What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I noticed that Google Docs had done a little bit of an upgrade to the style, and specifically, that the Note cards on the right side of the docs, were sporting a little more whitespace, and the font wasn't tied into the font on the doc.

I also noticed that the buttons on the Slide decks were colored with yellow - for the presentation tool. OK... sure... who doesn't like primary colors? But it was the whitespace that was a little annoying.

I like to keep things tight on the screen - not a lot of chrome, buttons, etc. And certainly not a ton of whitespace - it just takes up space. But at the same time, it's all about evolving and adapting to those things which you cannot change - and Google is certainly not interested in my style preferences.

Wonder if this is something of a bigger change on the horizon?

This morning I saw a tweet that announced that the Cognitect AWS Client library 0.8.243 was released. This was news to me, because I've been using Amazonica for years now, and it works, but has plenty of little things that always made me write a wrapper around all the things I really needed to do.

But hey... Cognitect are the guys that own Clojure - so if there's a "preferred way" to integrate with AWS, these guys would be the ones that would do it in the best way possible. I haven't looked at the docs much, but I wanted to put all this in a post so I could come back to it the next time I needed to talk to AWS from Clojure, and give this a spin.

Quite interesting...

UPDATE: I've taken a look at it, and I find it very interesting. Rather than use the AWS Java SDK, and just wrap the Java objects in Clojure code - which isn't bad but it doesn't really make it discoverable, and you end up wondering if there isn't a simpler way to get the data. With the Cognitect scheme, you send data, and get data, and it's up to you to then read what you need. Much nicer.

I saw this on Twitter this morning:

Adam McCrea - @adamlogic: I see a lot of confusion around @heroku's free dynos, so I wrote up a guide. Let me know if you find this helpful, and please share!

https://railsautoscale.com/heroku-free-dynos

and I have to say, it's packed with a lot of really useful information about the free, hobby, and paid dynes and database plans. What I really liked was that the alternatives, and work-arounds that he presented makes it clear there are some decent alternatives to the Heroku plans, but that Heroku is still in a good place.

I still want to put some Clojure service up on Heroku someday... I just need to know what the app is, and maybe it's tied into a macOS or iOS app as well. Who knows... but I really like to see someone look into the good, and the not-so-great parts of a service provider - just to keep them honest.

This morning a friend at the train station in Naperville mentioned that tonight starting at 6:00 pm there was forecast an Ice Storm that would make evening - and morning - commutes really nasty. So I had to look this up when I got into the office... was it really going to be all that bad? What was the latest news?

When I got in, and had time to look it up, it was sound pretty nasty:

...ICE STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 6 PM THIS EVENING TO 6 AM CST WEDNESDAY... * WHAT...SIGNIFICANT ICING EXPECTED DUE TO FREEZING RAIN. ICE ACCUMULATIONS OF ONE TENTH TO FOUR TENTHS OF AN INCH EXPECTED...

and if that wasn't enough, it went on to reassure us with:

POWER OUTAGES AND TREE DAMAGE ARE POSSIBLE DUE TO THE ICE. TRAVEL COULD BE NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE ON UNTREATED SURFACES. THE HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS MAY IMPACT THE EVENING COMMUTE.

And I just started giggling... We just got out of the Polar Vortex, and now we're going to covered in ice - and rain (to make it nice and slick) overnight, so that most places will be very hard to walk in the morning.

I have time, and knowledge, so we'll see what happens to that forecast as the day wears on. But it doesn't look particularly good for tomorrow morning's walk from the train station. But there's also working at home, or toughing it out... we'll have to see.