Posts

Today, my Sunday long-reading list included New Yorker’s The Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow. Can nuclear power possibly be a viable solution for climate change? Twenty or even ten years ago, my answer would have been a big fat No. Today? Not so sure anymore. Today, the looming disruptions of climate change have altered the risk calculus around nuclear energy. James Hansen, the NASA scientist credited with first bringing global warming to public attention, in 1988, has long advocated a vast expansion of nuclear power to replace fossil fuels. Even some environmental groups that have reservations about nuclear energy […] have recognized that abruptly closing existing reactors would lead to a spike in emissions. ...

Today I learned the hard way that since ASP.NET Core 2.0, the request body has acquired a default size limit at 30MB (~28.6 MiB). If the request body size exceeds the configured max request body size limit, the call to Request.Body.ReadAsync will throw an IOException. If this exception is uncaught, Kestrel will respond with a 413 Payload Too Large response and HttpSys will respond with a generic 500 Internal Server Error response (source). ...

I already mentioned what background music (or sounds) I like when I am coding. In that list, I included classical music. I know classical is not exactly a favorite. Not in my field, at least. I suspect the vast majority of people disregard it in advance, not really knowing what they’re missing out on, just because, well, you know, it’s dinosaurs stuff. If you are among them, you should reconsider and repent your sins. But have no worries, and rejoice, for I am here to save your soul. ...

Pattern Matching is coming to Python, and I am not sure I like it. Don’t get me wrong, I love pattern matching. I use it all the time in F#. I am sure that once it lands in the language, it will be wildly adopted. So what’s the problem with Python’s pattern matching? The community, some core developers included, has expressed several concerns. The Python Steering Council has acknowledged them and is willing to look into improvements should they be proposed. I am not going into the details here. You can look them up yourself. Let’s just say that there are a few gotchas, like the requirement to use dotted names as constants, to prevent them from being interpreted as capture variables instead (doh!) The lack of local scope bites hard here. ...

In March 1970, Dr. John Conway sent the “fatal” (as he later referred to it) letter to Martin Gardner. He was submitting ideas for Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. The New York Times features a good article on the fifty-year parable of The Game of Life. What’s appreciable, they asked some of Life’s most steadfast friends to reflect upon its influence and lessons over half a century. Among them, Brian Eno, who, being Brian Eno, has some smart things to say: ...

I’m a space junkie. So tonight, like all the other space junkies on the planet, I watched in awe as Perseverance seamlessly and beautifully landed on the surface of Mars. This is a phenomenal achievement. Of course, I will eagerly follow her1 progress. As I was following the live broadcast, I wondered: What kind of hardware and software runs all this incredible technology? It was launched in 2020, so it must be some cutting-edge stuff. As it turns out, that isn’t really the case. ...

I came back to reading Shirley Jackson almost by coincidence. I had just finished watching The Haunting of Hill House, and, as I always do with stuff that tickles my curiosity, I was doing a little research on it. That’s how I learned that the TV Series is loosely based on a novel by the same name written by… Shirley Jackson. Still imbued by the TV Series’s atmospheres, now knowing about its connection with Jackson, I was ready for another dive into her literature of psychological suspense and terror. Terror, not horror. Because one thing to appreciate in Jackson’s writing is that she relies on the former rather than the latter. To elicit emotion in the reader, she uses the tension between characters’ psyches and the complex relationships between mysterious events. Stephen King opens his own novel, Firestarter, with this dedication: “In memory of Shirley Jackson, who never needed to raise her voice.” ...

About seven years ago, I presented the Eve Framework in a very crowded Python room at FOSDEM 2014 in Brussels. If you don’t know about FOSDEM, well, you should check it out. Every year thousands of developers who recognize themselves with the free and open-source movement gather in Brussels from all over the world. And I mean thousands of them. According to Wikipedia, since 2011, the meeting hosts about 4,000 visitors every year. It’s huge, and it’s a one of its kind. ...

Today I learned the hard way: don’t you dare running a vanilla install of VirtualBox together with Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (WSL2). It won’t work. That’s because WSL2 uses Hyper-V under the hood, which is incompatible with VirtualBox. According to the official documentation for VirtualBox v6.0: Oracle VM VirtualBox can be used on a Windows host where Hyper-V is running. This is an experimental feature. No configuration is required. Oracle VM VirtualBox detects Hyper-V automatically and uses Hyper-V as the virtualization engine for the host system. ...

What music do you listen to while programming?1 For me, it’s usually jazz, classical, electronic, lots of it, or nothing. There are some specialized websites and podcasts I sometimes recur to, like [Music for Programming][1]. Several Spotify playlists I dig a lot, [Every Day I’m Nerdin’][2] being one of them. What can I say? I am musically omnivore. However, I recently discovered something different: the [Field Recordings podcast][3]. “A podcast where audio-makers stand silently in fields (or things that could be broadly interpreted as fields).” I am told it was launched last year, just about when the COVID lockdowns started, by acclaimed UK audio artist and producer Eleanor McDowall. It’s free, updated daily with submissions coming from all over the world, and holds many treasures. Most episodes are short, I’d say around the 5 minutes mark, with some notable exceptions like [The Sound of 2020][4], “A slow weave of some of 2020’s Field Recordings in chronological order”. One of my favorites has got to be the “[Inside the log burner][5]” episode by Chris Attaway (Devoran, Cornwall, UK, January 2021): ...