Issue 5 - yuletide, finished series, identifiers
A possibly weekly email about what’s been going on in my brain
18 - 24 December 2022
It’s the run up to Christmas which means everything is weird.
(There seem to be issues uploading images at the moment so this issue is text only I’m afraid!)
Christmas
Christmas is always a strange time for me as the social atmosphere changes, everyone’s mood tensions, and there is a set of largely silent expectations on behaviour. Are you seeing family? Who are you giving gifts to? Hope you’ve remembered to send cards! I’ve found it easier this year to say that I don’t celebrate Christmas rather than trying to play off the Grinch-like persona. It’s peculiar celebrating a Christian holiday when you’re very much not Christian, and my usual approach to religion - I respect your decisions so do the same for mine - is very one-sided when Christmas is everywhere. I’m now done with social engagements for the year though and I can embrace the hermit lifestyle I always aspire to.
If you do celebrate Christmas or get in to that holiday spirit, I hope you have a good one! 🎄
Watching
I finished up Wednesday on Netflix this past week - a fun little series that had the same kind of dark edge as the recent Sabrina alongside some fine wit and a sterling performance by Gwendoline Christie who physically towers over Jenna Ortega (1.91 versus 1.55m respectively). I’m still holding out hope that they give the Honorverse series of books an Expanse-esque TV series and cast GC as Honor Harrington. I can see why Wednesday has been so popular (my main after-show interaction has been with the #wenclair ‘ship) which is more than I could do with Netflix’s last darling, Stranger Things, which I gave up on part way through the first season when I realised I disliked all of the characters.
I also finished Andor on Disney+. I heard nothing but positive things about it but (prematurely) relegated it to the same pool as The Mandalorian: good for Star Wars. Happy to say I was entirely wrong about that: it’s just plain great. The writing is confident and intimate and doesn’t get bogged down in lore or side plots. There’s a scene towards the end (no spoilers) where two characters say goodbye, having spent probably less than ten minutes of screentime together, and the parting says so much about what they’ve been through without having to go into the minutiate. Well worth a watch regardless of your position on Star Wars, modern or classic.
The second season of Alice in Borderland has started on Netflix which is a rare example of Western Netflix getting a big budget Japanese show, this despite anecdotal evidence that a large portion of the Japanese Netflix library having full English subtitles. AiB</abbr3 isn’t great, but it has a kind of schlocky, devil-may-care attitude that makes it easy watching.
Identifiers
I’ve not done any coding outside of work since the release of GuessThatAnime which has meant I’ve done a lot of reading, researching, plotting, and scheeeeming, for the inevitable next project. I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of “what should my primary key be?”.
I switched to using UUIDs exclusively after Marco Pivetta’s talk on Doctrine Best Practices and never looked back. Using UUIDv4s eliminates an entire suite of issues (importing/exporting data, guessable sequences, not knowing values for relationships without a round trip to the DB) without a whole lot of downsides (they look ugly, larger index size, not able to be used for cheap relative ordering, no use for pagination).
I then read about not exposing your primary keys to the outside world (mainly for security) but it also hinted at solving the “ugliness” problem above - make sure your entities have a public, stable key like an alias/slug. When something doesn’t have a natural way of creating a key like that though, what do you do? And is there a way of having the benefits of UUIDs with fewer downsides? Which lead me to all sorts of other identifiers:
- ULID
- Snowflake from Twitter
- Sonyflake like Snowflake but from Sony with some tradeoffs
- New UUID versions which apparently help with sorting
- NanoID
- KSUID
My reading thus far has been from Hacker News threads one and two as well as an incomplete comparison table. KSUID and NanoID look like good ways forward to me but it will take another project and using them in anger before I can say whether there’s any benefit to using them.
YouTube watches
- Maker Secret Santa: Colin Furze, Emily the Engineer, Xyla Foxlin, Jimmy Diresta, Becky Stern - lots of different styles and approaches but all good fun
- Oppenheimer trailer - yup, that’s definitely a Chris Nolan film
- Putting your cat’s ashes into a concrete lamp - it’s a nice build but what a peculiar way to pay tribute to a beloved pet
- Particle beams in science fiction - I’d never really thought about what “particle beam” really meant so this was a great dive into the science behind them
- Veritasium trying to recreate “Rods from God” - it didn’t go well and I got the feeling he was just trying to recoup costs, for my money Megaproject’s video on the same thing is the better, less flashy one
- Restoring a big rusty cleaver
- How bonsai scissors are forged using sword-making techniques - instantly added to my “Japanese crafts” playlist
Random links
- Nvidia are canning GameStream - annoying as not all the games I have are on Steam where SteamLink could fill the void
- Moonlight - a non-Nvidia (but protocol compatible) client, and Sunshine which is a non-Nvidia host, setup looks a bit fiddly but might get around the Xbox Game Pass encrypted container installs that makes streaming, thus far, impossible
- DS4Windows - get Playstation controllers working on Windows flawlessly
- 12 days of PostgreSQL tools and projects
- If you can read this, your browser captions are broken - having messed with subtitles / captions before, this is a great summary of the weird state of them in the browser
- LastPass security incident - the scope of this is still being revealed but this looks bad; I currently use 1Password but I fear for the impact something like this will have on people’s trust in using password managers which, despite this, is still the safest way of securing yourself online
- PHP Annotated - always a great read, I recently got the latest version of Xdebug working and what a joy it is to use versus the ol’ “dump and die” method of debugging; also linked on there is loophp/collection which looks like a much better collection solution than Laravel’s
- Let’s Encrypt not supports ACME-CAA DNS records - a nice tightening of certificate delivery
- NASA InSight’s last tweet
This was hand-crafted by John.