Internet

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’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.

Elon Musk’s takeover at Twitter has been interesting. He fired a bunch of people and many more resigned. Many of these people were responsible for stuff that Mr. Musk doesn’t think Twitter needs (e.g., content moderation) but others who got the axe did the critical development and infrastructure work. Twitter hasn’t had a catastrophic technical failure yet. That has raised some eyebrows about staffing levels at other Big Tech companies. It’s too early to tell.

This is a good analysis by Matt Rickard on why the incumbent large cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) will not follow the telcos to become “dumb pipes” for compute and storage. He presents a number of arguments why the hyperscalers will continue to provide high value services. The most compelling one is that the incentives are aligned between open source and the hyperscalers. These companies can capture much of the value of open source by value added offerings.

The NHL has an interesting API that can access a wide range of information. It isn’t officially documented but I found some decent informal documentation. For fun, I wrote a Python program to get the live feed for the games going on today. It’s nothing special but was an interesting diversion. The biggest challenge is working with the live feed when I want to watch the game. The code is below:

Tim O’Reilly has a very thoughtful piece on web3. Since he is a guy who got many things right about web 2.0, I’m inclined to give his ideas some weight and I think he gets an essential truth about web3 right now: it’s too tied up in get-rich-quick thinking and not enough on the real value to be delivered. There will be value delivered by some of the new thinking in web3, but it’s really not clear what.

I’ve been doing some reading about web3 recently to understand what it is and what it might mean. There is plenty of skepticism about web3. The thing that bothers me the most is the premature annointing of these specific technologies as being the 3rd iteration of the web. The first (html) and second (web service, JavaScript, etc.) weren’t named until well after they had demonstrated their usefulness in practice. Maybe this specific assortment of tech will create a new decentralized web that empowers regular users.

Once again, YouTubeTV is in a battle. This time, they have a disagreement with Disney over the fees for carrying their channels. The channels include stuff I don’t watch (Disney Channel, ABC News, Freeform, etc.) as well stuff I do (the ESPN family of channels). One of the reasons I cut the cord was to pay (at least a little) less and deal with less of the nonsense hassles you have to with cable (call them once a year and threaten to cancel to keep your payment the same).

I’m a fan of cool maps. For years, I had the famous map of Napolean’s March to Moscow by Minard on my wall (what happened to that?). We’ve also got a few historical maps framed in our house. It’s always interesting to see how maps created before arial and satellite photography depict a coastline. This is an interesting animated map that shows all of the ships at sea. It was produced by Kiln.

As I was reading through some random stuff on Linux, I came across an interesting project called Lightstream. As the description says, this is a project that continuously replicates Sqlite databases to S3 compatible buckets. That seemed pretty interesting. Sqlite is more performant that most people think and really reduces the complexity of an application. If you don’t have to manage a database server and all of the networking configuration that goes with a database cluster, you can focus on building the app and not yak shaving to get a database set up.