What's it all about, Alfie?

Another year has passed, and another birthday arrives. As time passes, it's interesting that my birthday and the end of the year coincide, a time to think about the end of both, and the start of new things. It's been a year of ups and downs, the second year of the pandemic, and in many cases, so little has changed. In other ways, so much has changed.

A friend asked me to think about writing down how change happens from the inside, versus what's visible from the outside, and I mentioned that I thought it would be a very short story:

• Don't let yesterday ruin your today
• Don't hold today hostage for the promise of tomorrow
• Focus on just this moment, it's all we have, and it is more than enough.
• Do your best, all the time, and whatever happens - you know you couldn't have done more

This is what I've distilled my recovery down to... it's not a lot of big changes, in fact, it's not any really big changes at all. It's the almost imperceptible layering of millions of little things, that when viewed, occasionally, from the outside - appear as changes, but at the time they happen, it's really just sticking to one of the four tenets.

Every day is exactly the same... and I am blessed. 🙂

It's another Christmas, and things have started out quietly... I was able to finish Advent of Code today - all 25 Days in 25 days. It's an unusually warm Christmas - so no snow, but that's not really unusual, but the temps being as warm as they are is a little odd. Still... the temps will fall, and the snow will come, and it'll be time to shovel snow, but for now it's just like an extended Fall.

The Christmas Music has been great this year, and I've enjoyed some really good Christmas Movies. I wrote a Christmas Letter yesterday and sent it to extended family, and it seemed to be appreciated. I like catching folks up with a little humor. 🙂

Life goes on.

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. 🙂

It's been a wild couple of weeks for the log4j team... I mean, the problem with a logger is that you don't really want to limit it, and adding the url handlers probably seemed like a great idea at the time, but once they started to be used, it was understandably hard to drop support for them. And then the exploit hit.

It's just one of those nearly universal components of JVM systems that is being supported by volunteers, and trying to thread the needle between keeping as much of the functionality as they can... while restricting the vulnerability to something that can't be exploited. It's clearly not easy, as they've had at least three releases of the 2.x codebase to try and correct the vulnerability, and each time, there seems to be more there is to do.

This is certainly going to shift how some open source teams function... it's great to be the author, or maintainer of something as used as log4j, but to have this kind of attention... well... I'm sure it's not what they were hoping for this Christmas. 🙂

I just got Day 19 of Advent of Code, and it was brutal... I mean yes, the concept of change of axes, and then translation - that's not horrible, and while getting the individual translations right took a little time, the fact was, it worked, and I found the overlaps. What came next was the real challenge - Searching was not going to work.

This is not something new, as it's often that Part 1 is something that's reasonably direct, and can be solved directly, but Part 2 adds a much larger scope, and so can't really be solved in the same way. Not always... but often enough, that it didn't surprise me. So I knew I needed to thin the search space - I just didn't know I'd have to remove it entirely, and come up with an "execution plan" for the work.

Thankfully, I expect each translation to need the working rotation function, and offset so that once I had two sensor data matched, I could then move any point on one sensor to the other. But I then needed a faster way to find the overlaps, and then an order with which to collect all the beacon locations.

As it turns out, the unique set of inter-beacon distances is a nice "fingerprint" for a sensor data list, and we can use that to identify the "pairs" of sensors that overlap. Then it's the matter of order of mapping - and there we had to start at 0 and work up. If the pair had a sensor that we'd already mapped, then add it, and put it in the list. If not, put it at the back of the list, and try again. Eventually, all the pairs will be put in order, forming a chain of translations.

To get this, I worked on so many variations it's crazy. I easily spent over 10 hours on this day's puzzle. But in the end, the feeling of seeing the quick response was just fantastic! 🙂

It's December again, and that means 25 days of some of the funniest, most frustrating coding problems of the year. Yes, Advent of Code is back, and it'll be interesting to see how things work out. I will confess that today's problem wasn't too bad, but that's how the month always starts out. 🙂

We will see how things progress as we go through the month, but it's always fun to play along with the puzzles as they put you in the middle of the action to help Santa and the elves. It just makes me smile.