What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I was looking into the Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 LTS upgrades, and decided that it was probably a good time to see about the latest version of Postgresql for my laptop. Thankfully, it's a minor version upgrade from 14.0 to 14.2, and this is something that Homebrew can do quite nicely:

  $ brew upgrade postgresql
  $ brew services restart postgresql

and then after all the downloading and installing, we have:

  $ psql --version
  psql (PostgreSQL) 14.2

Then we are good to go! 🙂

I haven't had a need to use the local Postgres server a lot in the last year or so - using a Google Cloud instance for a while, but it's nice to have all the client support, and to have something local as that's still the best insurance to off-the-grid development.

This morning I did a little searching about how to disable any Auto-Complete in Sublime Text, as there are a lot of times that I really don't want to have any autocomplete happening, as it just gets in my way. So I was very happy to find that all I needed to do was to add:

  "auto_complete": false

to the Settings file, and that will turn it off.

Blissful silence. 🙂

Thankfully, Ctrl-Space will bring it back, and that's exactly the thing I was hoping to find. Then it's at my command, as opposed to simply appearing. Once again, less is more... coding is what I do, and I know what to type... so Sublime Text is again my favorite editor. Wonderful. 🙂

I have been using the iPad Pro for two generations now, and my current model is the M1 iPad Pro, and during the pandemic, it has really proven to be a great Zoom, Meet, etc. box. It has a nice camera, and with Front and Center in iPadOS, it really makes it easy to have a good presentation, or meeting. But it's really so much more.

With the GitHub app, I can get PR notifications, review them, and merge them. With the GitHub Workflow Actions, we have continuous deployment, and that is really quite amazing to me. Of course there are the shells to boxes, and that is great, but even offline, there is so much to like about this machine.

It's rugged - compared to my MacBook Pro, and the screen is a lot easier to clean. I'm not saying my MacBook Pro isn't nice... it's just that in some respects, the iPad Pro is nicer.

What a really amazing device. 🙂

With the update to macOS Monterey, the previous macOS command-line program for generating UUIDs, uuid, has been replaced with uuidgen. I'm not at all sure why the change, but I was glad that a little investigation with ls /usr/bin revealed something that turned out to be the winner.

With this, one of my favorite aliases is now:

alias uupb="uuidgen | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -d '\n' | pbcopy"

which generates a new UUID, lower-cases all the characters, removes the trailing new-line, and then puts it into the paste buffer for pasting in an editor, or on a form... as many times as you need.

I don't know if there are even release notes about the changes at this level of macOS, but they usually get figured out - one way or another. 🙂

I knew it was coming... they warned me with macOS 11 Big Sur... but it was still a bit of a surprise this morning to reconfigure Apache 2 to use userdir, which macOS Monterey doesn't enable by default, and undoes if you have it already configured. That's OK, it's not a huge deal to turn it back on, but the big news was the complete loss of PHP.

I haven't used it in many years, but it was the one tool that shipped with macOS that I could talk to Postgres, and script, but hey... things change, and they did warn me. 🙂

I guess it would be nice to have something like Node automatically handled, but then that would likkely clash with the Node devs and the nodenv installs, etc. So I'll live with Apache 2, and the userdir, and then just serve up static content on port 80, and leave the other stuff for the development environments.

I did a little digging over the past few days to see what's new in the latest release of Blink (v14.0.2) - the terminal/shell for iOS and iPadOS. It's a nice tool - has even more features than I initially thought. It's really a nice subset of a Unix shell without needing to connect to any other hosts. But that's not really the point of this dig... I was hoping that they had implemented SSH Agent Forwarding in mosh connections so that I'd be able to use git on the remote machines. If you don't forward the SSH key, then you have to have them on the remote hosts, and ssh-add them there. That's not ideal for me, as it opens up the location of the key to a somewhat untrusted host.

I read the release notes and it seems they have re-written the SSH Agent component, and yet they didn't get very specific about the Mosh improvements, so I did a little more digging on the mosh-client code itself, and it seems that there's a bit of a disagreement about including Agent Forwarding in mosh due to security reasons. The conveneince of using git and SSH keys for git operations means that most folks want to have the key forwarding. And you can do it in simple ssh connections.

But for mosh, eventhough it's built on ssh, it seems they don't want to add it. Odd. But hey... it's their code, it's their choice, and that's why I have the workflow where I do the commits on my iPad, and use Blink with mosh just to run the code. It would be nice to have SSH Agent Forwarding, but the durability of mosh trumps the need for agent forwarding... so I'll just stick to what I have now.

But it sure would be nice... maybe they'll figure it out.

This morning I was looking to visualize some time-series data from a Plaid Asset Report, in preparation for some work at The Shop, and I thought that it would be a perfect opportunity to use the xkcd Chart package. I like the way it's clearly trying to be a little less serious, and it seems like just the thing to try out for this visualization.

The data from the endpoint I created is returned as a sequence of tuples:

{
  accounts: {
    'Checking': [
      [ '2021-09-05', 115.4 ],
      [ '2021-09-06', 115.4 ],
      [ '2021-09-07', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-08', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-09', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-10', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-11', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-12', 110 ],
    ],
    ...
  }
}

these are really the closing balances for each date for the account, and I just wanted to be able to visualize them so that any calculations can be validated by looking at the data.

The graph turned out pretty well:

This is just exactly what I'd hoped for. 🙂

This morning, play.js had an update the allows for real-time collaboration through Code Sandbox, and I have to say, it's a very interesting development, for the development I'd like to be doing on the iPad. I have really been hoping to move more development to the iPad, and play.js is an amazing tool that I've just started to experiment with, and the idea of the collaborative sessions would be very nice to have as a teaching and support tool.

While I'd love it if there were similar iPad tools for ObjC, and Clojure, I can't complain because it's really a nice set of tools for the majority of the Node/JS and Typescript work that I do. Sure... there are npx commands that don't work because they are compiled, and so not everything is going to work today on the iPad, but quite a lot will, and the collaboration features are a nice move in that direction as well.

I was chatting with a friend this morning, and he has a new job at a blockchain company, and reached out to me on GTalk - which can be accessed from his messaging client: Telegram. Now I'd never heard of Telegram, even though it's been around for ages, and my friend says that it's pretty much the defecto standard for the crypto space. It makes sense, the feature list is something you'd expect from the crypto space: Simple, Private, Fast, Open... it makes sense.

Also, they have clients for all platforms, and the clients all stay secure and in sync. It's a nice idea, and while I think the clients aren't minimal enough, maybe that's something that you can change - after all, the code is all open source, and stripping out is usually simpler than adding in. 🙂

It's something to keep in mind... Interesting space, and challenges...

This morning, I was wondering if iTerm2 had yet added the feature to restore all the window positions on restart. In the past, I used the Open Default Window Arrangement - making sure to save any changes before a restart. But there were issues with that - one, I'd forget... two, on restart, all the windows would be on the first screen, and I'd have to move them to the six (or so) screens they needed to be, and while it's not horrible, it's time-consuming.

This morning, I did a quick search to see if there was any status update on that... and I was very happy to see that when I wasn't looking, they seemed to have added that option in the Settings of iTerm2.

Go to the General -> Startup settings in iTerm2, and then select Use System Window Restoration Setting, and I should be good to go. I haven't had the chance to test it, but I'm hoping that it's going to be exactly what I want. Right down to putting the windows on the correct screens.

UPDATE: when updating the macOS 11.5.2 this morning, this worked perfectly. The windows are all in the right places, the contents of each tab (session) is still there to reivew. It's just exactly what I'd hoped for. 🙂