w/e 2021-05-09

My back, the back of an idiot, continues to slowly get better. It still hurts when I walk but only very slightly. Other activities hurt enough that I’m not back to doing any more strenuous exercise which, honestly, I’m enjoying. I don’t think would be a sustainable position in the long term unfortunately.

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§ This week, because someone enquiring caught me at a moment when I didn’t have any plans for the afternoon, I spent several hours tweaking an old Python script for generating halftone versions of images. I guess it was nice to help someone, and satisfying to think how best to add a new feature to it (saving each of the CMYK channels as separate files).

Also, in updating old code: my Today’s Guardian site has been running for nearly 11 years and this week a new bug surfaced. Each article it fetches from the Guardian’s API has a unique ID, something like music/2021/may/07/joan-so-good-track-of-week. I was using a version of that as a filename to save the article’s text. This week there was an article with a 300-character ID but, it turns out, 255 characters is the maximum length for a filename.

I think one of the things that makes an experienced developer an experienced developer is knowing in advance the things that could go wrong, and writing code that will cope with that. When I was younger I don’t think I was aware that this was a skill, or set of knowledge, in itself.

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§ I can’t remember where I read this (these days the internet is like those shots of a newspapers on a printing machine, blurred text whizzing past my eyes) but I liked it: The Labour front bench behaves like a company’s legal department while the Conservatives’ is like the marketing department.

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§ We finished the first season of Ozark this week. I don’t think I’d heard of it before I saw it while browsing Netflix which seems odd given that (a) it’s coming up for a fourth season and (b) it’s really good. I imagine it’s been compared to Breaking Bad quite a bit, given it’s an otherwise normal, law-abiding family getting in too deep with scary criminals, and I’m not sure it’s quite as tight as that. But it was still gripping. Laura Linney in particular is excellent to watch.

I also watched the movie Support the Girls which I wouldn’t have glanced at twice except it’s by Andrew Bujalski whose first two “mumblecore” films I liked. It was OK but I felt like I was waiting for more of a plot to emerge, but it didn’t quite happen.

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§ Bye for now.