I’ve developed a new strengths-based workshop for Pride that uses superheros as a metaphor for exploring your unique superpowers. I’ve designed this with LGBTQ+, queer, and trans employee resource groups in mind. The idea for this came out of the coaching courses I just finished. Someone heard part of my story and said “it sounds like you took a difficult life experience and transformed it into your superpower.” which got me thinking that superheros are a fun metaphor to honour queer strength and resilience. 

This one-hour interactive workshop will help you to discover your superpower in being LGBTQ+. We’ll use superheros (or supervillains!) as a metaphor to explore one of your unique superpowers. You’ll learn to tell the story of your superpowers and come away with an action plan on how you can bring more of this superpower into your daily work and life.

I wasn’t too familiar with the genre of superhero movies or comics, but I’m researching by watching movies and reading comics. Last night my wife and I watched Thor Ragnarok and we had an awesome conversation about the different superpowers we saw in the characters. 

The workshop fee is $5000/group. Get in touch if you’re interested! 

The post Queer Superpowers: a workshop for Pride 2022 appeared first on Tara Robertson Consulting.

mapsontheweb:

Where In Europe people take their shoes on or off when people enter their homes or when they visit other people.

by loverofgeography

I’m hoping to send Software Design by Example to the publisher by the end of this month, and it has me thinking once again about what a programming language designed for teaching ought to look like. Here’s one request:

Built-in support for incremental exposition of code.

Most good books on programming interleave exposition and code in ways that most languages don’t directly support. For example, authors commonly want to write something like this to give readers a roadmap for what’s coming next:

class Grid:
    ...constants...

    def __init__(self, size):
        ...set up...

    def fill(self, value):
        ...fill entire grid with value...

    def adjacent(self, x, y):
        ...return neighbors of (x, y)...

They then want to fill in those markers one at a time further down the page or a few pages later:

    def fill(self, value):
        for i in range(self.size):
	    for j in range(self.size):
	        self.cells[i, j] = EMPTY

I don’t know any programming language that allows me to write this as shown. Some “simple” text processing will allow me to write something like this in my source file:

class Grid:

    ## [+fill]
    def fill(self, value):
        ## [-fill "fill entire grid with value"]
        for i in range(self.size):
	    for j in range(self.size):
	        self.cells[i, j] = EMPTY
        ## [-fill]
    ## [+fill]

and then slice the marked regions to produce the two versions shown above, but having used (and built) several such systems, I keep wondering why we don’t just add this to the language itself. Literate programming promised this, and while I was a zealous user for a couple of years in the late 1980s, bolting LP onto pre-existing languages proved too clunky to catch on. And yes, there are tricks like the Blank Maneuver and tools like jdc for the Jupyter notebook, but the former confuses novices (“Wait, you’re deriving a class from itself?”) and the latter doesn’t support forward markers in the original definition to show where the later code is going to go.

This issue may seem pretty esoteric—after all, most programmers don’t write books—but it highlights two larger points. The first is that most programmers do have to explain the work at some point, and there’s precious little in-language support for doing that. The second point is that languages don’t have any other support for incremental exposition either. For example, every textbook has diagrams, but you can’t put those in your source code: Jupyter notebooks and R Markdown files can show you the plots produced by your code in situ, but they won’t let you draw things by hand.

So here’s my suggestion for an enterprising graduate student who wants to change the world: pick half a dozen books on programming and go through them to create a catalog of explanatory techniques. Once you have that, extend your catalog by looking at slide decks and videos of whiteboard talks, and then design a little language and editor with built-in support for the top N techniques: really built-in, not wedged into specially-formatted comments or requiring extra compilation steps to see what readers are going to see. The language itself could be as small as Quorum, Hedy, or Lox: it’s just there to give users something to explain.

I often ask people what they would work on if they could work on anything. Variations of this idea have been on my list for two decades; I don’t think I have enough years left to see it through myself, but I’d be happy to chat with anyone who wants to take it on.

Two years before I started working on cameras for the Librem 5, I thought the work would go something like this: first, write a driver, then maybe calibrate the colors, connect to the camera support infrastructure, and bam! PureOS users on the phone would then do teleconferences with Jitsi or snap selfies with Cheese, just […]

The post Cameras: It’s Complicated appeared first on Purism.

In early 2004, I joined the small Nokia Lifeblog team to lead sales and marketing. Over the roughly 18 months I was with the team, I learned so much about the fusion of internet and mobile, became the first in the company using blogging in marketing and influencer outreach, and engaged with a huge range of characters (many who were foundational to what was then called Web 2.0).

When the team was dissolved in June 2005, I spent the next few months in relative obscurity within Nokia (another interesting story in itself) working on an idea, inspired by all the work I’d done with Lifeblog.

Basically, I saw that the web was fragmenting (into morsels, is what I said back then) as media and social streams multiplied. My vision was a way to bring all those morsels into one view, on any platform, and to remix and republish as folks found, used, and shared social media.

You have no idea how that was so alien to many I spoke with. I learned the hard way the difficulty of articulating something folks could not see.

Nokia Cloud
In 2006, I was picked up by the Multimedia product management team, to focus on the online side of things (I had PC and a Mobile peer product managers). By the end of 2006 I had managed to secure a fuuuuuckload of money (I’ll never be giving that kind of money ever again, I suppose) to work with IDEO (who brought in Digital Foundry (DF) and R/GA for the technical and visual) to make my idea become reality.

We called it Nokia Cloud.

Cloud.

In 2007.

Yup.

In any case, I must say, 2007 was a wicked amazing year, working with really smart and enthusiastic folks. The cool stuff was doing field research (which did a good job of validating what I envisioned) and design workshops to refine the ideas, which R/GA and DF made tangible in designs and early protos. The not so cool was the pressure from a multi-billion euro company wanting the product to be immediately available in a zillion countries and languages, and what I called the Nokia Jello – when a big company just can’t help but kill your agility (no pun intended, we were the first to introduce Agile to a traditionally Waterfall company process).[1] And not sure if it was cool or not when we went to launch the service, by then called Ovi (“door” in Finnish), at Nokia World 2007, that Orange had taken out a full page ad in the FT to warn us off.

iCloud, but before iCloud[2]
The spirit of my vision drove Nokia Cloud. You could see it in the way Ovi was described as the ‘door’ to your online services, which was sort of the way I always described my vision.

With Nokia Cloud, you’d have an app on your phone and desktop that would, through a single view, help you see various levels of your social streams and media (peek), get details (reveal), or dive into the social media service (dive) – providing a range of interaction to rapidly go through and remix all your streams. In the early days, I also wanted to apply some analytics to help folks find and manage everything (Last.fm style, which was a big thing back then).

We were also inspired by the Sidekick Danger (same founder as Android), where all your mobile life was backed up and like a soul, could be placed into another device should you lose one or get a new one.

One cool feature that came up was a ‘stub’, where you start something on one platform, say your mobile, and then grab the stub on another, say your PC, and complete the task. Of course, in the past few years, you can do such things with your iPhone via Handoff. But we wanted to do this back in 2007.

Alas, we spread product dev out in phases and the Danger-like phone contacts and calendar and media recovery were the first to roll out. But I left the team before any of the later parts were rolled out (I don’t know if they were ever rolled out, actually).

I wish I had kept my notes, as so much of what we saw then foresaw where mobile and internet were going. That the iPhone and Facebook were taking over the world in 2007 served as a background for what Nokia had to get right, and fast.

And while we’ve come so far since back then, the world didn’t go the aggregation route I had hoped for (open, choice for all, competition), but instead the world doubled down on stove-piped platforms – Google, Apple, Facebook – where users stayed in walled-gardens, just like the mobile operator walled gardens at the time we had all hoped would be busted open by an open internet.

I did have a bit of a fantasy that Nokia could be the one to stave off the dominance of what became FAGMA (or is it MAGMA, now?). Nokia’s mission was ‘Connecting People’, and the greatest social media network was the contacts in your phone. I wanted to make the phone the door to your online life, and I wanted Nokia to do it.

Alas.

Fifteen frakkin’ years
I left the Cloud team in early 2008, for various reasons, but mostly how I thought I’d not be able to contribute effectively in the new re-org that had just happened (the ones that stayed behind were more than capable to carry on). But what I did during the time I led Nokia Cloud taught me so much about design, products, the fusion of hardware and software, organizational structures, and how to convert disparate insights into a coherent manifestation (and evangelize it).

Since the launch of iPhone in early 2007 was a big thing for us on the brand new Nokia Cloud project, I usually use the anniversary of the launch to take stock of how things have progressed since 2007.

Sadly, when I see where we are today after 15 years, I’m a bit disappointed: NFTs, crypto, Web3, MetaFrakkinVerse – not sure these are anything new, as it all seems way derivative or gimmicky.[4]

Though, in many ways, what I see folks trying to do with their social networks, media, personal narratives, is still the same as in 2007. The difference is that the MAGMAs of the world are dictating the interactions, tastes, and content – so we’re all in the passenger seat, more passive than one would think. Indeed, the medium defines the messages, and so long as MAGMA serve as the pipes, we need to engage with each other on their terms.

Alas, the MAGMAs of the world are just getting more ingrained in our lives and I do wonder how we break that stranglehold. Which is rich coming from me: I am very much beholden to the Apple ecosystem. I am railing from inside the asylum, so to speak.

Next fifteen
I have no idea what the next fifteen years will bring. My interests still reside in the intersection of data, internet, software, and hardware. Not sure where it’ll take me, but I’m a tad wiser. Looking back at the Nokia Cloud project and what it could have been reminds me, again, how I should trust myself more and fight for the visions I see as important.

And sad that this insight might be all that remains from such a fun time.

“Vision” is yet another one of those overused business words. It’s become a trope. And almost always a vision is too broad or lofty to be useful.

And it’s also crucial for your product, your customers, and your people.

Of course, the problem isn’t with the idea of a vision. It’s with how we create and use them. And sure, we could try and use or make up a new word, like Snooflegulp, but we would eventually do the same thing with that word. And, while potentially more amusing, the outcome wouldn’t be any more useful - and likely more confusing.

So, I’m going to stick with “vision”.

A useful vision has three important aspects:

1. It is specifically customer-focused
2. It definitely includes you
3. It is meaningfully aspirational

Being specifically customer-focused

Here’s the deal - the market is inevitably going to judge your product or service one way or another. So it’s just easier if you start with customer needs to begin with.

And not just some hand-wavy, generic “the customer” or “need”, but a clear, crisp idea of a specific customer, with a specific unmet need.

Admittedly it can sometimes feel tricky to find the right level of specificity for a product vision, but I’d suggest embracing that trickiness. Try something you know is too specific. Try something else you know is too broad. Then explore what’s in between those two. Work through it collaboratively with a few other folks. And get feedback from actual prospective customers!

It definitely includes you

This may seem counterintuitive, especially after banging on about the importance of being customer-focused. But your product vision needs to also be something you want it to be.

Why? For two main reasons.

First, there are a lot of ways to meet potential customers’ unmet needs, but if your product vision includes you, it will add a special flavor that will be identifiably unique. And that will show up in many ways from finding the right customers, to deciding on which features, to how you handle services and support.

And second, being a product manager can take a lot of energy. And in my experience, you need to feel connected to your customers and your product in a way that makes spending that energy worth it for you.

One last thought on this. In a large organization, or for a large product, sometimes “you” can be a complex group of people. That being said - relegating this aspect of product management to nothing more than soulless “stakeholder management” is, in my opinion, a disservice to you, your product, your people, and your customers. Take the time to figure out how you can show up in your product vision.

Meaningfully aspirational

Building a great product is a team effort. Contributors, stakeholders, planners, partners…the list goes on. To get them engaged and keep them energized for the product journey your vision needs to be aspirational.

But not in some lofty, candy mountain sorta way.

A product vision is meaningfully aspirational when those involved understand its benefit, believe it’s possible, and can imagine (but not plan!) the path to get there.

Understanding the benefit is pretty obvious. If people can’t perceive or relate to the “why” of your product, it will never be aspirational.

Believing that your product vision is possible, also seems straightforward. Just because someone comprehends the benefit, it won’t matter much if they don’t think it’s achievable. In fact, if they think it’s impossible, that can be downright demotivating.

However, being able to imagine, but not plan, the path to achieving the vision may seem odd. But, if you can easily formulate the plan to achieve your product vision, the likelihood is that your vision isn’t very visionary. This gap between believing something is possible but not quite knowing how to get there is a source of energy and creativity. This is where people’s imagination can flourish and we can embrace optionality and experimentation! And that needs to be continually harnessed to move your product forward.

Go practice!

Whether you agree or disagree with the ideas above, it can still be useful to go try them out. Try to write a product vision statement for your company’s products or services. Or try writing out vision statements for products or services you love. Better yet, try writing them down as you wish they were for products or services you find lacking! Have others read and give you feedback about what you wrote. It’s an easy enough exercise that gets easier with practice!

mkalus shared this story from jwz.

A site that scrapes, collates, and de-dups your friends' posts on every social media site, and then shows you the union of all of those posts as one feed.

This is the only way to break Facebook's back: to allow your friends' transition from one social network's data silo to another to be so gradual and effortless that you don't even notice it happening.

The thing that makes this difficult, of course, is not the coding, but the fact that if you succeed at it in any meaningful way, the sky will blacken with lawyers, and the data silos' spending on technical countermeasures will absolutely smother you.

It is hard, intentionally so, for people to quit a social network because that's where all their friends are and you can't get them all to move at once. But if it were possible for someone to move to a new service in such a way that neither they nor you lose that connection, then the barrier to switching would much lower. The services would have to compete on their merits rather than on your sunk cost.

But by facilitating this, not only would you be in violation of the terms of service of every site, you'd also be posing an existential threat to almost every aspect of their business model. They live for the lock-in. Touch that in a way that actually turns the Eye of Sauron upon you, and it won't go well.

Many of you are already bouncing up and down in your eagerness to go into the weeds with designs of how this could work at a technical level, but -- stop. It's a Small Matter of Programming, and that part doesn't matter at all. Unless you have a plan that solves "lawyers and countermeasures" problem, there's no point. You're looking for your keys where the light is good instead of where you dropped them.

So yeah, I said that step 2 is "and then a miracle occurs". This project is absolutely impossible. It will never happen, and social media cannot be fixed. Surprise!

But that step 2 miracle does have a name, and it is "antitrust legislation". It needs to be illegal for these companies to monopolize and lock in your data. It needs to be illegal for their TOS to prevent entry into the market of the kind of inventions that I'm talking about here. Interoperability and federation would need to be a legal mandate.

Anyway, good luck with that.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

I’ve been wanting to explore the Uxbridge to Lindsay Rail Trail for a while. I decided that for my 500th consecutive day of biking that I would treat myself to my first out of town gravel ride of the year. At the same time I was wanting to explore the Beaver River Trail as well. I decided in the end to do a bit of both.

Here is the ride with GPS map of my route.

The recommended start point in Uxbridge is the Herrema soccer fields where there is plenty of parking. There is also a pavilion there with restrooms, but they weren’t open. From the parking lot, there is a gravel path called the Barton Trail that will take you to the rail trail.

About a km of single track before the rail trail.

Here is the junction with the rail trail. I decided to turn left to ride to the nominal start of the trail.

Here is the start of the trail. There is signage directing you to the historic trestle, but when you ride over it just about 100 m from this point, you actually can’t see it. It looks like just another bridge.

After Lake Ridge Rd, the trail quality and signage improves as from this point it is officially part of the Trans Canada Trail.

There was a map that shows much of what I ended up riding.

This wayfinding was curious. I wonder why they point out gas stations, but perhaps this is for the snowmobilers. Also note the directions to Neverland.

The trail was in good shape. This was the worst spot I saw.

Here is the fork where the Beaver River Trail takes off to the north.

There are concrete blocks making it clear that dirt bikes are not welcome.

I turn north on White Rock Rd today. The continuation east to Lindsay will have to wait for another day.

Nice smooth gravel, and very little traffic.

I can tell I have a tailwind headed north.

I did notice that most of the limited traffic that I saw along this stretch was gravel trucks. Just before I turn west on Black School Rd, I see the reason for this.

Lovely gravel most of the way to Cannington.

Not sure what this sign means.

Here is the turn off to the Beaver River Trail.

The first kilometre south of Cannington was not in great shape, but the trail condition improved markedly past Side Rd 16.

The section through Sunderland dumps you into a parking lot, and then you are supposed to take a dirt path on the east side of Rt 12 to get back on the trail.

I haven’t seen this before: a kiosk soliciting money for trail upkeep. Clever to put it just after the worst section of the entire trail.

Back to the junction with the Trans Canada Trail.

Do I look like I am enjoying myself?

All in all, a good day on the bike, with lovely weather. About 78 km with the detours that I took.

I was browsing books in the beautiful bookstore in the former Dominican church in Maastricht last week. Reading the blurbs on the back it hit me how themes in contemporary novels seem so utterly disconnected from the momentous in the now, so very much rooted in the past without making literary sense of the now.

The Dominicanen bookstore Maastricht, photo by Jorge Franganillo, license CC-BY

Post WWII literature in the Netherlands has been dominated by two themes, first processing the impact of the war not just for those who lived it but also those who inherited their parents’ trauma, and second coming to terms with a suffocating strict protestant upbringing in an increasingly secularised world. The latter never appealed to me at all, spending several hundred pages in the tediousness of an environment that had no bearing on my life. The former was of more interest to me, tracing the lines of events then to the present day, the complexity and emotions of the many different layers. Europe’s most historical event in my own adult lifetime was the fall of the iron curtain, with the Berlin wall its evocative symbol, and all it led to, the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of Yugoslavia and ensuing wars, Eastern European countries joining the EU. But that too is over 30 years ago, and I’ve read the novels that explore the societal and psychological upheaval and consequences for our current lives.

We’re now over a fifth into the 21st century. Yet browsing the new releases table in that Maastricht bookshop you wouldn’t be able to tell, other than by checking the year of release of the books on offer. The majority still is processing, or actually just rehashing, those same themes. At best the ‘protestant coming out and of age’ novels have morphed into more general personal reflection by the author, novel writing in lieu of psychotherapy. It seems to be the result of marketing (this stuff has been selling for well over half a century!) or ‘easiness’ (you can’t go wrong with these themes as an author!), but daring or suprising it isn’t. It all seems to me so exclusively looking backwards to the past, the books my parents generation would have found daring or surprising in the 1960s and 1970s. Standing in that bookstore I also realised how in school we were told that these were ‘the themes that matter’, and that as a consequence there’s a sort of reflex in me when I pick up such a book that it should interest me. It became very tangible to me all of a sudden that what interests me most, and what indeed should interest me, wasn’t presented on that table. The story was in what was missing among the new releases.

Most of what was on offer fully ignores the now, and what might be momentous in the now, let alone trying to make literary sense with it. I long to see more emerging ‘great European novels’ that have the interwoven European society and its complexity center stage, more exploration of the shifting globalisation and geopolitics playing out in communities and invidual’s lives, the next two billion people coming online, the workings of digitisation and data on our lives, and through it all the climate threat. More now and forwards looking, looking towards the horizon from the now, while incorporating what went before. More novels that are, well, novel.

Luckily, there was something on offer along those lines as well. And more easily spotted once I realised what I wanted to filter out.

I think I have adjusted my book choosing filters permanently last week.

The Dominicanen bookstore Maastricht, photo by Bert Kaufmann, license CC-BY

mkalus shared this story from Fefes Blog.

Wikipedia definiert das so:

Ein Oligarch (von Oligarchie „Herrschaft der Wenigen“) ist ein Großunternehmer, der durch Korruption auch politische Macht über ein Land oder eine Region erlangt hat. Mit der Verflechtung von Politik und Wirtschaft werden politische Entscheidungsprozesse intransparent und gehen häufig mit autokratischer Herrschaft und Schattenwirtschaft einher.

Oder nicht? Übersehe ich da was?

Datasette Lite is a new way to run Datasette: entirely in your browser, thanks to the Pyodide project which provides a full Python environment compiled to WebAssembly. You can use it to explore any SQLite database file hosted on a CORS-enabled static hosting provider, which includes GitHub and GitHub Pages. Read more about this project in Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser.

Runestone is the latest app from Simon Støvring, the developer behind Scriptable, Jayson, and Data Jar. Støvring’s apps tend to be focused on developer or automation use cases, filling holes in the iOS and iPadOS ecosystem to aid power users. Runestone mostly falls into the same category, although it also has some wider potential appeal for general purpose writing.

The new app functions as an excellent plain text editor for anyone who needs to write on their iPhone or iPad. It’s simple and thoughtfully designed, and includes a variety of excellent themes to improve your writing experience. Runestone’s marquee feature, however, is its syntax highlighting. For Markdown writers, the app will use simple color schemes (which can be altered to your liking using the theme settings) and subtle style changes to highlight your links, bold and italic words, footnotes, and more. The result is a very simple, essentially plain-text approach which still makes it easy to see your markup at a glance.

While Runestone functions perfectly well as an app for writers (I’ve written the entirety of this very article using it, and the experience was lovely), that’s ultimately a crowded category with many other equally simple editors that include more writer-focused features. It’s nice that Runestone can perform that use case if needed, but where the app really shines is in a far less fulfilled region of text on iOS and iPadOS: code editing.

The most core function of any code editor is syntax highlighting, and that is what Runestone is built for. The app currently supports highlighting for 28 different file formats, including those for many of the most popular coding languages such as JavaScript, Java, Python, Rust, and Swift. When you open a code file, Runestone automatically detects the language and highlights the code for you. If you open an unknown file format, you can always tap the file’s title in the top-center of the screen to manually set the language to be highlighted.

In my testing, Runestone’s syntax highlighting has been unbelievably fast and reliable. I’ve tried many code editors for iOS and iPadOS over the years, and performance and reliability have been the main areas where they’ve fallen down for me. Opening complex code files can freeze editors up, and highlighting often starts to waver and fail during editing.

I’ve thrown some pretty large and complicated code files at Runestone and so far I haven’t seen it miss a beat. I even dug up some awful old code from a previous job that I was once tasked with refactoring — we’re talking 10,000+ lines of bad spaghetti JavaScript in a single file — and threw it at Runestone. I’ve had good code editors on my Mac choke when trying to highlight these files, but with Runestone I couldn’t even detect a difference between opening them versus opening a file with just ten lines of code. The highlighting was there instantly, scrolling was available instantly, and the highlighting remained perfect when editing the code. This is the most performant code editor I’ve ever seen on an iPad.

Runestone is a free app with a $9.99 in-app purchase to unlock its “Premium” tier of features. Premium is targeted quite heavily at developers for writing code, so if you’re just looking to write Markdown or other simple text in Runestone, the free tier will likely satisfy all of your needs. For developers, Runestone Premium brings a host of excellent quality-of-life improvements that are well worth the cost. Among them: line numbers; custom themes; options for the app icon; a page guide to show when it might be time to wrap your line of code; a line highlighter for the currently selected line; indicators of whitespace for tabs, spaces, and line breaks; a vertical scroll buffer at the bottom of your file, the ability to tweak line height and letter spacing; and more. Also, the Premium tier unlocks a wonderful and nostalgic little minigame surprise that I won’t spoil here, but I adore it.

Particularly once you unlock Premium, Runestone includes a fantastic host of nice settings for developers to tweak to get their coding experience exactly to their liking. I was able to match Runestone up almost exactly to my setup in Nova, my preferred code editor on the Mac.

Runestone also includes even more excellent developer-focused features beyond syntax highlighting, including connecting and editing files on a remote server, advanced search and replace using RegEx, code formatting using Prettier, a ‘Go to Line’ function, intelligent auto-indentation (plus easily available controls for tweaking indentation backward or forward), and more. This app is packed with great stuff that has been long-awaited by developers on the iPad.

The one thing that is sorely needed for Runestone to become a true code editor is tabs. Currently, Runestone can only open a single file at a time, which is ultimately the app’s most limiting factor. I believe Runestone’s ease-of-use and excellent feature set could enable it for legitimate code development with just the addition of this feature. Thankfully, Runestone’s developer has noted that tabs had to be cut from the initial release, so hopefully they’ll be coming along not too far down the line.

If you’re a developer who enjoys using the iPad, I highly recommend checking out Runestone. iPadOS is still lacking many requirements of a true developer ecosystem, but getting a viable code editor is not a bad place to start changing that. For now, particularly without tabs, Runestone may be confined in your development workflow to just minor on-the-go changes. But as a 1.0, this app has enormous potential. I haven’t been excited about a code editor for iPad since Panic’s Diet Coda an entire decade ago, but Runestone has me excited once again.

You can find Runestone on the App Store, where it is availabe as a free download for both iPhone and iPad.

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Mitigation Measures

This site has links to a boatload of studies on masking. 21 of 24 studies found masks to be effective; one was inconclusive and one found that masks were not effective. Ten of the studies date from Dec 2021 or more recently.

Long COVID

There were three studies I found last week which correlate Long COVID with stuff in the gut:

• This preprint found that most of the people with Long COVID had SARS-CoV-2 RNA in their gut, up to 7 months afterwards. While they didn’t find COVID RNA in the gut of all of the Long COVID patients, they didn’t find COVID RNA in the gut of any of the non-Long COVID patients.
• This preprint from Turkey and found that the gut flora was very different in kids with MIS-C than healthy controls. That suggests that microbiota treatment might help MIS-C (and maybe also Long COVID).
• This preprint from the USA found changes in gut flora in both mice and COVID-19 patients.

Treatments

This article says that Paxlovid leaves a truly awful taste in your mouth. (Note: it’s still better than being on a ventilator!)

Vaccines

This article reports that in the USA, it’s no longer the unvaccinated who are dying: it’s old people who didn’t get boosted. (The unvaxxed still die at higher rates, there’s just a lot fewer of them now.)

This paper suggests another benefit to masking: inoculation (or, more precisely, variolation).  The idea is that masks reduce the amount of virus you get, sometimes to a level that you can fight off which still priming the immune system.

This preprint says that they found antibodies in vaccinated adults’ masks, and in children of vaccinated adults. They theorize that aerosol transmission of antibodies might be happening.

Variants

I try not to mention variants until it’s clear that they are an actual problem instead of a theoretical problem. I didn’t mention Lambda, Eta, and Mu for that reason.

Well, BA.4 and BA.5 are firmly in the “problem” camp by now. Rates in South Africa are spiking.

BA.4/5 is starting to trickle into other countries; this preprint says that BA.4/BA.5 grow about 8% and 12% faster than BA.2.

This preprint says that although most of the monoclonal antibodies which work against BA.2 work against BA.4/BA.5, cilgavimab (which is one of the components of Paxlovid) doesn’t work very well against BA.4/BA.5. This preprint, however, says that cilgavimab is still effective against BA.4/BA.5, so who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Treatments

Bummer. This article reports that Paxlovid failed to show that it worked as a prophylactic. Patients in the Paxlovid arm of the study did get sick less, but it was not statistically significant.

Pathology

This study analyzed the blood from kids with MIS-C, kids with ARDS, and healthy kids. They found 85 proteins specific to MIS-C and 52 specific to ARDS, which should help in understanding (and later, treating) the conditions.

You probably think COVID-19 symptoms are associated with breathing. I’ve been seeing things (including this article) which says that Omicron frequently has gastrointestinal symptoms. So if you’ve got diarrhea or vomiting, that might be COVID-19 and not food poisoning.

Recommended Reading

This article talks about the progress developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine. (It mentions ten different programs.)

COVID-19 is not the flu. However, this article has some interesting things to say about how COVID-19 is becoming more flu-like: less overdispersed, easier to treat, more predictable.

Back in November 2021, I wrote a post on how current Power Delivery (PD) capable notebook chargers with a USB-C connector can be used to charge pretty much all other devices that are charged over USB. This is because USB PD is backwards compatible and also delivers power to devices that use USB power for charging. A couple of days ago I noticed that the reverse is also possible: Small and very lightweight USB PD capable chargers delivered with high end smartphones these days can also charge my notebook!

The picture on the left is from a USB power delivery capable charger of my smartphone. It’s rated at 25 watts and a maximum voltage of 11 volts, so I was a bit skeptical at first if it would charge my notebook. After all, my normal notebook charger delivers up to 20 volts and 65 watts.

On the small charger, support for ‘PPS’ is indicated, which stands for ‘Programmable Power Supply’, an optional extension introduced with version 3 of the USB Power Delivery specification. This extension allows the charger and the charged device to agree on any voltage instead of one of the fixed levels defined in previous versions of the standard.

So I gave it a try and used a USB PD cable with a display that shows the charging rate to see what would happen. And indeed, the notebook and the charger recognize each other and the notebook draws the advertised 25 watts from the power supply, no more, no less. Under normal conditions, the notebook draws around 8-10 watts, so the charger is more than capable to drive the notebook and even charges the battery at the same time. Not very fast, and it takes forever to charge the battery while working with the notebook, but it works just fine. I then ran s-tui and a stress test for half an hour to see how things look like under maximum load. 25 watts are just around what the notebook draws in these conditions and the charger was almost capable of absorbing the load. Not quite, however, I noticed that some power started to come from the battery which started to drain at a rate of about 3% an hour. Not a very likely scenario during my daily work, however.

The picture above shows how the battery is used and recharged in a number of scenarios. The blue line at the beginning is a discharge rate of 21 watts under full load with the stress test utility and no charger connected. After half an hour I connected the 25 watts charger and the notebook then assumes that it takes the full load of the stress test and additionally charges the battery with one or two watts. But that is not quite the case, as I said above, the battery is slightly discharged. I then stopped the stress test and the charger could then recharge the battery at a rate of around 12 watts, while the rest was used to power the running notebook.

O.k. so why would I use a 25 watt charger with my notebook? Well, in cases where I’m mobile all day and want to put as little weight into my backpack, this charger comes in very handy, as it weighs next to nothing compared to a full 65 watt charger!

Despite its title, David Farley's new book Modern Software Engineering feels a bit old-fashioned. The author is best known for his advocacy of dev ops and continuous delivery, and his starting point is the following definition (pg 17):

Engineering is the application of an empirical, scientific approach to finding efficient, economic solutions to practical problems.

I strongly agree that our field needs more of this; I was therefore disappointed that Farley proceeds to leave out almost everything that empirical, scientific study of programs, programming, and programmers has uncovered in the last three decades. As just one example, consider test-driven development. On pg 98, Farley writes:

There are several studies, academic and informal, on the impact of TDD on defect reduction. Most studies agree that defect reduction is in a range from 40 percent to well over 250 percent.

He includes these three links to articles from 2003, 2007, and 2012 respectively. What he doesn't include is Turhan et al's meta-analysis in 2011's Making Software, which found that (a) the more rigorous the study, the weaker the evidence for or against TDD and (b) overall, there is no evidence that TDD makes anything better or worse. There's also no mention of the more recent (and very careful) work of Fucci et al. (which we reviewed in 2016), which found that (a) there's no difference between test-first and test-after but (b) interleaving short bursts of coding and testing is more effective than working in longer iterations. If people started working in shorter cycles when they adopted TDD they might well ascribe any benefits they experience to the wrong cause; that's exactly the sort of question careful study could answer.

I went through the footnotes in this book twice looking for any mentions of research findings from the last ten years. I came up empty, and I think that's a shame. I'm the first to admit¹ that most academic studies in software engineering are irrelevant to most working programmers, but there are a lot of gems. We know so much about how programmers actually do code reviews, whether code clones are actually harmful, what difference static typing actually makes, and where hiring and onboarding go wrong; I think a modern introduction to software engineering should include all of that and more.

1. "Admit" is putting it mildly: "shout repeatedly" is probably a more accurate description of how often and how loudly I've complained about this.

It’s Monday, and the skies are clear.

(Thank goodness.)

Yesterday, the smoke from New Mexico wildfires was unpleasant enough that we stayed inside all day. (Until it filtered out in the evening.)

To have fires here in April and early May is something I simply cannot recall.

Sure, it’s a drought, and La Niña is a bitch.

But early-spring fires?

Never.

(Climate Change is NOT joking around.)

In art school, we learned that Kant considered the Sublime to contain a degree of the awful, or the terrifying.

(Maybe awe-inspiring is the better term? I graduated in 2004, so it’s a little rusty.)

But as I remember, it’s more than just beauty, the Sublime.

Three quarters of a day with my reality constrained by smoke pollution, and as soon as I got outside again, the world shimmered.

Yet billions of people live with pollution every day.

(I consider myself fortunate.)

Frankly, people around the planet live in all sorts of places, and all manner of ways.

It’s a big world out there.

I bring this up right now, having just put down “The Moon Belongs To Everyone,” a phenomenal photo-book that arrived in the mail last June, by Stacy Arezou Mehrfar, published by GOST.

(Like I said to Shawn Records last week, thanks for your patience, Stacy!)

Really, this book is terrific.

I love it.

Last week, I wrote that because of the clear, Joseph-Campbell-inspired-structure, Shawn’s book didn’t make us think too hard.

This one is the opposite, as its lack of text, and great variety of imagery types and styles, make you guess what the heck is going on, as you turn each page.

No lie, we see frozen waterfalls, jungles, desert, oceans, and rock formations, just off the top of my head.

The paper changes, through the book, which I also loved, including these eerie portraits that seem almost like silver ink on black paper.

(Though I can’t say for sure.)

We see nature, and food, in various forms, including a killer photo of a super-intense-looking pomegranate.

The pomegranate was also featured in a design-trick I thought was clever, in which some images have a color sampled from within, and it’s turned into an entire color-block-page.

This happened a few times.

(Orange, magenta and red, if I recall.)

Books like this, which use only photos to tell non-linear, abstracted stories, are often called “poetic.”

And sure enough, the only text in the entire book, (beyond the credits,) was a poem by the artist that I read twice, much as I did with the photos.

If I’m being honest, at first I was a bit skeptical, but kept an open mind, (all those slashes,) but by the time I was done with the second pass, I was convinced.

Cool rhythms, repeating motifs, and if you pay attention, the message is there.

Like the imagery, it’s non-linear and abstracted, so it makes for a fitting close.

The poem speaks to immigrants, and emigrants.

To where we begin, where we end up, and who are we anyway?

How does it always come down to the patch of Earth on which you were born, or the spot you choose to put down your roots?

This book definitely qualifies as a work of art, in my opinion.

Sleek and pretty, but with just a hint of menace.

Job well done.

See you next week!

To purchase “The Moon Belongs to Everyone” click here 

If you’d like to submit a book for potential review, please email me at jonathanblaustein@gmail.com. We are particularly interested in books by artists of color, and female photographers, so we may maintain a balanced program. And please be advised, we currently have a significant backlog of books for review. 

Original article: This Week in Photography: The Moon Belongs to Everyone.

The OpenSea Discord server was compromised, allowing a scammer to post a seemingly-official announcement that OpenSea was partnering with YouTube on a line of NFTs. They urged people to act quickly to snag one of only 100 free NFTs that would offer "insane utility".

Given OpenSea's prominence, it's surprising that the hacker managed to obtain relatively few NFTs of much value. The wallet appeared to have successfully stolen only 13 NFTs, none of which were from high-value collections, that are worth a collective $20,000 if resold at the collections' floor prices.

OpenSea tweeted several messages acknowledging the hack and urging users not to click any links. They have not yet confirmed that they've conclusively re-secured their server.

• "OpenSea Discord Hacked, NFTs Stolen Using Fake YouTube Site" , Vice
• "OpenSea’s official Discord compromised in a phishing attack that stole at least $18k worth of NFTs" , The Verge

My big project this week was Datasette Lite, a new way to run Datasette directly in a browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide. I also continued my research into running SQL queries in parallel, described last week. Plus I spoke at HYTRADBOI.

Datasette Lite

This started out as a research project, inspired by the excitement around Python in the browser from PyCon US last week (which I didn't attend, but observed with some jealousy on Twitter).

I've been wanting to explore this possibility for a while. JupyterLite had convinced me that it would be feasible to run Datasette using Pyodide, especially after I found out that the sqlite3 module from the Python standard library works there already.

I have a private "notes" GitHub repository which I use to keep notes in GitHub issues. I started a thread there researching the possibility of running an ASGI application in Pyodide, thinking that might be a good starting point to getting Datasette to work.

The proof of concept moved remarkably quickly, especially once I realized that Service Workers weren't going to work but Web Workers might.

Once I had comitted to Datasette Lite as a full project I started a new repository for it and transferred across my initial prototype issue thread. You can read that full thread for a blow-by-blow account of how my research pulled together in datasette-lite issue #1.

The rest of the project is documented in detail in my blog post.

Since launching it the biggest change I've made was a change of URL: since it's clearly going to be a core component of the Datasette project going forward I promoted it from simonw.github.io/datasette-lite/ to its new permanent home at lite.datasette.io. It's still hosted by GitHub Pages - here's my TIL about setting up the new domain.

It may have started as a proof of concept tech demo, but the response to it so far has convinced me that I should really take it seriously. Being able to host Datasette without needing to run any server-side code at all is an incredibly compelling experience.

It doesn't matter how hard I work on getting the Datasette deployment experience as easy as possible, static file hosting will always be an order of magnitude more accessible. And even at this early stage Datasette Lite is already proving to be a genuinely useful way to run the software.

As part of this research I also shipped sqlite-utils 3.26.1 with a minor dependency fix that means it works in Pyodide now. You can try that out by running the following in the Pyodide REPL:

>>> import micropip
>>> await micropip.install("sqlite-utils")
>>> import sqlite_utils
>>> db = sqlite_utils.Database(memory=True)
>>> list(db.query("select 3 * 5"))
[{'3 * 5': 15}]

Parallel SQL queries work... if you can get rid of the GIL

Last week I described my effort to implement Parallel SQL queries for Datasette.

The idea there was that many Datasette pages execute multiple SQL queries - a count(*) and a select ... limit 101 for example - that could be run in parallel instead of serial, for a potential improvement in page load times.

My hope was that I could get away with this despite Python's infamous Global Interpreter Lock because the sqlite3 C module releases the GIL when it executes a query.

My initial results weren't showing an increase in performance, even while the queries were shown to be overlapping each other. I opened a research thread and spent some time this week investigating.

My conclusion, sadly, was that the GIL was indeed to blame. sqlite3 releases the GIL to execute the query, but there's still a lot of work that happens in Python land itself - most importantly the code that assembles the objects that represent the rows returned by the query, which is still subject to the GIL.

Then this comment on a thread about the GIL on Lobsters reminded me of the nogil fork of Python by Sam Gross, who has been working on this problem for several years now.

Since that fork has a Docker image trying it out was easy... and to my amazement it worked! Running my parallel queries implementation against nogil Python reduced a page load time from 77ms to 47ms.

Sam's work is against Python 3.9, but he's discussing options for bringing his improvemets into Python itself with the core maintainers. I'm hopeful that this might happen in the next few years. It's an incredible piece of work.

An amusing coincidence: one restriction of WASM and Pyodide is that they can't start new threads - so as part of getting Datasette to work on that platform I had to add a new setting that disables the ability to run SQL queries in threads entirely!

datasette-copy-to-memory

One question I found myself asking while investigating parallel SQL queries (before I determined that the GIL was to blame) was whether parallel SQLite queries against the same database file were suffering from some form of file locking or contention.

To rule that out, I built a new plugin: datasette-copy-to-memory - which reads a SQLite database from disk and copies it into an in-memory database when Datasette first starts up.

This didn't make an observable difference in performance, but I've not tested it extensively - especially not against larger databases using servers with increased amounts of available RAM.

If you're inspired to give this plugin a go I'd love to hear about your results.

asgi-gzip and datasette-gzip

I mentioned datasette-gzip last week: a plugin that acts as a wrapper around the excellent GZipMiddleware from Starlette.

The performance improvements from this - especially for larger HTML tables, which it turns out compress extremely well - were significant. Enough so that I plan to bring gzip support into Datasette core very shortly.

Since I don't want to add the whole of Starlette as a dependency just to get gzip support, I extracted that code out into a new Python package called asgi-gzip.

The obvious risk with doing this is that it might fall behind the excellent Starlette implementation. So I came up with a pattern based on Git scraping that would automatically open a new GitHub issue should the borrowed Starlette code change in the future.

I wrote about that pattern in Automatically opening issues when tracked file content changes.

Speaking at HYTRADBOI

I spoke at the HYTRADBOI conference last week: Have You Tried Rubbing A Database On It.

HYTRADBOI was organized by Jamie Brandon. It was a neat event, with a smart format: 34 pre-recorded 10 minute long talks, arranged into a schedule to encourage people to watch and discuss them at specific times during the day of the event.

It's worth reading Jamie's postmortem of the event for some insightful thinking on online event organization.

My talk was Datasette: a big bag of tricks for solving interesting problems using SQLite. It ended up working out as a lightning-fast 10 minute tutorial on using the sqlite-utils CLI to clean up some data (in this case Manatee Carcass Recovery Locations in Florida since 1974) and then using Datasette to explore and publish it.

I've posted some basic notes to accompany the talk. My plan is to use this as the basis for an official tutorial on sqlite-utils for the tutorials section of the Datasette website.

Releases this week

• datasette: 0.62a0 - (111 releases total) - 2022-05-02
  An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data
• sqlite-utils: 3.26.1 - (100 releases total) - 2022-05-02
  Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases
• click-default-group-wheel: 1.2.2 - 2022-05-02
  Extends click.Group to invoke a command without explicit subcommand name (this version publishes a wheel)
• s3-credentials: 0.11 - (11 releases total) - 2022-05-01
  A tool for creating credentials for accessing S3 buckets
• datasette-copy-to-memory: 0.2 - (5 releases total) - 2022-04-30
  Copy database files into an in-memory database on startup
• datasette-gzip: 0.2 - (2 releases total) - 2022-04-28
  Add gzip compression to Datasette
• asgi-gzip: 0.1 - 2022-04-28
  gzip middleware for ASGI applications, extracted from Starlette

TIL this week

• Intercepting fetch in a service worker
• Setting up a custom subdomain for a GitHub Pages site

Source

wilwheaton:

And yet, California gets the same representation in the Senate as any of those other states with a smaller population that Los Angeles County. Sure. Makes sense.

It was a year ago today that my darling Olivia came out as a trans-woman. I am so proud of her for boldly finding her way to her true self.

Over the last year she has continued to explore the nooks and crannies of her gender identity and expression; it has not always been easy, especially when she’s struggled to communicate her finely-tuned self-regard to others in a way that does it justice.

In parallel she’s made great leaps and bounds toward independence, self-confidence, and self-determination. And she’s continued to confront her grief over her mother’s death.

She is an estimable young woman; I love her dearly, and am in awe of who she’s becoming.

Searching the term "streaming light" will bring up dozens of lights claiming to offer soft, attractive lighting. Most of the results will be cheap LED ring lights with from brands you've never heard of. And if you want to go with a reputable brand, you can expect to pay anywhere from $150 to $300. They offer better quality, but they usually aren't worth the higher price.

Needless to say, I was skeptical when I was sent the Logitech Litra Glow. At $80, Logitech's latest peripheral falls well below the price point of other major brands such as Elgato and Razer. But Logitech has managed to create a light that forgoes frivolous features to create a product delivers where it counts.

The problem with current streaming lights

I've worked in the film industry for over five years now, and have been involved with everything from major films to live television, commercials, and indie projects. If I've learned anything from those experiences, it's that expensive lighting doesn't equate to good lighting. You'd be surprised at how many cheap paper lanterns are used on major productions. It's why my setup currently consists of flashlights, floor lamps, and foam boards.

When it comes to streaming lights, though, users are looking for a light that's simple to set up, doesn't take up much space, and produces soft light. Of course, price is a major factor, too.

That's why ring lights have become so popular. You point your camera through the ring, plug it in, and you're good to go. The problem is that the quality of the lights is lacking. Not only are the bulbs prone to failure, but the lights lack diffusion. They produce harsh light that washes out their subject and creates unappealing hot spots on your skin.

The unboxing experience

Logitech has taken a different approach. Instead of going for a ring light, they've opted for a flat LED panel with heavy diffusion. Thanks to its unassuming design and small surface area, you'll forget it's on your monitor in no time.

The unboxing experience for the Litra Glow falls right in line with the design of the device itself. It's simple.

Going from unboxing the light to being fully set up takes less than a minute. Inside the box you'll find the light already attached to the monitor mount, a USB-C to USB-A cable, a visual instruction pamphlet, and a safety manual. I'm not going to tell you to ignore the safety manual -- that would be highly irresponsible -- but you won't be needing either piece of paper to get ready for streaming. Once it's plugged in, you're ready to go.

Logitech doesn't promote it, but one of the best features light is the ability to make adjustments in real-time without needing to use software -- or worse -- go behind your desk to fiddle with sliders or tiny buttons. There are five buttons located on the back of the light and each one is easily identifiable by touch. Simply reach up and you can adjust the brightness and temperature on the fly.

This is a feature that's lacking on many higher-end models that I'd love to see incorporated in the future. Whether you're in a meeting that runs into the evening, streaming with natural light that needs a boost, or any number of other scenarios, being able to tweak your lighting without switching applications or getting up in the middle of a conversation is a feature that Logitech should promote more.

The Litra Glow's mount is another surprisingly intuitive inclusion. I don't know many mounts that I'd call "intuitive," but thanks to a clever tilt mechanic and a design that naturally fits to both curved and flat monitors, it earns the title. Like a webcam, the Litra Glow hooks onto the top of your monitor. It's a nice change of pace from many lights that either require their own stand or don't have an option for mounting at all. Once you've hooked the light onto your monitor, you can adjust the tilt horizontally and vertically to make sure that the light is pointed exactly where you want it for the softest look.

Light of your life

Now for the question you've all been waiting for. Does the Litra Glow produce decent light? Yes. And it's better than just decent.

Anyone with experience in photography or cinematography can tell you that the bigger the light source is, the softer the light will be. So when I saw how small the Litra Glow was, I had my doubts. Thanks to a surprising amount of power and it's multiple layers of diffusion, it delivers soft light, even during the daytime.

Put kindly, I'm somebody with imperfect skin. More pointedly, I look like a zombie who's been starved for weeks. I can use all the help I can get to smooth out my imperfections and bring some colour back to my face.

That's where the brightness and temperature settings come in. Many webcams automatically adjust their colour balance to match the lighting, so being able to adjust the colour temperature of the light is essential. If the light on your face is too warm compared to the background, you'll either look really orange -- not a popular look these days -- or your background will be blue. If that's what you're going for, that's great. But you should be able to make that choice, not have it thrust upon you.

If you use a DSLR like I do, you have the option to tweak your in-camera temperature manually, so this won't be as much of a concern. Still, it's a great option to have, and you can achieve some really creative looks if you feel like experimenting. The image above was from a recent Twitch stream. I used the Litra Glow as my key light, the LED strip light behind my TV for the pink ambient light, and a flashlight bounced off of a white foam board for the blue fill light. It took about two minutes to set up, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

Comparison

Below you can see a power comparison. It isn't meant to show the quality of the lighting, but rather its power.  The images were taken on a bright afternoon with my camera stopped down to show the power of the light more effectively. At 100% power, I would have needed to lower the exposure even further to not be blown out compared to the background. In other words, you won't need to worry about a lack of power, even during the day. Angled correctly, the Litra Glow can help to smooth out less than flattering shadows.

The Litra Glow comes with five presets for brightness and temperature using the buttons on the back of the light. I found these gave a solid range of options without needing any finessing, but if you want to go more in-depth with your settings, or if you prefer a software-based approach to your peripherals, the Litra Glow works with Logitech's G Hub. Jumping into the program allows you to make fine adjustments to the brightness and temperature.

And if you want to see how you look before joining a call with your boss to ask for extra vacation days -- somebody please share this article with my boss -- you can preview how your lighting will look in the Hub as well.

Simple and clean

I love the Litra Glow. In a sea of terrible options, the Litra Glow offers an option that isn't significantly overpriced or one button press away from falling apart. If I had one complaint about the device, though, it would be the plastic construction. While it doesn't feel cheap, I doubt it would survive the fall off a standing desk. That shouldn't be a concern thanks to the monitor mount, but it's worth mentioning. And hey, it feels like a tank compared to most ring lights.

At $80, Logitech's Litra Glow offers soft lighting in a compact package that easily competes with more expensive options on the market. It's a product that you can easily set up and never think about again. And that's a good thing.

You can find the Logitech Litra Glow Streaming Light at Best Buy for $79.99.

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