Damian’s notes

PEP 517: A build-system-independent format for source trees. This is an attempt to do for Python packaging what WSGI did for web frameworks: create a framework in to which appropriately simple or complex guild systems can be plugged.

Doing my ironing while listening to a podcast about alone time and loneliness

Photos of the concrete façade of the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum in Japan.

The eye has a system for detecting whether it is daylight or not that is separate from the light sensors that let us see. So faffing with the colour balance of your LCD display probably makes little difference.

Checklist for programmers working on almost any web site that processes peoples’ names, even if it is just in the login & profile sections. The upshot of this is most of the clever ideas you might have for parsing and making deductions from a person’s name are probably not generally useful and should not be attempted!

English spelling dictionaries in the format used by the built-in spell-check on macOS, amongst other things. Unlike the built-in dictionaries it permits all the spellings supported by the OED, including ‘Oxford’ or ‘world english’ spellings like ‘organize’ and ‘realize’.

Naming authors, and processing people names in general, is a tricky subject. Here is a note on just some of the variability an internationalized application that handles names must take in to account.

Arial is a knock-off of designers’ favourite Helvetica which is ubiquitous because bundled with Microsoft Windows. Here’s a detailed history & critique by Mark Simonson

Red bean: a zip file of web pages bundled into an Actually Portable Executable file that will run as a web server on any modern x64-based computer—Linux, macOS, or Windows. It can serve millions of static pages a second on quite ordinary hardware.