People seem to be very excited about Roam Research at the moment. I’m sure it has many qualities. But I’m slightly surprised to realize that one thing that fans seem to find very useful (and almost miraculous) is the automatic back-linking. Ie, the ability to see what pages link to the page you are currently …
Author Archives: synaesmedia
Android : Extended SurfaceView's onDraw() method never called
This has just resolved something I’ve been beating my head against the wall over for the last several days. Source: android – Extended SurfaceView’s onDraw() method never called – Stack Overflow WHY? Android? Why are you so convoluted and perverse? So … yeah … subclass the SurfaceView class … and you’d expect to be able …
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Mind Traffic Control : Site Going Down
I’m going to close down the Mind Traffic Control site on Google App Engine. The online app has been dead for some time. While I’m very happy with my command-line version which I’m using every day. The only reason the site is still up on GAE is for any old users to export their data. …
Welcome to Cardigan Bay
Cardigan Bay is my new wiki-engine written in Clojure / ClojureScript. I’ve been working on it for about three months, and it’s a long way from finished, but now interesting enough for people to start playing with (and hopefully giving me some feedback on). The goal is for this to be the new engine behind …
GraphQL
I’m late to this party. But I’m starting to look into GraphQL and realize that it’s very much speaking to many of the things I’ve been thinking about recently. A nice clean schema-first declaration of data that you care about and want to interact with. The schema representation isn’t quite as elegant as I’d ideally …
Travel Report
So as noted previously, I went travelling without a notebook, but with a Xaomi tablet, a portable keyboard, and a copy of UserLand Linux. How did that go? Surprisingly well. Actually I ended up using another keyboard, a cheap “cover” with keyboard built in, no Bluetooth but micro-USB. And I had to get an adaptor …
Holiday Reading
I’m about to go on holiday in January. And it’s time for a new adventure in travelling without my laptop. I can’t go anywhere without the safety blanket of a Unix computer. And since my PocketCHIP got stolen, I’ve been without something portable. Anyway, what you see in the photo is my new Xaomi 8″ …
CLOjure SHell
I’ve been playing with CloSH, the Clojure Shell. And I have to say, I’m sold. If you’d like to have the full power of Clojure. And to write shell scripts that look like this : [cc lang=”clojure”] (doseq [f (expand “*jpg”) (println f) (sh identify -format “%wx%h” (str f)) (println)) [/cc] rather than in hard …
What's up? August 2019 Edition
Gosh … we’re half way through the year already. So what am I up to in programming? Clojure I still think it’s a wonderful language. Not doing as much as I’d like. But it’s still great. One thing I did a few months ago was port the terminal version of Mind Traffic Control to it. …
How would you design the perfect programming language?
Another Quora answer I should be moving here : Phil Jones’s answer to How would you design the perfect programming language? Well, the obvious way you’d approach it, is start with a reasonable knowledge of using other languages to get a sense for their strengths and weaknesses. And start with some good role models. …
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