Probably partly because we’re heading towards the end-of-year Holiday Singularity, we again don’t have many holidays to choose from. But it is the birthday of American novelist Willa Cather, whose work I happen to not like, but has long been a staple of high school reading lists.

Willa Cather

Of importance to me, tomorrow also marks the first anniversary of the first post, with 261 posts to date. For the next year, I intend to start writing more technical material. I’ve been thinking about some gaps in overall software education, and this would probably be a good time to start talking about topics like orders of complexity, reading other people’s code, standards, and so forth. So, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, watch out for it in the coming months.

Also, Friday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Netscape/Sun announcement of JavaScript. I don’t remember the press release, itself—I was in college, after all, and still don’t watch corporate announcements—but I can certainly remember dismissing JavaScript as a fad. I also assumed that web sites were a fad, though, so that tracks.

New Issues

Rather than iterate through different projects saying “I added some issues,” since that’s all my public activity for the week, it seems to make more sense to just list the issues.

  • SlackBackup — There’s a part of me who assumes that this project should simply be declared obsolete, since the required tokens are no longer available and many libraries are out of date but can’t be automatically updated, plus Slack’s recent acquisition by Salesforce makes everything uncertain. But I have heard from a couple of people who would like to see this maintained, so these are what prevents that.
  • library-twitterbot — This project works about as well as it was going to, but can always be better.
    • Add a Path to Offer Links only makes sense, given that we can’t expect random Twitter users to sign up for GitLab—in the case of @Replybrary—just to say “hey, this news article seems like a better choice for these keywords.”
  • Entropy Arbitrage, the blog, is always going to be under development, I suspect.
    • Rewrite Mailing List Sign-Up, because the current code—in the sidebar to the right, if you’re viewing this on the web—was just JavaScript copied from MailChimp, but it doesn’t work when trackers have been disabled.
  • Uxuyu got this ball rolling, since I didn’t want to keep relying on blog posts to keep track of what work needs to be done.
  • GenAudio is still of peripheral interest to me, even though I haven’t done much work on the planned series that was supposed to rely on it.
    • Fix “Theme Song” Sequences is an infuriating issue. The process is that lines are read by a text-to-speech program and then a static image is turned into enough frames to fill the time. Credits, themes, and so forth take pre-recorded audio and attaches a series of static images that fill the time together. Somehow, despite the fact that the math should be identical, I haven’t been able to get the credits to show without getting the audio and video out of sync for the rest of the show.
  • Miniboost still works for me, but there are still some changes that I’ll eventually want.
    • Add Window Title and Icon is the same issue as for Uxuyu, blocked by the lack of work on Proton Native.
    • Add an In-Document Search would make it more useful in keeping notes up to date. Actual searches for reading purposes aren’t actually that useful, though, because I can always run grep at the command line, since the notes are primarily stored as Markdown.
  • ham-newsletter works—the November newsletter went out on Saturday, after all—but still could be improved.
    • Add Error Correction/Recovery is a reminder to myself that the first newsletter missed an entire section, because I didn’t think to look for an error before sending.
  • zoea was an attempt at a lightweight Scuttlebutt client that I still think is a good idea, but most failed at the time.

I probably mentioned this before, but I should have done this work a long time ago. Even so, it’s good to go through old projects to figure out what needs to happen next, and to get all of that information in a centralized place.

Granted, it’s not ideal, if I ever choose to move away from GitHub, but barring something like adding Bugs Everywhere to every repository to then add all the issues, this is fine.

Next

For the first time in a while, I don’t really have much of a plan. I’ll probably add more issues to repositories, but will also probably try to polish off a few of the Uxuyu issues, since I’ve said that it needs attention at least half a dozen times in the last few months, without actually doing anything about it.

Credits: The header image, unsurprisingly, is Portrait of Willa Cather (cropped) by Carl Van Vechten, in the public domain as a donation to the Library of Congress where the donor restrictions have expired.