(the first 3 paragraphs are a slight modification of what I wrote for an Amazon review)

Album front cover

The headline kind of gives it away, but this album definitely sounds like a cross between early/late MxPx and Good Charlotte. You can see on Wikipedia and other places that this was part of a 3ish album trend where MxPx moved more towards the pop part of pop punk. Kind of interesting coming back to it now. I was listening to MxPx albums as they came out in the 90s, but fell off with The Ever Passing Moment. I even briefly joined the fan club and still have the shirt. Because of Reese’s interview on Mike Herrerra’s podcast, I recently started listenign to their self-titled album, which sounds like their early stuff except with lyrics that match grown men the grown men they now are vs kids they were when writing Teenage Politics.

Advent of Code 2015 Problem Set

Day 10

There’s a lot to be said for doing the Advent of Code in December along with a few thousand other programmers. It’s fun to be part of something with others and you get to all the neat and wacky solutions that others come up with.

On the other hand, going at my own page with the 2015 problem set allows for interesting little coincidences to form. What I did one day (when I was at about Day 7) was to go through all the remaining days and write some first impression ideas at solutions. This got my brain thinking about what I needed for each day. One day, before getting to the Day 10 problems, I was idly flipping through the book Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! As I was trying to decide if it would be one of the languages I’d add for 2016. I ended up coming across a built-in library that would have made solving Day 10 a real breeze. Day 10 is the Look and Say sequence. I’m sure by paying close attention to that Wiki entry I could have figured out an algorithm. But, basically I just needed to group together each repeated number and then I could take the length of that list/array to find out how many numbers. That becomes part of the new number. Unfortunately, as far as I could see, that functionality was not built into Python. So my Python code looked like this:

I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.

Public Radio

Radiolab – Heard about them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life. Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the 30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)

I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!. Ever since some folks used Haskell during last year’s Advent of Code and this guy’s videos that I mentioned in an early 2021 blog post, I’ve been very curious about the language. In fact, at this point I’ve decided that Go and Haskell will be the next two languages I learn.

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, I always find it fascinating how the kids interpret the world. Here are a couple examples of how Sam is seeing things at this point.

LEGO Ban

Last weekend I was sitting at the computer, working on some code when my wife came into the room. “Did you tell Sam that he couldn’t play LEGOs?”

“Of course not,” I retorted.

“Did you tell him he couldn’t be in the basement, then?”

A few days ago I read this article over at Tech Republic about how, Mozilla’s greatest achievement is not Firefox, but the Rust programming language. They point to Firefox’s declining numbers in the face of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers and I’m inclined to agree with the author. There is, of course, a kind of poetry to this. Although Netscape was one of the first dot-com companies and beat Microsoft to the punch at creating the first mainstream web browser, it’s not Netscape Navigator which is its greatest legacy. Instead it’s spinning off into Mozilla and, the most poetic part, the creation of the Javascript programming language. (Javascript was written in just a week and a half and this episode of Red Hat’s Commandline Heroes podcast does an excellent job documenting it)

As I was going through my feed reader recently, I came across an article from Ars Technica, that I’d skipped over when it first came out, which announced that the All Your Base Meme is now 20 years old. I couldn’t believe it. It was my first meme, a few years before Numa Numa would be the meme that crossed over into regular pop culture. It led me to The Laziest Men on Mars’ page on Mp3.com, which was a kind of proto- Bandcamp in the early 2000s where indie bands (and some commercial bands) would put up MP3s to gain followers. ( This ended up being my favorite song from The Laziest Men on Mars) Here is the video that took over all of us on the Internet 20 years ago:

I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.

Python

Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI

Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.

https://youtu.be/lVhEo31wAw0

The PDX Broadsides - Pi Day (I’m In Love)

https://youtu.be/AHrth9lOfzo

This is my seventh year raising money for Johns Hopkins Children’s Center via the Extra Life gaming charity. When I started back then I was brand new to streaming or recording video game play. In fact, just a few years before that I hadn’t even understood the point. I found out that you could somehow display your progress towards fundraising on your screen while you played. I had no idea how to do that and, at the time, I’d only done commandline programs. So I found bfinleyui’s web-based program. I set up XSplit (which I was using at the time) to capture the web pages and was able to have a great first year. The following year he created an app with Adobe Air that was even better. The GUI for this app would become the inspiration for ElDonationTracker; what I aspired to eventually build. My first commit to the repo for ElDonationTracker was that year. I was exploring how to get the API data via the commandline, but I wasn’t too hurried because I had the Adobe Air app. Unfortunately, the following year Adobe killed Adobe Air. So it was now time for me to try and make my own app. Unfortunately, I’d never done GUI programming before and my experiment with the TKinter GUI framework didn’t quite work.