Developer Journal, Cripple Creek Miners' Strike

Today marks the anniversary of the start of the Cripple Creek Miners’ Strike in 1894, notable not just as a union victory, but also the only time in history—as the strike dragged on—that a United States state militia would be deployed in support of workers, rather than shooting at people to force them back to work.

In any case, let’s get moving on projects.

Morning Dashboard

GitHub - jcolag/dash

The changes were relatively light for the morning dashboard generator.

The most important issue was adding “freezing rain” to the list of weather conditions that get identified in the daily bar graph. Basically, I need to wait for these conditions to arise to see them get rejected—the code prints anything unrecognized—before the weather’s name can be translated to a visual difference. In this case, it’s not perfect, but I use 🧊 the ice emoji.

Beyond that, the documentation now explains the QPF values, and I bumped a couple of libraries.

Miniboost

GitHub - jcolag/Miniboost

My note-taking application needed a library bumped.

Maybe more interestingly to people running Node.js applications, something changed on my system that began causing errors when running Miniboost, crashing the program before it could start. Searching for the error message suggests that it’s an OpenSSL issue, probably low on the technology stack, since nothing this program does involves encryption.

The solution to the error is to set an environment variable, instructing libraries to use older versions of algorithms.

export NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider

Because I can never remember to do tedious things like this, and because I don’t want to continue using obsolete encryption in all software, I added it to the application’s package.json file on startup.

Entropy Arbitrage

GitHub - jcolag/entropy-arbitrage-code

The blog itself required some minor changes to the styling for the recent GitHub previews. I’ll tweak that until I’m happy, I guess.

While looking at the styles, though, I realized that the code snippets—such as you see above, setting the environment variable—had a peculiar, sickly border that looks reasonable inline (like this), so that has changed, as well.

Finally, I added the asset repository’s metadata to the places that the development server should ignore. Otherwise, when the asset repository automatically commits and pushes to GitLab on Tuesday nights, the blog scrambles to update based on invisible files.

Ham Newsletter

GitHub - jcolag/ham-newsletter

In what appears to be a recurring theme over the last few months, I ran into a snag while trying to send out the latest Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter…which, yes, of course you should sign up to receive. Interestingly, the first attempt succeeded, but something went wrong in the generation. After that, the generation-side worked, but the code couldn’t get the request through.

After waiting for a bit—Mailchimp has something of a reputation for making quick changes to their API and realizing that people rely on the older behavior—I started investigating the almost-worthless error message that some part of my request was a string instead of an object. Of course, everything is sent over HTTP, so everything in the API is a string, but…sure.

The lack of specificity was new, but the error message dates to at least 2017, where developers were converting objects to JSON, then converting those strings to JSON. Reasoning that the library I use for web requests might have added an internal convert-to-JSON step, I took out my calls to JSON.stringify(), which fixed the problem.

While I was already editing things, I also updated the verbiage about translating the blog. Here’s the old version.

Remember, all content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license, so if anybody needs to provide a translation, you don’t need my permission.

In retrospect, that comes off as if I didn’t want to be involved. So, future issues of the newsletter—did I mention that you should subscribe?—will indicate that, while I don’t need to be involved in translation efforts, I’m also happy to help if I can. It took nearly two years to come to that realization…

Other Library Updates

I also bumped versions of a library on Generic Board Game.

Next

Uncomfortably like last week, I don’t have much of a plan for the upcoming week.

I’d like to play with some new user interface technologies, since it doesn’t look like Valence Native has plans to keep up to date, let alone move forward. The fact that some part of it relies on an outdated SSL implementation makes it seem like more trouble than it’s worth.

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Credits: The header image is Cripple Creek, Colo., under martial law, 1894 by Rastall, Benjamin McKie. University of Wisconsin, long in the public domain.