markjgsmith

I've never been to Syria but I've seen first hand people living in very difficult conditions in other parts of the world so I can imagine how this might feel for the Syrians. All we in the west have heard for so many years is all these terrible things happening in Syria, so I'm just so happy there's some hope for them finally. Best wishes for all. #

It's interesting to see that the US and the Saudis are getting on. This article made me smile a bit. It wasn't all that long ago, probably a decade ago, that I got pulled over into secondary at the US - Canadian border. I was going for a weekend snowboarding in Vermont. What was the issue? I had UAE stamp in my passport, because I had been to Abu Dhabi a few years before. Why had I been there? I was doing solutions architect work there for a US company! They were building a new television broadcast center there and I was integrating our software into their internal workflows and systems.

Anyhow the trip went well, I found the emeratis to be very friendly. It was kind of wild as the plane was landing in the early evening, looking down across the vastness of the desert, to see in the distance tiny pickup trucks and people riding camels battling the sand storms.

How times change. I hear and see lots of tech entrepreneurs visiting the region the last couple of years. #

I just rewatched the very cool Harold White space warp drive explanation that was featured on the latest Rogan. It's at 25:42 if you want to skip straight to it. The thing that I keep wondering is that if you are traveling at say warp 5, how do you ensure you don't smash into anything? The stoping distance at WARP5 has got to be spectacularly long, and I would have thought that across such large distances the chances of hiting something that is vaguely space ship sized must increase. #

Netlify support did finally get around to updating their cli github action, so all my deploys are working again. Thanks to those that took the time to post their similar experiences in the thread. #

Hey Netlify, are you okay?

This is day 2 of Netlify blocking all my deploys that are coming from inside Github Actions workflows. I have no idea what's going on because they appear to be ignoring my posts on their support forum. I'm fairly certain the issue is on their side because I reset the code to the exact version that created the current live website, a known good version since that made it out without any issues, and that is now getting blocked too.

So far I can still deploy by building the site locally and deploying direct, but that's really sub-optimal because the workflows in the Github actions do all sorts of extra things. And who knows how long this will last. Hey Netlify, are you okay? #

All sorts of strange issues today. As well as all the deploy problems, I had some really quite bizare interactions with GPTs today. I have previously had some good experiences working on CSS with AIs, but today was with javascript, and it was really quite terrible. I was trying to do something very simple, and the AI was repeatedly failing, and adding complexity while doing so. So I asked it to remove the styling that it had added without asking me, and it said yep removed it. And it hadn't. This went on for at least 30 mins. Over and over it would say that it had removed it, but then it still hadn't, and it would even check itself and say, oh yes I didn't remove it, then still fail to remove it.

One thing that hadn't occurred to me before, and I can't believe I hadn't thought if this, and I also can't believe I haven't heard anyone talking about this yet. How do we know that the GPT companies aren't just barely training their models, then releasing them to billions of users half baked, so that the users train them for free without knowing it. Surely this is bound to happen as VC money dries up. #

Having some errors with the deploy to Netlify this morning. This is just a test post. Bit of a mystery since the status page doesn't show any relevant errors or incidents. #

There's definitely some type of issue on Netlify this morning as far as I can tell. I've openned a support case. The good news is that since I run a static site all powered by git, I can continue writing posts locally and they will sync up later, the bad news is that nothing new is currently being added to the live site. #

Well I am able to deploy directly to Netlify, hence you can read this post, but deploys via Github Actions appear to be completely blocked for me. I haven't seen that before in all the years I've had my sites on Netlify. It's a bit strange. No reply yet on the support forum site, almost 7 hours after reporting it. Not great. Especially since deploys to all my sites are currently affected. #

What with the Trump tarrifs, new US trade deals being struck, and the new pope, it feels like a lot of big things are sliding into place. I wonder whether this could be the beginning of a nice bit of momentum for everyone. #

This whole transition to using AI tools is going to be very complex. Of course that's nothing new to hear, but I get a sense that some are starting to get a feel for the size of the issue at hand. Reality is very very complicated and it took humanity literally millions of years in a shared reality to build the current non-AI "solution". I feel like we need to be careful, but also not too careful, sometimes you have to press on reguardless. But also, empathy, kindness. #

Running my static generator in the VSCode debugger

I configured the VSCode debugger to run my static site generator. It's been a while since I've been debugging like this. It's awesome to finally see the code running with all the debug tools. Makes it so much easier to get back into code that I wrote years ago. I wanted to make a quick note of it here, it's one of those things that you configure then don't think about for ages. Now I can refresh my brain with this blog post.

Crucially VSCode supports debugging programs launched via npm. Since I use npm scripts to run my code locally and in Github actions, I wanted to use the same method in the debugger.

The trick to getting it working was to use the npm launch configuration, and to also add a new 'debug' npm script, which was a copy of the existing 'build' npm script but with the additional '--inspect' node arg. Then when you run the debugger in VSCode, and after you have set a breakpoint somewhere near the top of your code, the command line window opens, and VSCode runs the program, halting at your breakpoint and you can step through the code, examining variables, callstacks and use all sorts of other cool tools. #

Nothing huge or major today, but I did fix a long standing bug on the linkblog that had been causing a display issue on some links. Basically if you used a file editor that adds a newline at the end of files when saving them, then that caused the linkblog link created from said file to not have space between the link text and link domain, which looked kind of bad. I was having to use an annoying workaround using the linux truncate command to remove the newline after each save. Anyhow that's fixed now. #

Figured I'd try for one more feature for the redesign. Here's a bunch of text. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. And if I've done this right, there should be a picture in the top right of this note. #

Long overdue site redesign

Just a quick post about the recent site redesign. I have been wanting to do a bit of an overhaul of the site design for a long time at this point. That wasn't possible until now because I was coding everything on a very small screen. Now that I have a laptop, the redesign became possible, and also somewhat more urgent because (1) I could see how bad the site looked on desktop browsers and (2) I'm looking for a job. The fact that it was quite a painless redesign is confirmation that my static site generator is working well, and perhaps my long term vision might be possible.

Here's a couple of screenshots that show the before and after for prostherity:

The biggest annoyance with the old design was that the text was too wide on desktop browsers. Though it looked okay on mobile, it spanned the entire screen on desktop. Second to that was the top of the page looked very empty and bare, and the menu items were confusing, but also far too minimalist. That's the best I could do without being able to open up devtools.

The new design takes a traditional blog layout approach, with a sidebar on desktop that contains the menu items. That frees up the header section considerably, cleaning it up, making it look neat and tidy. The main content now has text that doesn't span the entire page, making it much easier to read. I also added some borders around the different posts so it's completely clear where each one starts and finishes, even when the page displays posts of different types.

Along with the visual redesign I re-organised all the pages, updating the breadcrumbs making it less confusing when browsing the archives. It's often a good idea to cleanup things both visually but also logically. Hopefully the site is a lot easier to read on desktop now.

I've added some javascript and CSS to create a hamburger menu button that appears in the top right of the screen on small screens. That way there is no need for a wasteful sidebar taking up valuable screen space on those devices. Clicking / taping the hamburger menu opens a centered list of menu items. Clicking / taping it a second time closes the menu. Load the page on a mobile device or resize your browser window to test it out.

That's it really, it's still quite minimalist but is a good foundation to build on. At some point in the future I plan to make some more frontend changes to give it a more styled look. I just need to decide what direction to take it in design wise. For now it's good enough.

Thanks to Gemini for helping with some of the trickier CSS and javascript. It was actually very fun pair programming with an AI. #

Just discovered a small bit of collateral damage from the site redesign. A lot of the site links on the about and portfolio pages were 404ing. I've updated them, so they now point to the correct place. Sorry, the links should work again now. #

Just had a strange but interesting conversation with ChatGPT about Belgium politics and belgians. I learnt a lot. Wish I could have asked it to draw a few more pictures. I felt a good representation necessitates much more creativity. Then again perhaps my questions could be better too.

It asked me to try again tomorrow. Anyways, check out the conversation. #

Following yesterday's redesign, I've been re-organising the menu items and pages on the blog this morning so they make more sense. It's not exactly right just yet, but it's better than it was. The problem is that "blog" is what we call the entire site, and the main page of that site is a page that display the blog posts, notes items and links all interleaved. But the menu items give you a way to view these individually as well. However since /blog is the site main page, then where do you put the page that shows just the blog posts? Bit of a connundrum. Well I've opted for /posts. As in 'only the blog posts'.

The whole things is compounded slightly by the idea of archives. Basically this is just a way to find posts by navigating a date folder structure. I won't go into it here, but you'll see the problem if you click around a bit. Integrating individual posts with the ability to have archives isn't trivial. I've noticed others are having similar issues on their blogs. Anyways, things are getting better slowly, bit by bit. #

I ended up figuring out the archives issue I mentioned earlier. I was able to change just the breadcrumbs at the top of each page which show the current location. It wasn't as complicatd as I had thought, but just difficult to see. It wasn't actually all that difficult to change, which is a really good sign that my static generator is very flexible. Of course there are some simplifications that could be made, but on the whole, it's working rather well. I think it likely won't be too much effort to get it to a state where I can release it as open source. #

My new favorate thing: Writing CSS code with Gemini. CSS is actually kind of fun again. And now the blog looks half decent both in a web browser and on mobile. More changes to come no doubt. Technically I guess this is vibe coding. #