F-Day plus 125

125 days since our house flooded, and the damaged furniture fittings, floors, underfloors, and now inner walls have been torn out.

Over a third of a year since we had to move out, I’m optimistic that perhaps, at last, reconstruction work is almost ready to begin.

It’s a long, slow process. And there’s clearly a way to go. But it’s good to see progress happening.

A view through a pair of dilapidated residential rooms, through the gaps in a hollowed-out partition wall.

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Note #29482

🎶 It starts with sausage,
A hot dog in a bun.
One simple sausage,
Put some mustard on one…

Is it just me, or are (sinner) Sir Pentious‘s colours reminiscent of a hot dog?

Sir Pentious, an anthropomorphic snake from Hazbin Hotel, in black and yellow longitudinal stripes with red 'eyes'.

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The chair guardian

I guess it’s sweet that the dog has decided that I’m not to leave my home office without her noticing.

But when the naps right behind my wheelie chair I worry she’s going to get her paws run over!

A fawn-coloured French Bulldog lies on a laminate floor against the feet of an office chair.

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Tango Two

Making another attempt at learning to tango, this time at a more-beginner, more-local class. It’s still super hard but he makes me question whether I even know how to walk, let alone dance, but I love it so much!

Remembering the 90s Web

This morning I had a lovely meeting with Andreas Marakis, who’s researching the sociological impact of the Web of the 1990s on people who experienced it first-hand.

I’m seeing more and more interest in this period – even, surprisingly, among people too young to be nostalgic about it – as the countercultural “web renaissance” tiptoes out of the shadows and encourages newcomers to take their first steps in building their own Web identity with HTML, CSS, and (maybe) JavaScript.

Anyway: chatting to Andreas was great and it reminded me of quite how grateful I am to have gotten to experience a lot of these seminal technologies when they were at their newest and most-experimental.

F-Day plus 115

115 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what’s beneath and whether it’s stable enough to lay a new floor on top of. Also, somebody’s coming around to quote for the laying of new floors (and we’ll see if their numbers line up with those estimated by the insurance company).

Several vehicles parked in the rain on the rural residential driveway of 'The Green'.

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Yodawg

“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm.”

A fawn-coloured French Bulldog wrapped in a blanket in a way reminiscent of robes. This, combined with her wrinkled features, makes her look a little like Yoda.

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The improvement to code quality that drops the coverage metric 40%!

Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy.

Then I realised the method didn’t have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn’t have any, so my change would improve test coverage. Nice.

But it didn’t. CI complained that test coverage had dropped. Wait, what? All I did was move some code and add a unit test.

Then I realised that the coverage analysis tool was only counting files that actually contained any tested code. By adding a test to part of a previously-untested file, that file became part of the scored codebase. Uh-oh.

Looked deeper. Turns out the code coverage tool was also counting the test files themselves as being part of the code-under-test.

Fixed all of the above. Code coverage score dropped by about 40%. 😱

Now I’ve got more work to do.

Happy Friday. Check what your coverage tool is inspecting, folks.

Optional AUP

Got to say, it’s very sporting of AWS to make compliance with their terms of service and acceptable use policy optional.

Screenshot of dropdown field labelled 'Will you will comply with AWS Service Terms and AUP - optional', currently set to 'Yes'. The label is saying that the field is optional, but the joke is that it sounds like complying with the terms of service is optional.

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Sending a test email from WordPress/ClassicPress using WP-CLI

Note to self: ignore search results that say to install a plugin; the absolute fastest way to send a test email from a WordPress/ClassicPress installation (assuming you’re using WP-CLI) is just to run something like:

wp eval 'wp_mail("recipient@example.com", "Test Email", "A test email from WP-CLI");'

Ground White Pepper

There are many things I don’t like about the kitchen in the Chicory House where we’re living medium-term following our house flood.

But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot for “buying a new one where the last one’s still more than half-full”.

Close-up of a spice rack containing not one, not two, not three but four tubs of 'ground white pepper by Sainsburys'.

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Wikipedia @ 25: Surface plasmon resonance

I think I’m probably done with my blog (and podcast) series of Wikpedia @ 25 posts. It’s been a surprising amount of work.

But don’t think I’ve stopped hitting Random Article! Today I was reading about surface plasmon resonance, and, despite looking at it on and off all day… I still don’t think I “get” it. I’ve even dived into the linked articles to try to get a background understanding of the topics around it, but… nope. It’s still all gibberish to me!

Think I need the ELI5 version!

Twenty Inches

I let the elder kid choose her lunch. She chose a pizza so huge that each slice is larger than her entire face. Needless to say, she needed a little help with it!

Two preteen children sit in front of an enormous pepperoni pizza.

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