The best time to own a domain

Jim Nielsen: That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. More here.

February 9, 2023

Heading to Go: A Look at Building a Video Encoder (meetup)

We’re doing a DevRomagna meetup this month, and I think it will be a super-interesting one. It’s titled Heading to Go: A Look at Building a Video Encoder and the presenter will be Daniel Enrico Botta, a C# software engineer who recently switched to Go for his video encoding projects. Here’s the abstract: This talk will discuss the experience of moving from C# to Go for a video coding project. The pros and cons of using Go, a modern and efficient programming language, and how it compares to other languages will be shown....

February 8, 2023

Brad Mehldau plays I am the Walrus

Brad Mehldau plays Lennon/McCartney’s I Am the Walrus, from his upcoming album, Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles.

February 6, 2023

Making the latest C# language features available in older .NET versions

In a C# library I’ve been working on, I wanted to use C# 9.0’s init keyword. Quoting the documentation: The init keyword defines an accessor method in a property or indexer. An init-only setter assigns a value to the property or the indexer element only during object construction. This enforces immutability so that once the object is initialized, it can’t be changed again. Consider the following class: public class Person { public string FirstName { get; init; } } You can initialize it like this:...

February 4, 2023

Flammarion engraving

I was reading iA’s grumpy writing about GPT (with which I sympathize) when my attention was captured by the image they added to their post. It was so fascinating that I had to research it. As it turns out, this is the Flammarion engraving, a famous wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (“The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology”)....

February 2, 2023

A quick preview of the Blazor United prototype for .NET8

Steve Sanderson, the original creator of Blazor, recently posted a quick peek at some of the new Blazor prototypes they are experimenting with for .NET 8. I think this looks great. Mixing client and server is a brilliant concept. Essentially one would be served with server-side Blazor on the first landing. While using the app, a background task would download the client-side stuff, ready to be consumed at any subsequent access....

January 28, 2023

The days are long but years are short

Source Above all, I liked the affection and serenity that shines, through all stages, between father and son. A depiction of the circle of life I gladly subscribe to.

January 27, 2023

Barnes & Noble's surprising turnaround

According to the always-interesting Ted Gioia, the recent turnaround of Barnes & Noble is to be attributed to the company’s new CEO and his love of books. Quite astonishingly James Daunt, who took the helm of B&N in late 2019, refused to take promotional money from publishers: Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door....

January 25, 2023

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Slow Sunday morning, while surfing the YouTube ocean, I stumbled upon the audio recording of David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech. Any DFW fan knows about the commencement speech he famously gave at Kenyon College in 2005, and I’m probably one of the few who hadn’t yet listened to it. So this morning, I hit the play button and was blown away by it. Unsurprisingly, I guess, as the speech was met with universal acclaim....

January 22, 2023

Book Review: Uomini, boschi e api

I wish everyone could listen to the song of the partridges as the sun rises, see the deer on pastures in spring, the larch trees reddened by autumn on the edges of rocks, the darting of fish among the clear waters of streams, and the bees gathering nectar from the flowering cherry trees. In these stories, I write about village places. These natural environments are still livable, about the beautiful social insects that are bees, but also about ancient jobs that are slowly and inexorably disappearing....

January 21, 2023