Recently updated blogs

Olympic Silver Medal Finally Awarded to Tim Koleto Today, my friend Tim Koleto was awarded the Olympic Silver Medal with the Japan figure skating team in Paris at the Victory Ceremony near the Eiffel Tower and the River Seine. His mother, his constant cheerleader, was there to see it. Olympic Victory Ceremony The “Victory… Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian billpetro.com Subscribe to have future articles delivered to your email. …

Today I’m giving the closing keynote address at PyCon US 2024, sharing “Untold stories from six years working on Python packaging.”I aim to post a fuller transcript with slides within the next several weeks. But, …

I wasn’t really mentioning this publicly, but now that the papers are all signed, I’m happy to announce we just bought a house! It’s a very, very, very fine house in a quiet neighborhood in Rutland, Vermont. Which means, yep, I’ll be a Vermont resident again. It feels like a nice culmination to spending the last year exploring the country (almost exactly a year – we left August 17th, and …

Wednesday, Aug 7 IPA (phonetic) wordle solver (permalink) made and submitted by rfong find words that fit phonetic criteria! a total cesspool of regex. don't actually use it to cheat at phonetic wordle though, it's better for your linguistics brain to solve puzzles yourself. — rfong

AI bots, scrapers, and crawlers are no longer welcome on my blog I'm an independent content creator that uses my content partly as a way to to get interest in my paid services. I don't know about you, but for me the idea of an AI LLM scraping my content to regurgitate it without any benefit to me seems like a dumb business decision. When Cloudflare announced their new service …

I’m just back from a productive week working with Mika Satomi and Lizzie Wilson on a mini project ‘Modulating Time’ at the annual, week-long PIFcamp gathering in Slovenia’s Julian Alps. We worked on handheld stick-based and woven devices for tactile control of musical pattern and tempo, so that audience members could manipulate our live coding performance. Here’s a sneak peak at what we ended up with!

I recently got my hands on a USB drive with Kakasoft USB Copy Protection (DRM protection). This software promises to let you share data without the fear of it being copied by the end user. However, the pseudo-hacker in me couldn’t resist the challenge. After all, “If it can be read, it can be copied.” In this article, I’ll walk you through the entire process I used to crack this …

I’ve always been careful to ensure Curious British Telly doesn’t become a rose tinted, nostalgia-for-the-sake-of-nostalgia borefest - you know the thing, see all those Channel 5 documentaries about the 1980s. Nonetheless, it’s sometimes difficult to deny that the past had some amazing opportunities.Sure, there was nothing as conveniently lazy as, for example, Deliveroo in 1981. But did you need really need it back then? Especially when your hunger could be …

This modest (and, of late, fitful) undertaking owes its name to Edward Thomas. I expressed my thanks to him (accompanied by the touching elegy "To E. T.: 1917" written by his friend Walter de la Mare) in my first post here: Tuesday, March 9, 2010. A month later, I posted this comment about "Adlestrop": "No doubt many of us first encountered Edward Thomas by discovering 'Adlestrop' in an anthology. And …

Today, I arrived at work a bit earlier than usual. After grabbing my morning coffee routinely, I opened up my Google Calendar to see what meetings I had for the day. Of course, our meeting room for our recurring daily stand-up got canceled again.This had been bothering me for longer than I cared to rememberWhenever this happened, we ended up manually rebooking a different meeting room — not particularly time-consuming, …

The CSS Anchor Positioning API is a game-changer in web development because it lets you natively position elements.

I've been helping some teams at Shopify improve page load performance, and the issue of 'videos with an alpha channel' kept coming up, where videos of UI mocks needed to be composited on top of inconsistent backgrounds, such as larger CSS backgrounds. Often a good solution here is to create the animation using web technologies, but sometimes video is a better solution for consistent frame rates, and allows for effects …

"Get or create" is a very common operation for syncing data in the database, but implementing it correctly may be trickier than you may expect. If you ever had to implement it in a real system with real-life load, you may have overlooked potential race conditions, concurrency issues and even bloat! In this article I explore ways to "get ot create" in PostgresSQL. Illustration by Abstrakt Design Table of Contents …

“Public.work is a search engine for public domain content.” The site claims to have over 100,000 public domain images. This in and of itself is not that special, but the interface is. It’s gorgeous, a fun and engaging discovery layer where every search becomes a URL that can be shared [example] and the page of images endlessly scrolls up, down, and even sideways. Of course, the endless scroll is a …