My Name Rhymes

Most of my activity is now at notes.billmill.org

2023-07-26T16:00:00Z

I announced notes.billmill.org more than a year ago, but at the time I was still keeping this blog up to date with different content.

At this point, substantially all my activity has been moved there and I'm not doing much with this blog and root domain.

Notes has its own feed, so if you're interested in reading what I write, you should add it to your feed reader!

RIP Beckett Longdog Woodmill

2022-10-31T21:00:00Z

In about 24 hours, my dog, Beckett Longdog Woodmill, will go to sleep for the last time.

16 years ago, when she was still a puppy who looked like this, she saved my life from a house fire. I wish I had taken more pictures of her back then, but it wasn't as easy as it is today.

As soon as I moved in for the first time with my then-girlfriend, now wife, we got a dog. She was a rescue dog from the SPCA, and whenever anybody asks us what type of dog she is we tell them she's a Baltimore Brown.

Beckett lived with us through the great Baltimore blizzard of 2003.

Back in those days, she was a very fast runner.

She was an enthusiastic head tilter.

She had a funny way of eating spaghetti, and we'd always feed her some to watch her enthusiastically chomp some down.

I was very nervous to bring our first child into our house, worried that she'd be jealous. I didn't need to have worried, she was always kind and respectful to them, and loved to eat the snacks they threw on the floor.

In her old age, she turned grey.

Until she was about 15 years old, she knew that she was not allowed on the furniture. After that, she decided she was old enough to lay on the couch, and we all agreed that was pretty fair. She could be found on her couch almost all the time the last few years.

My wife and I are incredibly grateful to have had such a long time with such a good dog. The world will be poorer for her absence, and we will miss her terribly.

Let's write a bash script

2022-10-31T21:00:00Z

I used to fear and loathe writing bash scripts, but nowadays I enjoy the process. Let's write a bash script.

The Prerequisites

The #1 thing that has made me comfortable writing bash scripts is shellcheck. Despite being written in haskell (jokes) it's the most useful linter, by far, that I have ever used.

Before I had shellcheck, I lacked confidence when writing bash scripts. With the lessons I learned from it and its superb wiki, I have become a proficient bash coder mostly confident that I will not wipe my hard drive by accident.

For this script, I'm going to write the basics of a script to download youtube videos and make gifs out of them. If you want to follow along at home, you should install yt-dlp and ffmpeg.

(For a fully fleshed-out version of this script, check out ytgif)

Let's start

The first two lines of every bash script I write start with:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

The first line is a shebang that tells our operating system we want it to use bash to execute our code.

The second is an incantation to tell bash that we want the script:

-e : to exit if any command fails
-u : to fail if we try to reference an undefined variable
-o pipefail: to fail a subcommand if any of its commands failed¹

This makes it a tiny bit safer to write bash - it's still a footgun that fires razor blade grenades, but there's a safety on the trigger.

Usage

The next thing I do is to write a usage function. Yes, bash has functions. Yes, they're awful. Yes, you should still use them.

This function prints out a documentation string and exits the program. Whenever our script is unsure about its arguments or spots an error, it will call usage to give the user some help and exit the program.

function usage {
function usage {
        cat <<"EOF"
Usage: youtube-gif [OPTIONS] <youtube-url> <output_file>

Download the video named in youtube-url and create a gif of it.

OPTIONS

  -v:             print more verbose output

EXAMPLES

  <TODO>

EOF
        exit 1
}

I put this usage function first because it helps serve as documentation for what's going on with the script. Remember that anyone unfortunate enough to have to read your bash script may be frightened by bash, and be kind.

Arguments

Parsing arguments in bash relies

1: there are various problems making pipefail imperfect. It's still better than not setting it. ^up

Links for the Week of October 10

2022-10-17T23:00:00Z

The NBA API wrapper by Swar Patel, Randy Forbes et al, is a really nice wrapper around the nba.com API that seems to be semi-officially tolerated by the NBA
I love the TIGER_STYLE document from the tigerbeetle database, which lays out their style and the axioms they've chosen to abide by. More projects ought to lay out their stances as clearly as this, and I've tried to start doing so in my own projects.
Apache Superset is an interesting-looking tool that I found from this duckDB blog article. I tried to play around with it though, and it seemed pretty painful to actually get data into.
I like this idea of per-document backends; it introduces a lot of complexities but also eases some of the problems of stateless web development for particular workloads. I have been thinking about workloads like this in combination with a site that uses many SQLite databases instead of one large relational data store.
remake looks neat, a GNU Make-alike which "adds profiling, comprehensible tracing, extended error messages and a debugger". I love make, and this seems like a useful complementary tool
Scratchapixel looks like an interesting series of computer graphics tutorials, which is a thing I love to collect but ultimately rarely have the time to mess around with. Aspirations though.
This week I learned about the reveal_type function of pyright, which made my debugging life easier
postgresql 15 was released
obsidian 1.0 was released. Obsidian has been the first note-taking tool I've ever found simple and compelling enough to stick with, and I'm very happy with it.
Enjoyed this Database alignment chart
Greg Linares tells the story of exploits delivered on drones
Warren Craddock tweeted a fascinating tale of companies too obsessed with themselves to notice their own failures. How do you dream big, but also stop when it's clear you have a fatal flaw?
Russ Cox considers a big backwards-incompatible change to go, to eliminate the loop variable capture problem.
I created a diamond chart of NBA team efficiencies and wrote a little twitter thread about it. Hopefully more on this soon.
I got a new work computer, so I created a new version of my mac OS X installation script.
I added OpenAI whisper support to ytgif, and made some Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Frankenstein gifs.

Music

Nobody's Fault But Mine is an American classic. I used to listen to the blues a lot, and I might have to go back and revisit some of my favorites.
There's more, new, King Gizzard this week. Just an unbelievably productive band. This article dives into their process a bit.
I posted about Hania Rani last week, and I dove in some more this week. This hour long set is great, as is this KEXP set:

Links for the Week of October 3

2022-10-10T23:00:00Z

I learned a bit about writing C this weekend
Last year Richard Feldman gave a very neat talk at Strange Loop about using reference counting to find palces where a compiler for an immutable language can silently perform mutation for performance gains.
Nikolay Dubina has collected a "handy list of well-known and lesser-known tools for Go projects"
Raghu R wrote this tutorial for the k language, which I admire from afar. I aspire to go through this some day, but probably never will.
Jason Miller collected this list of "Application Holotypes", an attempt to roughly categorize types of applications and the architectures appropriate to them.
QP Hou created roapi, which "automatically spins up read-only APIs for static datasets without requiring you to write a single line of code." A very neat idea I don't have a direct use case for but I'll be looking for one.
I've known about rr before, but I was reminded of it this week. It's a debugger that enables you to record the events that occur in an application execution and replay them - a practical time travel debugger.
The supabase folks teamed up with "snaplet" to get postgresql running in the browser. The neatest part of this trick is that they used v86 to run a whole linux VM in WASM to do so.
I made an observable plot template repository becauase I always have to re-learn how to create an npm app, and I wanted to be able to at least maintain that knowledge.
Fabien Geisen explains the AlphaTensor Matrix Multiplcation paper
A report from Jamie Brandon on his attempt to write a SQL parser in Zig in one week. Dan Luu asked on twitter what similar examples there are where somebody presents a project you can follow along with, which spanwed an interesting thread. I suggested a few examples, including Bitwise by Per Vognsen, which is criminally under-rated.

Music

Via this video of Hania Rani playing a gorgeous, bizarre, vertical piano before it goes to Nils Frahm's studio, I discovered her lovely piano work. ht Tim Bray.
New King Gizzard album this week! I love this extremely prolific and genre-hopping Aussie band. The new album is mostly in a jam-rock groove, which is not normal for them, but not being normal is normal for them. I like this album more than anything they've released in the last few years.

Links for the Week of September 26

2022-10-03T17:00:00Z

Simon Willison lists some core engineering practices
I wrote a little tool for turning youtube videos into gifs with ffmpeg and yt-dlp. Short twitter thread about it here
Casey Muratori makes the case that turns are better than radians
I've been considering giving the helix editor a serious try, but it's hard to even consider giving up my vim familiarity

Music

I listened to Hot Rats a lot this week, one of my favorite albums:
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' new album is a fun jam

Links for the Week of September 19

2022-09-26T13:00:00Z

The Wasmtime wasm runtime hit version 1.0. I'm interested in the possibilities this offers for sandboxed and portable applications in a variety of languages.
Ceej Silverio's short thread about how difficult it is to add engineers at the start of a project matched thoughts I've been having on the topic lately
Ben Johnson released LiteFS, a system that distributes SQLite writes to a leader, by writing a Fuse filesystem to distribute SQLite writes. The ARCHITECTURE doc is short and worthwhile reading.
Simon Willison started a very interesting twitter thread by asking people what tools they use to process CSV files of varying sizes. I updated my csv tools survey with some new tools from reading the responses.
Charlie Loyd objectively correctly notes that Bryce had the finest UI of all time and that every modern UI is extremely boring
I liked these detailed notes from Alexander Wang on drawing curved arrows between boxes. I love when people share the specialized knowledge they gain when building detailed things.
A thorough and balanced article comparing the memory safety of zig and rust, by Jamie Brandon
A c compiler in zig from Veikka Tuominen
Tsoding is working on a single-file graphics library in C. The idea is that it can be compiled down to WASM for web display, SDL for native display, or whatever target you can think of. demos here
Vincent Rischmann shows how you can use SQLite virtual tables to expose an API to sqlite as if it were a database. He uses zig for his example.
Dan Nguyen tests OpenAI's new voice-to-text AI against one of TV's finest-ever scenes and it gives impressive results

Music

Lots of good music this week!

New Nils Frahm, if you like ambient sounds. Great work music
Vieux Farka Touré and Khruangbin album - I haven't listened much yet but the pairing is self-recommending
A coworker turned me on to Thee Sacred Souls, a neo-soul outfit, and I liked their self-titled album

Links for the Week of September 12

2022-09-19T13:00:00Z

This week Uber got owned, which prompted a lot of thinking about authentication and authorization
Xe Iaso saw that and made the case that push 2fa is considered harmful. I think this is where corporations are going, but not sure it's ready yet for wide distribution. (And I'm ready for the "considered harmful" phrasing to be considered harmful...)
Phil Eaton's go-sqlite3-stdlib is an interesting project that provides a set of common golang functions for interacting with sqlite databases. Rather than relying on sqlean, they chose to reimplement and add on several other features as well.
Tyler Langlois does some quality performance engineering to measure caddy vs nginx, specifically as reverse proxies. My general take from it: they came out close and it's pretty much a coin flip.
Matt Holt, the caddy author, found a performance regression from that post - metrics were causing too much overhead how they were implemented. I was impressed with the speed and responsiveness of caddy's developers.
David R. MacIver wrote part 2 of a series on estimation - I enjoyed this as well as the other posts in the series a lot.
I like 18f's document on language and framework selection
Aidan Steele wrote a useful thread on AWS design patterns
Tom MacWright ported a javascript ray tracer from javascript to zig, and wrote a reflection on the port and also on the value of play
Julia Evans drew an excellent debugging manifesto comic
Jason Scott reflects on the development of the internet
Robin Sloan wrote about creating an app strictly for friends and family. I love this idea and wish it weren't so painful to do. Security balances against usefulness.
Coda Hale wrote about how work scales in organizations
Jacob Kaplan-Moss argues that "a group of mediocre programmers working with a structure designed to produce quality will produce better software than a group of fantastic programmers working in a system designed with other goals." in Quality is Systemic
We all know that global variables are bad, but Forrest Smith argues that they're even worse than we think, and programming languages should make them harder to use than they already are
Tim Morgan wrote a ruby compiler, and reflects on the process of building it and building software for personal joy

Music

Not sure why, but I listened to the Beatles a lot this week

Book

This week I started reading Deep Learning and the Game of Go (github repo). I created a repository with my implementations and notes about it. More on this later this week, hopefully.

Links for the Week of September 5

2022-09-12T10:30:00Z

http://http://http://@http://http://?http://#http://

is a legitimate URL

I figured out how to build sqlite fiddle with a sqlite extension and wrote up notes alongside code. I learned a lot about compiling C into WASM along the way, and SQLite remains a joy to work with - the aggregate C file is such a great idea.
Along with help from a sql.js developer, I added custom aggregate function support to the library. With this, you can define custom aggregate functions in javascript, making it easy to extend SQLite without having to do tricks to compile in extensions.
Ben Johnson continued his excellent series on the internals of SQLite and wrote about how SQLite parses queries
Hugo Landau laments the loss of mildly dynamic websites. Amen!
There is a proposal to bring levelled logging to the golang standard library. I'll be interested to see how it compares to zerolog et al. Like many others, I have written and abandoned my own levelled logging wrapper around the stdlib.
Speaking of logging, I revisited this article about using canonical log lines, the practice of each service request emitting a single wide long line when it completes. I wish go logging libraries supported the pattern of accumulating log bits as it proceeded, then emitting them at the end, better.
Raph Levien demonstrates and explains a new best technique for creating parallel curves of cubic Bézier paths. I worked a bit about that in the past here when making Sol LeWitt drawings and have been following Raph's work that helped me a ton since.
I've been trying to work my way through the Polgár chess problems, and this little site that lets you play them online is handy
connect-go looks like a neat RPC library, aiming for something similar to but simpler in important ways than gRPC. site here
The go team released a tool to check for vulnerabilities in your dependencies
Marc Brooker wrote a very interesting blog post suggesting we use cumulative density graphs instead of histograms for displaying metrics graphics. I look forward to giving this a try the next time I have some metrics to display
Divam Gupta made a simple gui for Stable Diffusion that makes AI image generation a click and install process
Jonathan Whitaker wrote a colab notebook to explain how stable diffusion works
youtube-dl has a Javascript interpreter done in 870 lines of code. Lovely stuff
The US Congress has an API!
Health insurers published close to a trillion prices to comply with price transparency regulations and Alec Stein is looking for help in trying to make sense of them
The passing of Richard Cook brought how.complexsystems.fail back to my attention. Excellent work and I'm sad to hear of his passing.

Music

I enjoyed JID's tiny desk concert
I hadn't listened to Charlie Parker in a long while and it was a pleasure to go back to it

TV

My wife and I started House of Dragons but didn't enjoy it very much so we're quitting on it
We started on Underground Railroad instead; we're not far enough in to make any judgement

Links for the Week of August 22

2022-08-29T10:30:00Z

Stable Diffusion

There was a lot of noise around the open source Stable Diffusion image generation model this week. For kicks, I followed some instructions from the web to install it on my Macbook, but had trouble getting it to work well.

I'm very sympathetic to views like these, that Dall-E (and other image generation tools) unfairly abuse the work of human creators for profit:

Early days, but this sums up a lot of my concerns. pic.twitter.com/DaYj2RISOA
— Kyle T Webster (@kyletwebster) July 23, 2022

Similar concerns are why I don't like github's copilot - it disregards the explicit wishes of the authors of the software it's trained on for corporate profit.

This morning, Simon Willison posited that someone with my sympathies is an AI vegan. I understand where he's coming from, but it feels to me like an attempt to marginalize (an admittedly marginal!) viewpoint. It chooses not to engage with the people saying "it's unethical to do that!" by framing it as a natural idea that there is always that wacky group saying that what we're doing is unethical and we can safely ignore them.

That said, I eat meat! And I do try to both listen to but ignore what vegans say, so the metaphor definitely has power to me.

Maybe I will end up just getting over my ethical concerns and using the human-creator-mashup tools. Some of the work coming out of stable diffusion is neat (although I find it way less groundbreaking than the people who are really excited about it...) and I'm even occasionally jealous of github copilot.

Links

A nice collection of useful datasets and a python library that makes downloading most of them a one-liner
How to test your apps with VoiceOver. One of the best talks I ever went to was a short talk by a blind computer user where he showed us how he used his computer. (I'm trying to avoid calling it "eye-opening"...)
A funny Dan Hon twitter thread on legacy software on the Star Trek enterprise
Ben Johnson continues his excellent series on SQLite internals with a post explaining how the WAL works.
I have been studiously ignoring NixOS so far because it feels like it tends towards my worst perfectionist instincts, but this week I started messing with it again, inspired by this tweet thread. I'm intrigued by devbox, which seems like an attempt at a UI layer on top of it, though I've not yet played with it and it seems pretty alpha.
Here's how lichess puzzles are generated (or were, as of 2014 - I couldn't find how they're currently generated in a brief search)
A tool that cleverly merges jupyter notebook files to ease (make possible?) collaboration on them
An interactive guide to color & contrast seems like a very cool online book on all sorts of color theory topics.
I wrote up complete notes for doing a mundane task - setting up a google cloud service account - and was struck by just how many steps there are for even a simple task.

Music

The new Black Thought & Danger Mouse and JID albums are really good.
The album "Get Fucked" by The Chats is enjoyably straightforward rock and roll

TV

This week we finished "We Own This City", David Simon's dramatization of the GTTF in Baltimore. It was far below the quality of The Wire (what isn't), but it was good. Anything that puts more attention on the dire situation of Baltimore is a good thing.