ongoing by Tim Bray, podcast version

Welcome to the monthly “Long Links” post for March 2021, in which I take advantage of my lightly-employed status to curate a list of pointers to good long-form stuff that I have time to savor but you probably don’t, but which you might enjoy one or two of. This month there’s lots of video, a heavier focus on music, and some talk about my former employer...

I’m in fast-follow mode here, with more Topfew reportage. Previous chapters (reverse chrono order) here, here, and here. Fortunately I’m not going to need 3500 words this time, but you probably need to have read the most recent chapter for this to make sense. Tl;dr: It’s a whole lot faster now, mostly due to work from Simon Fell. My feeling now is that the code is up against the limits and I’d be surprised if any implementation were noticeably faster. Not saying it won’t happen, just that I’d be surprised. With a retake on the Amdahl’s-law graphics that will please concurrency geeks...

On and off this past year, I’ve been fooling around with a program called Topfew (GitHub link), blogging about it in Topfew fun and More Topfew Fun. I’ve just finished adding a few nifty features and making it much faster; I’m here today first to say what’s new, and then to think out loud about concurrent data processing, Go vs Rust, and Amdahl’s Law, of which I have a really nice graphical representation. Apologies because this is kind of long, but I suspect that most people who are interested in either are interested in both...

What happened was, I needed a small improvement to Expat, probably the most widely-used XML parsing engine on the planet, so I coded it up and sent off a PR and it’s now in release 2.3.0. There’s nothing terribly interesting about the problem or the solution, but it certainly made me think about coding and tooling and so on. (Warning: Of zero interest to anyone who isn’t a professional programmer.)...

This is just another round of cheerleading for e-bikes, provoked by my odometer clicking over to three thousand km. Granted, not amazing for twenty months of commuting, but not nothing. For anyone in an even marginally urban situation in reasonable health, if you don’t have one of these, you’re really missing a trick. For earlier raving about this vehicle, see here...

Welcome to the monthly tour of long-form excellence that I, due to being semi-retired, have the time to read. You probably don’t have that kind of time but one or two of these might brighten your day anyhow...

Months into the cold wet Pacific-Northwest Dark Season and our cat, a charming 4-year-old calico, has been bored and fretful. The obvious solution: Get her a kitten! Easier said than done, let me tell ya. But it’s done. The little feline fluffball’s name is Thorn, spelt “þ”. More on that below...

Not the most original name, granted. It’s wedged into the middle of Greater Vancouver’s western oceanfront and is mostly occupied by our airport and its apparatuses. But there are a couple of decent parks, and on a greyish February day they yielded fresh air, smiles, and a harvest of photographs. This particular season of this particular year, we’ll take what we can get...

I’ve been programming and remembering how much fun it is. With nostalgia for Old Data and thoughts on my work at AWS...

Following on Tuesday’s big succession announcement at Amazon, I was apparently the only human who’d been in a room with Andy Jassy more than once in recent years and was willing to talk to media. By about the fifth conversation, my talking points were stubs because the points wore off, leaving a well-polished gleam. So I might as well share them directly. If you’ve read any of the other articles this may sound familiar...