Daniel Rendall – 67 Bricks blog

Wishing upon a star

When I was a boy, many years ago…

…I used to like building polyhedron models out of card. Here is a photo of me, probably around 1987ish, spray-painting a compound of ten tetrahedra. Evidently the photographer had partially obscured the aperture with their finger, but there were no digital cameras back in those days, you only found out your mistakes when you had the picture developed!

The author, as a boy, spray-painting a compound of 10 tetrahedra. — The artist at work

Making a model out of card was a long and laborious process. First, armed with a protractor and ruler, one had to draw the net on card, making sure there were tabs in the right place to glue the thing together. Then it had to be cut out, and the intended folds scored very carefully with a craft knife (you need them to fold cleanly, but if you cut through the card you’ll have to start again). Finally, it had to be glued together to give it three-dimensional form, a process which got increasingly fiddly as access to the interior became harder.

On jspawnhelper and automatic updates

I had just settled down to write some ScalaCheck tests when suddenly my peace and harmony was shattered by the news that the “download PDF” functionality on one of our sites had recently ceased functioning, and it would be quite nice if it could be restored to good working order. And so begins our tale.

Migrating a VirtualBox Windows installation

I have been using Linux as my primary OS since 1999ish, except for a brief period early in the history of 67 Bricks when I had an iMac. Whenever I have used Windows it has invariably been in some kind of virtualised form; this was necessary in the iMac days when I was developing .NET applications in Visual Studio, but these days I work solely on Scala / Play projects developed in IntelliJ in Linux. Nevertheless, I have found it convenient to have an installation of Windows available for the rare instances where it’s actually necessary (for example, to connect to someone’s VPN for which no Linux client is available).

My Windows version of choice is the venerable Windows 7. This is the last version of Windows which can be configured to look like “proper Windows” as I see it by disabling the horrible Aero abomination. I tried running the Windows 10 installer once out of morbid curiosity, it started talking to me, so I stopped running it. I am old and set in my ways, and I feel strongly that an OS does not need to talk to me.

Programming a Tesla

I have a friend called Chris who is a big fan of the band China Drum. Many years ago he challenged me to program their song Last Chance as a custom ringtone on his Nokia phone and, being vaguely musical, I obliged.

Time has moved on since then. With his hitherto rock-star hair cut to a respectable length, he is now the CEO of a company providing disease model human cells. And he owns a Tesla, something he likes to remind me about from time to time. Now it turns out that one of the silly things you can do with a Tesla is program the lights to flash to make a custom light show for a piece of music of your choice. You can probably see where this is heading.

Embracing Impermanence (or how to check my sbt build works)

Stable trading relationships with nearby countries. Basic human rights. A planet capable of sustaining life. What do these three things have in common?

The answer is that they are all impermanent. One moment we have them, the next moment – whoosh! – they’re gone.

Today I decided I would embrace our new age of impermanence insofar as it pertains to my home directory. Specifically, I wondered whether I could configure a Linux installation so that my home directory was mounted in a ramdisk, created afresh each time I rebooted the server.

Why on earth would I want to do something like that?

Zen and the art of booking vaccinations

This is a slightly abridged version of a painful experience I had recently when trying to book a Covid vaccination for my 5-year-old daughter, and some musing about what went wrong (spoiler: IT systems). It’s absolutely not intended as a criticism of anyone involved in the process. All descriptions of the automated menu process describe how it was working today.

What have I been listening to?

A while ago, Tim suggested we could have a #now-listening channel in our company Slack, in which people could post details of what they were listening to. It occurred to me that it might be a fun challenge to try to figure out from what I’d posted on there who my favourite artist was, and which was my most-listened-to album. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. This is an account of what I did and my various thought processes as I went along…

Challenge: figure out how to get my posts from our #now-listening channel and do some statistics to them.

Session musician programmers

As a software consultancy, we are always in the business of trying to recruit good developers. One of the more annoying phrases that has cropped up in the industry lexicon of late is “rockstar programmer”, as both an ideal to which developers are assumed to aspire, and a glib description of the kind of programmer that software publishers are assumed to be desperate to employ.