Trade Wars 2002 was a great 1991 online game I hosted on one of my BBSes back in the day. Not sure if it was Lorien or Phoenix BBS; it might have been the latter given the game’s release date. I totally forgot TW2002 until yesterday when I spotted this 1991: Trade Wars 2002 article on the 50 Years of Text Games newsletter. I humbly confess that, until yesterday, I never made the obvious connection between TW2002 and Eve Online. That’s quite startling considering that I’ve been a beta player first and then an avid Eve player for a few years (Eve was also the last game I seriously played on a computer.) ...

Pardon me while I’m venting out my frustration. I am so tired of Homebrew messing up with my stuff. It used to be the perfect tool for the right job until they decided to auto-brew-update-and-cleanup at every new install. Another day another issue, today with vim not running anymore: dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/lua/lib/liblua.5.3.dylib Referenced from: /user/local/bin/vi Reason: image not found Lua has suddenly gone missing. Ah, but of course. I installed something with Homebrew this morning. The fix is to brew reinstall vim, which then leads to the following error: ...

My brilliant friend Salvatore Sanfilippo (otherwise known as antirez of Redis fame) has an interesting write-up on his website. How similar is programming to prose writing? After getting his own feet wet with novel writing, he is convinced that the two activities share many common traits. One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes. ...

According to a famous and fortunate Homeric expression, words are winged, not so much like birds but rather like arrows, which cut the air quickly to go straight to the target and break through the listener’s heart. The Greeks have always known that the word is used to convince and show truth and correctness. But they also know that it has a magical force in it: it can turn into a spell, capable of dominating and dragging the listener’s soul; to bewitch like music and to heal like medicine; but, above all, to deceive and mislead. ...

Flask 2.0 has just been released. Along with it come many other major satellite releases: Werkzeug 2.0, Jinja 3.0, Click 8.0, ItsDangerous 2.0, and MarkupSafe 2.0. Across all projects, Python 3.6+ is now required, and comprehensive type annotations are supported. At a glance, I’d say that the biggest news is async views in Flask 2. Work has also been done around Werkzeug Request and Response classes to allow for better sync and async in the future (it’s not a public API yet.) Jinja, Click and ItsDangerous come with a lot of new niceties. Details are available on the Pallets website. ...

For decades Scandinavian countries have been renowned for their educational systems, low levels of corruption, sustainable economy, social justice, overall quality of life. According to Jukka Savolainen on Slate, the reason why Finns have now been dominating the World Happiness Report four years in a row has little to do with these factors and more with their life expectations. Savolainen perspective is interesting because he is a Finn living in the US. He experienced the Scandinavian system first hand, then moved to a (very) different culture. ...

I am very late to the party, but today I learned that the good old dotnet SmptClient is considered obsolete and should not be used. Quoting the documentation: We don’t recommend using the SmtpClient class for new development because SmtpClient doesn’t support many modern protocols. Use MailKit or other libraries instead. (source) Interestingly, Microsoft is recommending a third-party open-source library as an alternative. I hope we’ll see more of that in the future. ...

Robert Edison Fulton was the first solo round-the-world motorcycle tourer. He made his worldwide trip on a two-cylinder Douglas motorcycle between July 1932 and December 1933, more or less 90 years ago. On his way from London to the colonial Middle East, Fulton crossed Nazi Germany. Some of the countries and places he passed do not exist anymore. Most have changed dramatically; others, not so much. I suspect, for example, that his adventures in Syria, Afghanistan, or at the Indian-Pakistani borders might have been written today. ...

The official Git documentation presents the following example as a valid use-case for the worktree command: You are in the middle of a refactoring session and your boss comes in and demands that you fix something immediately. You might typically use git-stash1 to store your changes away temporarily. However, your working tree is in such a state of disarray (with new, moved, and removed files and other bits and pieces strewn around) that you don’t want to risk disturbing any of it. (source) ...

Only 24 people have journeyed far enough to see the whole Earth against the black of space. The images they brought back changed our world. Here is a selection of the most beautiful photographs of Earth — iconic images and unknown gems — digitally restored to their full glory. Toby Ord’s recent Earth Restored project is a must-see.