean install of Big Sur last week I decided not to reinstate my complicated workaround and see what happened.

Happily the problem seems to have been fixed. I haven’t had a single kernel panic and it always sleeps and wakes without incident. Inevitably the longer uptime has unearthed other latent problems (e.g. flaky webcam) but they’re a bit easier to live with.

Thanks for sorting it out Tim Apple!

At work I’m slowly understanding more about how TruffleRuby works. It took me a while to get my head around a compiler issue this week but I eventually managed to remove some unnecessary null checks. It’s a large and complicated project but as I work on the code I’m starting to see how the pieces fit together.

One incidental frustration of working with Java code is how long all the file paths are. I frequently want to do command-line operations on files with names like src/​main/​java/​org/​truffleruby/​core/​module/​ModuleNodes.java and it becomes tiresome to tab-complete down through all the directories each time.

Fortunately James suggested the perfect solution: fzf, which I’m already using in Vim, comes with key bindings that make ⌃T bring up the fzf interface from the shell, and from there it’s easy to quickly pick the path of a deeply-nested file. I had no idea that this feature existed because you have to enable it by running $(brew -‍-‍prefix)/​opt/​fzf/​install. Recommended.

A man phoned me up and then two men (one of whom could have been the same man as the first man) came round and took my broken TV away. Now I don’t have a TV. They clearly didn’t work directly for the shop I bought it from, which isn’t unusual, but it wasn’t until they left that I realised they could have just been opportunistic male television thieves with a phone. They did give me a piece of paper in exchange for the TV, though, so that’s probably fine.

The living room feels really weird without a TV in it, like I’ve just moved in and haven’t got my shit together. The reality is that I moved in years ago.

I’m enjoying Arrested Development. It’s amusing without really being funny; I haven’t laughed yet but I like the gentle absurdity of it. The best thing it’s done so far is to remind me of the Pre-Taped Call In Show sketch from Mr Show which did make me laugh when I rewatched it just then.

After four months of relentless baking I’ve finally reached the bottom of the massive bag of flour that dominates my kitchen. Don’t worry, I ordered another massive bag of flour.

On Thursday I touched my toes briefly.