I think the quickest fix I saw pushed through was boring a hole in the paywall for Covid related articles, from memory that took less that 24 hours after the first case was discovered in Australia.
It had nothing to do with my team but I think at first it was a bit of a kludge: if category == covid then leak.
When I was at Farifax, I once whinged so much about ending up on smh.com.au via links on theage.com.au that we got a fix through the system in about a week just so I’d shut up about it.
People were actually very good about it. Once I pointed out that “I’ve subscribed to the Age, why would I try to log in to the SMH after hitting the paywall?” everyone was sold fairly quickly. It probably helped that it was peak 2020 at the time. News was pretty important to Victorians at the time.
The ABC News website insists on showing me the Today in NSW section even though I’ve got all the things set to Melbourne. The sidebar shows local news correctly but not the main feed.
I hit the CDN endpoint ae9.equinix-mel.netarch.akamai.com so there are multiple ways for the national broadcaster to detect I am, maybe, possibly, not in NSW.
They can be such a Sydney media outlet sometimes, across the board.
George Michael came up in my feed last night so I started reading his Wikipedia page as a result. Apparently Casey Kasem refused to say “I want your sex” on American Top 40. Because America, I guess.
I am, of course, listening to various albums today.
Do professional chefs use “things have started exploding” as a measure when reheating food in the microwave too?
The trains were crowded enough that I decided to catch the traditional Sunbury line home. I’ve never been on a roomier Sunbury train.
Apparently I am enough of a train nerd to be curious about the metro tunnel. Please listen for announcements does not seem great though.
I had such a great time speaking at Web Directions Enqueue, thanks for having me and I’m looking forward to the next one.
I’m also very, very pleased that people guessing which milestone usually guess ten years too low (I’m ignoring the fact that a sensible person always guesses ages low for anyone they think is over twenty-one).
Having a milestone birthday this week has got me thinking about the last ten years.
Buying a home has got to be a highlight, that it was the place we’d been renting for ten years beforehand is gravy. We knew its sins going in but also that we loved living here in good ol’ 3011.
A lot of professional achievements. From memory, I had the first functional commit on the CMS re-platforming for Fairfax but if not, it was one of the first five or six. I sometimes worry that that will be the biggest project I ever work on but I thought I’d worked on big projects ten years ago so who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These days I make regular decisions that effect a “try not to think about it” number of websites. But I also get to help other developers contribute code to these same sites. Often is the people who have been showing up for years, but sometimes it’s a new contributor who then becomes a regular contributor and, finally, an old hand.
Me: Oh good, I slept through another major internet outage.
…arriving at my desk…
Internet: fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Over a dozen birds are hanging around on the lawn out the front of our house and I can’t help but be a little creeped out.
Elsewhere in the talk I use the phrase up cache creek without a paddle which I am reasonably proud of.
That thing when you are writing a talk and find yourself asking “what’s the funniest transition to use for this joke?”
AC/DC playing Melbourne reminds me of the best concert I never went to.
Last time they played Melbourne, they were at Docklands Stadium. As a concert stadium it has a nasty habit of letting all the sound go straight up out of the venue.
We were living in North Melbourne at the time and the wind was just right for sending a perfect mix in to our living room.
We threw open all the doors and just listened to the concert for about an hour or two. At the end of the show there was a huge guitar solo: we looked at each other and said “that crowd is going fucking wild right now, right?” “Yep”.
I miss that flat in North Melbourne for many reasons, acca dacca being one of them.
I can almost hear a few people saying “too soon”.
I’m a little sad that the Peekaboo Bug page no longer resolves (it redirects to the site’s home page). The content isn’t lost, it’s just another reason to be thankful to the Web Archive.
Youngs, don’t worry about it… but ask an old why you’d prefix a CSS property with an underscore or an asterisk if you want to be entertained some time.
Alternative headline: Liberal cabinet agrees to lose more seats to Teal independents.
As a democracy nerd, I’m enjoying Annabel Crabb’s Civic Duty on iView.
The first episode was basically a love letter to the independence of the AEC, describing them as beige as a term of endearment. It made me want to gift one to America. No division of a population will be perfect but it’s really nice not have gerrymandering as just a thing we live with.
Not since the days of Joh, anyway.
They didn’t even have the guts to go with “LIVE: GG sacks PM, announces double dissolution election”.
The ABC is doing a live blog of events that occurred 50 years ago. “This live blog could have been an article.”
Turns out that organising a really self-indulgent milestone birthday party is a lot of fun. At the start of the year I wasn’t going to do anything…
Now, it’s an eight to ten hour me fest with the optional afternoon package.
Streak freezes are bullshit. You didn’t do the thing, you broke your streak.
LinkedIn is claiming I have a 62-day win streak for their six-by-six Sudoku but it’s only about 30 something.
The hobbling scene in Misery remains a bit fucking too much.
Things I say in detailed technical conversations that I didn’t have on my bingo card: “👨 🏻🐰👨 🏻 appears differently to 👨🏻🐰👨🏻 which would trigger a false support detection even though none of the dudes are wearing bunny ears”.
Anyway… detecting emoji support is complex.
I remember being in tears of laughter when the Daily Show went all Simpsons Rake Theory with the phrase “Dick Cheney shot a 78-year-old man in the face”.
In their corporate wisdom Paramount have deleted it from the internet.
I like getting bots to do things, even when there will be no long term time savings. As I find ways to improve a process, I can just do it once and actually forget about it.
I must not import Toby’s database over mine while migrating his site to the new server, I said to myself.
So anyway, you’ll never guess what happened.
On the other hand, I know my backup works.
For the first time in ages I am building a site. I want to use sass to keep ’em separated. After years of build tooling improvements I decided to use Gulp because Sass + CleanCss results in a very clear 30 line file. thing.pipe() is clear and it just makes sense.
I’ve added the plugin check action to my WordPress plugin template repo now that security reports are created for each plugin update.
I’ve used the most basic configuration and will customise it based on each plugin’s needs.
Companies: we believe personal responsibility is the most effective way of solving the climate crisis.
Also companies: low waste refills are less profitable so we have decided not to sell them.
I quite enjoyed this video from Paul ET on the history of the movie trailer.
Furthermore, I want to personally invoice Sam Altman $10,000 every time I see an AI generated security report closed as not applicable. $20,000 if the reporter subsequently comes back and asks for it to be closed informative to avoid a loss of H1 reputation.
Apparently it’s because VoiceOver is a little bit crap. The browser and I were innocent bystanders. Sometimes, just sometimes, technology makes me want to kick a puppy while stealing candy from a baby
Today gave me this spring’s first sighting of 20ish ducks paddling up the Maribyrnong River in formation. It’s very cute.
I’m trying to do a thing with role=alert and can’t figure out whether to yell at myself, Firefox or VoiceOver. I suspect it’s a little of the first and the last. The browser is an innocent bystander.
I find it very strange that Firefox doesn’t provide a copy link to highlight feature but supports links to highlighted text. Outside of browser testing, it’s the only time I open Chrome.
I’m tempted to personally invoice Sam Altman $10 for every time I have to delete spam generated by Chat GPT.
I needed to come up with some alt text for this photo from March 2019. It included the word thirst-trap.
I’m going through the notes section on my website to check for broken images and quickly check links.
Turns out I’ve been posting to my website first for twelve years now. First to syndicate to Twitter, when it was fun, and now to Mastodon.
At various times I thought about giving up and leaving my more ephemeral content for Twitter because I liked it. I’m glad I did not.
Host your own content, you never know when your favourite social media site will become your X-favourite site. The Nazi bar. Or both.
I’ve found life without analytics really freeing. I used to worry about visiting my own site and messing up the stats. No stats, no worries.
It was also a stupid concern given that only referer spammers allow the scripts to run these days.
Not a good puzzle day… gave up on Wordle and had to send through my very impolite filler word and I broke the LinkedIn 6×6 Sudoku, although I’ll go back later. At least I got additional.today out nice and quickly.
Councils prioritizing private development over locals is one of those things that gives me the screaming shits and entirely reasonable amount.
In this case, the footpath that’s closed for so long that it needs a permanent sign leads up to pedestrian lights so, of course, people are crossing a reasonably busy road without the benefit of those traffic lights.
Friends doing nice things can be pretty great.
It has been 0️⃣ days since typing git checkout [repo] instead of git clone [repo].
It really seems that the Police Squad! TV series has been disappeared from the internet. I know a lot of it made it’s way in to the first Naked Gun movie but I’ve been wanting to re-watch it but it’s just vaporized.
Last night, the YouTube app on my TV was mostly showing music in my suggestions. Mostly related to what I’d listened to on YT Music during the week.
Stupidly, they were mostly audio only clips of tracks I’d listened to. Because obviously when I turn on the TV I want to listen to music.
I’m assuming they’ve turned up the Gemini in their YT algorithm.
Yay, I managed to update about 1500 notes on my site without accidentally sending a single one to Mastodon.
The code alongside the comment “don’t share old posts to Mastodon (magic number alert)” just paid for itself.
Contrary to popular belief, I’m Going Home is the best number in Rocky Horror and I will not listen to anyone who suggests otherwise.
Predictably, I am planning on watching Rocky Horror tonight. My copy is the 25th anniversary re-release.