What's it all about, Alfie?

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. 🙂

Apple is doing something interesting with the iPhone 13 orders this year. In the past, they used to open up ordering at midnight, Pacific Time. This meant that it was 2:00 am local time for me, and I get up early to run, so it wasn't horrible - and given that the new iPhones sell out in a matter of a few hours, it was the only way to get one of the first batch.

Then in the last few cycles, they moved the starting time to 5:00 am Pacific Time, so that meant a 7:00 am start time for me - not bad at all. But there was still the load on the Carrier's APIs, and there would be issues with that, and all manner of other things, so this year they have again, changed things up.

After the Apple Event the Apple web site allowed for a sort of Pre-order, Pre-Order... You can go through all the steps of buying the new iPhone - selecting the size, color, capacity, communicating with the carrier, payment method - everything right up to the point of actually buying it. And then you wait for 5:00 am PT on Launch Day, and you simply finish the order. The iPhone is in your "Bag", and you just need to pay for it.

This gets around a lot of the surge of orders because no one can buy one until Launch Day, and it's the same starting time, but all the communication with the Carrier, etc. is now much more spread out in the days leading up to Launch Day. They haven't started shipping anything, and I don't believe they have even reserved units for sale - but they have done all the work needed to verify that you are who you say you are, and all your selections, so on Launch Day, there is much less to do.

Clever. 🙂 I like it a lot. I've got my phone on pre-order, pre-order, and on Launch Day, tomorrow, I just need to login and click once, and it's in the Pre-Order queue. Nice.

In the last few months there seems to have been a lot of changes in the IRC world. Freenode had what has been called a hostile takeover by some, and a good number of high-profile projects left that network and went to Libera, which was started by some ex-Freenode folks. All this was probably a lot more traumatic for those immediately involved, and I feel for them. It also meant that for the IRC channels and projects I do follow, it meant that many went dark for a bit.

It happens. We adapt.

When the projects popped up on Libera, I was able to get on there, and see that they were as popular and active as ever. Sure, it's a little more diffuse than before because some didn't move, but my IRC Client on macOS - Textual, allows for multiple server connections, so that I can have Freenode and Libera connected, and the side-bar has all the channels - some on Freenode, some on Libera, and it works just fine.

I never expected that it had multiple server connections - I just never needed them... until I did. And when I did, I was so very glad that it handled it as nicely as it did.

In the end, to me, it looks very much like nothing changed, but I know quite a lot did.

A friend pointed out Cloudflare Workers to me as a near-Heroku style deployment and run-time platform for Node/JS projects. It's really more turn-key than Heroku - it's targeted at the folks that don't want to maintain servers, or worry about global data centers, or anything like that. Just make a Node/JS project, deploy it, and pay for what you use.

There are a lot of reasons to like something like this - it's what someone would need if they just wanted to write the code and leave all the other details to someone else. It's got a nice "Free Plan", for little hobby projects - much like Heroku, but it doesn't provide all the services that Heroku does in it's Store... but again, if this is a simple Node/JS app, you are probably set up with your own database and Cloud Services, so that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I haven't really used it on a project - yet, but I can imagine trying one - from my iPad and play.js... it might be interesting to see how it all might work in a non-laptop mode... 🙂

I just read in Apple News that CNN is reporting that Johns Hopkins University is reporting a 300% increase in COVID-19 new cases on Labor Day 2021 over Labor Day 2020 - which is not a good sign given the way Fall 2020 went... it does not bode well for this coming Fall. I know that the situation is not the same - so many are vaccinated, and this has really become a pandemic of the unvaccinated, but it's scary to see three times as many new cases as a year ago.

I worry that the rise in deaths that lags the rise in new cases is going to mean that the next month, or so, is shaping up to be bad news... And the truth is that the new cases are just the start of the progression... there really is no way to stop the cases that have already taken hold, it's just got to play out. And those cases will lead to others...

It's a crazy situation...