Twitter

So sounds like Twitter's getting bought in a hostile takeover.

I've been working on the next version of FeoBlog and I had a couple more features that I wanted to sneak in, but I should just release what I've got. (Agile! (lulz))

If you want to help me test it, or just want to play around with an open, distributed platform let me know!

I've been working on the next version of FeoBlog quite a bit lately. It's been fun!

One of the new features will be allowing FeoBlog to remember your private key for you, since working with them can be a bit cumbersome. I enjoyed this little experimental UI for letting users configure that behavior based on their preferred security level:

However, it ended up being a bit cumbersome to use in practice, so I'm going to change it to instead give you all the options, and then details about the security implications of the options you set. That way, it's less about shaming the user to choose the higher security level, and more about letting them configure it how they want and informing them of the consequences.

Another of the new features is Windows support! I switched to using ESBuild instead of Snowpack. Not only is it able to properly bundle, on Windows, I think it's actually faster as well. AND I found a plugin that lets me write my web worker as a module and inline it within the app bundle. 🎉 Definitely would recommend trying it if you're deploying JS to the browser.

Since about v0.5.0, I've been using FeoBlog as my own sort of RSS reader. I've got a few scripts that read Twitter, Mastodon, and some RSS feeds into FeoBlog for me, and then I just view my "My Feed" page and there's everything in one convenient place.

One surprising benefit of this is that I actually feel less of an urge to keep on top of things. The feed isn't going to get reordered by some unknown algorithm. There's no little "unread" counter telling me how many more I have to read until I'm "caught up". Plus, those posts aren't going to go away, I'll always be able to find them in the feed history. (Though it could be easier.)

So, generally a more healthy relationship with social media. Which is to say: I'm reading a bit less than before.

Bags or no bags?

I’m flying home to San Diego today. Trying to check in to my American Airlines flight, they’re telling me I can’t carry on my bag, and offering to charge me to check it.

But their web site says:

… sooo which is it? I guess I’ll check in at the counter and see. Hopefully the lines aren’t bad. 🤞

TableStream

So, working on FeoBlog, I wanted to print some data into a table in a terminal, and I was picky about how I wanted to do so, so I wrote my own.

In particular, I wanted to be able to:

• Stream data without worrying about how much memory it'll use.
• Let the table formatter
  • Pick column sizes
  • truncate data
  • align data.
  • choose a table width based on the size of the data and/or the terminal window.

The existing ones I found on crates.io required holding the table in memory.

So I just wrote my own:

https://github.com/NfNitLoop/tablestream

FeoBlog Changes

Whew. Have been working on some nice FeoBlog changes that I'll probably release this weekend.

• Better handling of post timestamps.
• Filtering and searching of your follow feed! (Which has become important now that my feed is basically 99% Twitter.)
• ... which is now the default view if you visit feoblog and are logged in.
• Oh yeah, and a fancy header to show you what posts/feed you're viewing, since that could sometime be ... unclear in the previous version.

I should probably make another video. The UI is looking much better now than the one I showed in v0.1. Plus, I've learned a couple things about video capture since then.

But for now, shower and bed. 😴

FeoTweet v0.2.0

Now available here! https://deno.land/x/feotweet@v0.2.0

It adds support for syncing a single user's tweets to FeoBlog, as well as copying tweet attachments into FeoBlog.

Developing in Deno is still pretty fun. Though I did spend a couple days scratching my head due to this bug.

Apparently HTTP clients don't do well when you close the HTTP connection when they're still sending bytes at you, even if you've already sent a response.

The HTTP 1.1 spec isn't super clear on what should happen in this case. For example, it says this about closing connections, but seems to imply it's only for idle connections:

A client, server, or proxy MAY close the transport connection at any time. For example, a client might have started to send a new request at the same time that the server has decided to close the "idle" connection. From the server's point of view, the connection is being closed while it was idle, but from the client's point of view, a request is in progress.

This means that clients, servers, and proxies MUST be able to recover from asynchronous close events.

And it says this about "Client Behavior if Server Prematurely Closes Connection":

If at any point an error status is received, the client

• SHOULD NOT continue and

• SHOULD close the connection if it has not completed sending the request message.

... but that's only in the case of an "error" status, not an OK status.

Chrome handled this case by ... pausing for about 5 seconds, then continuing without error. (!?) And Deno handled this case by ... well, in the case I reproduced in that bug report, the next call to fetch() would fail, but during debugging I saw other sorts of odd failures. Like calling .read() on a Deno.Reader that seemed completely unrelated to the HTTP connection would fail and say the rid (Deno "resource ID") was invalid. Yeah, that one had me confused for a while. I wasn't able to reproduce that one in a minimal example, though.

I was able to work around the issue by just waiting for all the bytes to be sent before sending an HTTP response. But this seems like a thing that people could use to DoS your server. If you try to be nice and read all these unnecessary bytes they sent to you they can just do it forever. Though I guess there are countless other ways to DoS an HTTP server in addition to this, so what's one more?

Mastodon, now in FeoBlog

One of the first questions I got when I told folks about FeoBlog was "Does it support ActivityPub?" (i.e.: "Does it interoperate with Mastodon?")

And while there are some reasons why it can't interoperate directly with ActivityPub, it's always possible to sync data back and forth.

So, I wrote feomasto, a little tool to sync my Mastodon feed into FeoBlog. You can see the results here.

Some design decisions I'm interested to hear feedback on:

1. Since FeoBlog is all public, I decided to only sync "public" and "unlisted" posts from Mastodon, so as not to expose any private posts from users I follow. (i.e.: not "private" or "direct" posts.)

2. So as not to unnecessarily use bandwidth of (often for-free) Mastodon servers, I decided to not inline images. Though, I could see myself coming back and deciding to add them as FeoBlog attachments, which would allow for inlining them without touching Mastodon servers. (Beyond the first download.) For now, I just link to the attachments so you can click in and view them as you wish.

Let me know what you think!

I'm also still really enjoying writing stuff with Deno. Not having to deal with package.json, tsconfig.json, npm, etc, just removes a lot of friction. Plus, it's super easy to write, run, and share a standalone script that imports dependencies from online. (Though, I haven't really used the new module stuff in Node, so maybe you can do that there too these days?)

Deno & rss2fb

Had fun writing code for Deno! :D

https://deno.land/x/rss2fb@v0.1.1

Just published my first #Deno package. It's pretty cool!

One unexpectedly nice thing -- if there are errors in code hosted on https://deno.land, the error message contains URLs that take you directly to the line(s) of code in a web page. ❤

https://twitter.com/NfNitLoop/status/1411547380302839811

It's a pretty fun and easy way to write and distribute some TypeScript!

I want to write more, but I was "done in 20 minutes" a couple hours ago, and I need to clean the apartment. We're heading out of town tomorrow to see some friends for the 4th of July. So I don't get to play with code again until we're back on Monday afternoon. 😢😛

What is "political" at work?

re:

(Twitter)

I assume that's in response to this line in the blog post:

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.

This is such a tone-deaf "got my privilege blinders on" rule.

What counts as "political" discussion?

I've worked with people who I'm sure would claim it's "political" that I casually mention my husband in work chat, since they're "politically" (and likely religiously) against same-sex marriage.

Is openly mourning the death of yet another black person killed by a cop "political" because "black lives matter" is somehow a sentiment that needs to be "both sides"-'d politically?

What about saying that you're for equal pay for women, and compensation transparency?

I'm not saying work chat should have a #politics channel or invite irrelevant quarrels, but when you're in chat with folks 8+ hours a day (especially when you're remote), "real life" stuff creeps into chat. It's impossible to separate politics and real life in general, but it's doubly impossible when your existence and lived experience is politicized.

I suspect what counts as "political" will just be whatever makes trouble for The Company, or makes the leaders uncomfortable. They don't want to take a side because that's hard, so they'd rather just pretend the problem doesn't exist. And who will bear the brunt of that rule? People who speak up about issues.

And that leads me to the thing that always makes me confused at this kind of thinking, something that feels like cognitive dissonance when I come across it at a company: You can't be for "diversity and inclusion" and against talking about "political issues". Your workplace is not inclusive if some of your coworkers need to censor themselves, and others get to be "the default". And your workplace will not be as diverse once those employees find other, better places to work.

But, maybe Basecamp isn't for diversity and inclusion? Seems like their "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" working group is getting axed:

3. No more committees. For nearly all of our 21 year existence, we were proudly committee-free. [...] But recently, a few sprung up. No longer. We're turning things back over to the person (or people) who were distinctly hired to make those decisions. The responsibility for DEI work returns to Andrea, our head of People Ops.

I'd love to hear from members of that working group how they feel about these changes.

My ideal workplace would be one that actually sticks to and implements its stated values. If you value DEI, then it seems like the issue isn't "political" discussion, it's sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., statements. And, hey, some of those are already illegal in the workplace so you're probably already enforcing bans on that kind of speech. If you've got people in your company who are angry because they don't get to be the "other side" of those "political" issues, I'd suggest you've found the "divisive" problem in your company culture.