Thought Bricks

I wrote a few weeks ago that we might be able to use fiber optics to monitor infrastructure. That’s pretty cool and all of that but wouldn’t it be much better if we could just roll across the bridges watching a TikTok and generate useful data to monitor infrastructure? Apparent, that might just be possible. It’ll take some time to become a reality, but someday maybe our bridges will be safeguarded by lasers and iPhones.

When you’re right, you’re right: The amount of utopian bullshit and fake promises on a technology that doesn’t really work as anything but a speculative bubble and money laundering device should be a big red flag. Crypto is a movement based on the theory that the existing nation-state is a system rigged by billionaires, and the right response is to create a different and more corrupt order rigged by different billionaires, money launderers, and dictators.

The next interesting bit about Svelte is the reactive functions. Often code needs to do something in response to a variable change. Svelte makes that easy by automatically rendering the view when a variable is reassigned on the next browser paint. That’s nice but sometimes you need to react to a variable change inside of the script before it gets rendered. For example, if you need to get new data from the backend on the change of a variable.

I’ve been doing some more digging on Svelte and have learned some interesting stuff. A basic thing is the way that Svelte just uses {brackets} to demarcate dynamic content. Everything that is inside the brackets is just JavaScript. Another very basic thing is how the control flow works. It’s very much as expected and supports {if} with multiple {:else if} branches all closed with a final {/if} as well as {#each} for iterating through a list.

Yet Another JavaScript Framework has caught my attention. This time, it’s Svelte. I don’t build web pages often, but it’s good to know how to use a framework to be able to build the simple stuff I do. I’ve experimented a bit with the mainstream ones (Vue and React) but they are a little much. I need something simple and it looks like Svelte fits the bill. I heard of Svelte in a newsletter from The Economist where they described how they produce some of their interactive web presentations and mentioned the Svelte framework (among a few other things).

I noticed the other day that the search function on this blog had somehow been broken. I’m not sure how as I’ve not changed anything recently in the layout or functionality. In any event, it wasn’t working and I wanted to fix it. After a quick look at the harbor theme README.md indicated that I needed to have a search.md file in the content directory. I didn’t have it so I created the very simple file and added it.

I’m intrigued that the Linux kernel is moving beyond C and allowing Rust in the 6.1 kernel. It seems like a 30 year run of using C is long enough. Times change and the kernel has to change as well. I don’t know much about Rust, but this makes me interested in taking a deeper look. Writing really solid C code is notoriously hard even using modern techniques to avoid buffer overflows and the like.

I’m inconsistent at best about writing on this blog. The primary reason I persist in doing this is that the best way for me to learn something is to write about it. Even if you aren’t an expert (and I’m not on most of the topics that I’ve written about), it’s OK to write something and expand upon it as your interest and knowledge grow. The secondary reason is to have a journal of the stuff I’ve been interested in that is easy for me to refer to in the future.

An interesting casualty of the pandemic supply chain issues is the availability of trained dogs for bomb-sniffing. I would have thought that we would raise our own dogs for this but only 7% are from the US and we have a chronic shortage. The US Government pays about $8k for a “green” dog (a year old dog that has basic assistance dog training but isn’t specialized yet) This seems like a really good business opportunity for someone who likes dogs and can do basic training.