Ballpointcarrot.net

I realized I hadn't updated this space in a fair amount of time. The Advent of Code project, while fun, also became very time-consuming (if you add in the time spent around mid- to late-December performing in choir events, I ran out of time to do much of anything).

However, I'm going to try to hold myself to updating this at least somewhat regularly. In order to help me do that, I've put together a "dailies" section, where I can drop a daily thought. That will be presented on the main page sidebar, and should hopefully hold me to updating it (even with a trivial thought) once a day.

Solving these problems has been more difficult than I originally imagined - these aren't your FizzBuzz-level problems; they're asking for a little bit more (especially the second halves). I got a little bit of a head start on day three, as I'm three hours behind the release of the problems, and that means I get to have some time before bed to think about them. This proved bad, as I was laying in bed thinking about solving things (which makes sleeping nigh impossible :D).

On this particular night/day, I had some issues with work (and I was on-call for my team at the time), so I got a second chance to look at them early in the morning (3am-ish local time). But, once I was up, I was up, so once the work problem subsided, I took a crack at getting the rest of the problem solved.

This is my first of these writeups to take place after-the-fact, so let me know if there's any issues with how it was covered here vs. the previous days.

Day 3, Part 1

Spurred on by

1. a lack of posting in this space,
2. the chance to show off the new backend/theme to my blog (I did work on this while nobody was looking, and started building an RSS feeed!), and
3. after finding this Tweet by Ali Spittel,

I decided that doing this "Advent of Code" was something to do. First, it gives me a nice thing to practice on. Second, it gives me a reason to make some frequent posts on here (which, given the year+ lack of content, may not be a bad idea). Finally, it helps me build out some public code, which I've been bad at doing - even if they're solutions to set problems. I'll be using GitHub gists for posting my solutions, and embedding them here.

TL;DR: Building on basic email, and with the advent of Mastodon, XMPP, Matrix and more, using and building federated networks could bring immesurable improvements to the Internet.

On Walled Gardens

One of the more controversial decisions I've made for myself in the past few years was to take myself off of the Facebook platform. While this makes it far harder for friends and family to scout me out on the Internet as a whole, I had reservations about using their platform, and ultimately deactivated my account in early 2011. The reason for this mostly stems out of two main points:

• The first takes us way back to April of 2010. Back then, Facebook introduced a change to their platform; as a result, all users' permissions defaulted to be public by default. This caused a fair amount of backlash at the time, and ultimately caused the FTC to sanction Facebook as a result of this and earlier privacy concerns.
• The second is due to their need to create a wide break between content on the inside of their platform and the rest of the Internet (the "walled garden", as is often used). As a result of this separation, users who either are not on Facebook at all, or may be logged out for the time being, lose the ability to access media and content stored there.

I'm flying a lot more as part of my current job. As I write this, I'm on a flight from Seattle to Salt Lake City (first of a connection). I enjoy the fact that I can connect to the internet while going over 500 MPH at nearly 30,000 feet in the air - it's a wonder of science that I can do these things.

However, sometimes the cost of getting the in-flight internet is a little over-the-top. Most of the time, I'll connect to the hotspot, but then use my laptop offline (http://devdocs.io offline mode is perfect for this).

On one of my last flights, though, I wanted to see just what I had access to. On Delta flights, there's a flight status tracker on the web portal during the flight, which provides details about how the flight is going, times to arrival, and other flight data. A data nerd by nature, this is something I want, and normally pull up on the seat-back entertainment system (instead of watching a movie like a normal human being.)