Weeknotes 82

August??? etc

I’ve now had time to read some of the second edition of The Elements of Computing Systems. It’s a decent upgrade: the material is essentially the same but it‘s been expanded, clarified and reorganised. The new organisation more clearly separates the hardware and software halves of the book, and there are improved & additional illustrations which do a better job of explaining the ideas.

The first edition has a frustrating habit of scattering closely-related concepts far apart — it’s not uncommon to have to assemble a single coherent explanation from some pieces found in the “Background” section at the start of a chapter, some in “Specification” and some in “Implementation” — but that happens less often now that they’ve rewritten the text to present related ideas together. Thankfully they’ve dropped the ill-conceived “Background” section entirely and replaced it with as many sections as they need to support the rest of the chapter.

I admit I’m disappointed that they haven’t updated the anachronistic website or any of the downloadable tools and projects. This feels like a real missed opportunity because the site is visually offputting and the tools are clumsy and frustrating to use, and these superficial problems could easily deter new readers from the incredibly valuable underlying material.

If I was rich enough to retire (🙏) I’d definitely spend a few months rebuilding the tools from scratch, probably in React (for the web) or SwiftUI (for Apple platforms), so that at least some readers would have a more inviting and accessible option than a very clunky Java GUI. Likewise it would be a relatively small project to rebuild the website so that it looks more inviting and causes less confusion. If anyone wants to just pay me to do all this for some misguided reason then that’d be great.

Unbelievably it still doesn’t have any Tetris in it. 🙄

Overall: I recommend the second edition and it remains my “if you read only one book” pick for software engineers despite the gradual neglect of its online presence. I continue to feel a little frustrated that its full potential remains unrealised because it could easily reach a wider audience with a bit more polish, but I understand it’s an academic project so I’m mostly just grateful that it exists.

The revised Apple TV remote built into Control Centre on iPadOS 15 is a mixed bag.

Good: it repurposes the iPad’s hardware buttons to control the Apple TV’s volume and Siri integration. Maybe earlier versions did this but I never saw the UI call it out so I wasn’t aware of it; now it does and so I am. Very useful.

Bad: the standalone remote app was unpublished last year, but iPadOS 15 prevents you from launching it even if it’s installed (imperious error message: “TV Remote Has Moved to Control Centre”) so it’s no longer possible to have a TV remote open in Slide Over. That’s a downgrade because it was really useful to be able to keep a persistent remote on the screen sometimes; bringing up Control Centre blurs out the rest of the screen so you can’t leave it open for occasional playback control while doing something else. Bad karma Tim Apple.

Sometimes at work I theatrically sigh “oh, heavy is the burden of being me” when confronted with a tiny inconvenience but I’m starting to worry that some of my colleagues don’t recognise this reference to a 1993 episode of Deep Space Nine. ♻️

Tomorrow is not a bank holiday.

A reader wrote in to ask how I store my flour. The answer is that I keep it in the original paper bag, slumped on a chair at my dining table like a sullen child, with the top folded over a few times and clipped closed on the corner with a big BEVARA clip. This has so far provided adequate protection against weevils and/or sunlight. It’s not super convenient because I do have to regularly scoop it out into litre jars to make it available for use but I don’t mind.

A new 16kg bag of flour arrived this week.

12.1kg down.