zerosleeps

I though this suggestion to add an “open a random post” button sounded fun, so I’ve just added that feature to zerosleeps.com. You’ll find it in the navigation bar. A simple way for someone to get a feel for the nonsense that I’ve posted here over the years.

I didn’t want to generate a link to a random post every time the navigation bar is rendered. Instead, I wanted the random thingy to have it’s own URL, which in turn redirects the requestor to the absolute URL for a random post.

On top of that I didn’t want to do this using HTTP 302. Django’s RedirectView makes it easy to serve 302 responses, but the semantics of that status code didn’t feel quite right - it’s supposed to indicate “that the target resource resides temporarily under a different URI”.

HTTP 303 felt like a better fit to me: “the server is redirecting the user agent to a different resource … which is intended to provide an indirect response to the original request”. A subclass of HttpResponseRedirectBase made light work of that requirement.

After deployment I discovered that Safari (and only Safari as far as I can tell) was caching the 303 response: you could visit /random_post/ as many times as you wanted, but you’d always get the same page back within the same 180 second period. Fair enough I suppose: I’ve told my web server to add a Cache-Control header to anything generated by Django, so it’s not unreasonable for Safari to cache the response to the initial redirect in addition to caching the final page. It’s interesting that other browsers don’t do that though.

I acquired an iPhone 15 Pro at the weekend, which is the first modern pocket-computer I’ve owned with an always-on display. It’s really nice being able to glance at the thing to see if there are any notifications.

While I was thinking about this new trick, I realised that this is the way phones always were! My first half-dozen mobile phones were things like the Nokia 5110 and Nokia 3310. I remember a Samsung A300, and a Nokia 3100. Oh and the outstanding Sony Ericsson T68i.

They all had always-on LCD displays. The last few were even colour!

Then in 2010 I replaced my can’t-remember-the-model-number Nokia for an iPhone 4 and that was the end of that.

Yeah they were terrible displays when you hold them up to what we have now. Terrible devices compared to what came after. But isn’t there something amusing about the fact that it’s taken 15 years to get back to where we were?

Maybe next year’s iPhone will have a status LED like that goddamned amazing Sony Ericsson T68i did!

Good atricle by Luke Plant:

The problem is that Hardly Ever is still Sometimes, so the client’s response has gone from being a definite “no” to a definite “yes” in less than a second. It doesn’t matter to me that it rarely happens – the situation still happens, and I’ve got to write code to cope with it. The fact that the code won’t be used very often doesn’t make it cheaper to write – it’s not like engineering where a machine that is used less will require less maintenance.

I finished playing The Last Campfire last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. It took me about 8 hours from start to finish. We need more games like this (or maybe I just suck at finding them): no violence, nobody dies, no time limit. Beautiful visuals, a quiet and immersive soundtrack, and a story that tugs the heartstrings.

This game was obviously made with massive spoonfuls of love.

I’ve just finished rewatching Chernobyl for perhaps the fourth time, and I implore anyone who has not seen it to watch it. I’m not a good storyteller - why use 20 words when 5 will do?! This is perhaps why I admire those who can tell a good story so much, and Craig Mazin who created, wrote, and produced Chernobyl is one of those people.

But what makes it even more amazing is that it’s a real story. I’ve read a few books about the disaster, and listened to Mazin speak about the production of the miniseries on the accompanying podcast and I’m satisfied that, with a few embellishments obviously, the timeline, characters, visuals, and plot are all astonishingly accurate.

I don’t mean the correctness is astonishing (although it is): the story itself is. Every few moments something happens in the show that seems ridiculous, but almost every time it turns out that nope, that person actually said that thing. They did that thing. That is what happened.

I can’t recommend it, and the podcast, enough.