Posts on Lucas Pardue - Bits && Pieces

Custom Bluesky Handles with Hono and Cloudflare Workers

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently changed my Bluesky handle from @simmervigor.bsky.social to @simmervig.org. I did this using the HTTP validation method, which relies on providing custom responses to /.well-known/atproto-did. The blog explains how I used Hono to set up a simple request router and run it in Cloudflare Workers. You too can use this method to easily and quickly set up a bunch of handles under a unified organisation e.g., @alice.example.org and @bob.example.org.

De-Press-ed: Migrating from WordPress to Cloudflare Pages

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This website was previously powered by a self-hosted WordPress, running on a VPS. In front of that, sat Cloudflare and its APO product that helped to speed it up and reduce burden on the origin.

The origin server was an old-school, janky, LAMP stack. In spite of the rest of the world seeming having ditched LAMP (or its ilk) and performing a chain of moves from the hottest static site framework year-to-year, I took a certain joy in the legacy. I liked the fact I was dogfooding the experience of taking a weak origin and magically turning it into something that can operate at Internet scale with a few button clicks.

Lately though, there’s been a bit of bluster in the world of WordPress. I have little skin in that game, other than as an end-user of a software product that I have to run and maintain. That meant having posts on the matter thrust into my WordPress dashboard under the “Wordpress News and Events” panel. Sure, I can remove that panel, but it used to have some value. Abusing the panel to inundanate me with WordPress politics is not cool. And the more I’ve read, the more it seems like there are some very blurry lines between the WordPress open-source project, WordPress foundation, wordpress.org, wordpress.com, WPTavern.

This site is simple and has infrequent content updates. WordPress was really overkill for my needs. However, maintaining it did have some toil. wordpress.org decided to tell me in my dashboard that they had blocked some sites from their update servers. Am I next? Probably not. Yet, the fussing about I’ve seen on the Internet the past couple of weeks has given me the kick up the arse to finally ditch WordPress. I started the migration away from WordPress a few days ago, and in the meantime the situation has continued to escalate in absurdity. In the words of Blumhouse, its time to say NOPE, GET OUT.

Degox - Taking (Back?) my Internet Privacy and Presence

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For as long as I’ve used email, someone else has provided it to me for “free”. Detoxing in January is a staple, so why not extend that to weening off Google and call it a degox.

This was supposed to be a short post about my experience migrating to Fastmail. However, it went sideways and turned into an essay. I’ve knitted together various experiences and topics from over the decades. I’ve come to the slow realization that this choice, to take back my Internet Privacy and Presence, isn’t a new year fad to be dropped unceremoneously by February.

2 Meg in the Embed, and the little tweet said "Give over"

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Due to a single embedded tweet, it seems my website at https://t.co/jLqWpZKaB6 loads about 2.5 megabytes of JS across a dozen HTTP/1.1 requests to https://t.co/7OXJ9hd5oI. WTF, this doubles the total size of download resources. I think I'll just delete the embed.
— Lucas Pardue (@SimmerVigor) January 2, 2021

As the embedded tweet says, I was shocked to discover that a single Twitter embed - inserted into a Wordpress blog using the native embed feature - more than doubled the download size of my site, caused by dozens of Twitter JavaScript resources, all fetched using HTTP/1.1. For tweet that contains just text from me(!), it is unpalatable that so much - well, crap - is pulled in to render it. I’ve come up with a solution now but before that, I sent the above tweet in the hope that someone might have a magic fix. My plan sort of worked, it generated a lot of replies from people more knowledgable about web development than me. The discussion was very interesting, I recommend you read it. But if you don’t have the time for that my summary is:

Dicey Dungeons is a delightful duende

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Dicey Dungeons is a roguelike where you roll dice in dungeons. The premise is a game show but it reminds me more of The Running Man than Wheel of Fortune.

Anthropomorphic die uses non-anthropomorphic die to attack charming Honey Monster in a space suit

This game has simple mechanics on the surface but steadily grows in complexity and difficulty; each successful run is meted with a failed spin of the not-wheel-of-fortune wheel and an unlock of a new character or challenge. Each of these tweaks the core mechanics in a way that makes the next run unique and interesting.

2020 gaming in 200 words a week

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This blog has been a little quiet in 2019. After a days work it can be hard to think of something worth blogging that isn’t tied to my working day, and without inspiration it becomes difficult to muster up the energy to write anything.

So I’ve decided to create a framework for blogging: a single post, once a week, that reviews a different game in a maximum of 200 words.

To kick things off I’ll start with Crusader Kings II.

Poor Princess Sofie, the end of her life was crap

Web protocols ate my hosting

Fri, 28 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

New Year, same old blog. A new style, some broken links and some fixed-broken links. Here’s to yet another Wordpress-based blog! Now for some background.

An actual front page of a newspaper

This website has been through a small number of hosts. It started off being hosted on a wordpress.com subdomain. I then migrated it over to a cheapo shared hosting solution, which worked pretty well for the low volume of traffic that it served. As we enter 2019 I am pleased to present the blog from a cheapo VPS, which is fronted by a free CDN.

SpotifyStatusApplet v1.3 Beta 1

Sun, 29 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

FYI: SpotifyStatusApplet was broken by a Spotify API change made in Q3 2018. This page is provided for archive purposes and the download has been removed. More information is available on the Project Page.

A small update to SpotifyStatusApplet has been released as a beta.

This version fixes a critical issue with newer versions of Spotify that prevent the applet from working. Thanks JeffreyO.

It also adds the (much requested) feature of playback control using the remaining soft keys: 2 - previous, 3 - play/pause toggle, 4 - next. Thanks JeffreyO.

SpotifyStatusApplet v1.2 Beta

Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A small update to SpotifyStatusApplet has been released as a beta. This version adds the ability to toggle on/off the Field titles (Track, Album and Artist) by pressing “soft key 1″, the first key underneath the LCD on most models.

Beer Catalog

Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Since I moved to London I drank a lot of beer. It is easy to lose track of:

What I’ve tried
When I’ve tried it
and would I drink it again

In order to keep a better track of these beers I created a beer catalog page capturing what I deemed to be the important details.

In 2024, I retired the catalog page as it was rarely ever updated.

Ode to IBM Rational Rhapsody

Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Ode to Rhapsody

to the tune of “Comme d’habitude” / “My Way”

And now, the end is here
And so I face, the final codegen
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I state my Use Case, I’ll draw a Lifeline
I’ve declared a class that’s pure
I created each and every dependency
And more, much more than this, I did it in Rhapsody

Software Metrics and Craftsmanship

Mon, 26 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Software Development Metrics are a notoriously difficult area, there exists a large allure of quantitative measurements that can be condensed into a top-level dashboard showing progress, plan alignment, effort , costs and so on. However, the unfortunate reality is that the collection and analysis of Software Development Metrics is difficult for a number of factors such as complexity, variance, meaning and gaming of the system. Often it is a difficult case of understanding if we are more interested in the performance of the project (Health) or the performance of the developer (Efficacy).

UI Navigation - Android

Mon, 19 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Up vs. Back or in other terms hierarchy vs. chronology is one of the User Experience aspects touched upon in my post UML: Modelling User Interfaces Part 1 – Hierarchy and Navigation. The Android methodology for UI navigation has received some attention over the years and the largest change to date was brought in with the introduction of the Action Bar as part of Android 3.0+.

UML: Aside - Completeness vs Clarity and other CvCs

Sun, 11 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the recurring issues I have experienced with UML, or more generally Model Driven Design is the continual struggle between definition and interpretation. One of the tenants of UML is to abstract upwards towards a level that avoids implementation specifics. However, this introduces the potential for a need of a “Leap of Faith”, something that was discussed my post UML: Modelling User Interfaces Part 1.

Android Resource and the Eclipse switch Quick Fix

Mon, 05 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the process of updating and refactoring an old Android project I unwittingly changed a Project configuration option (the “Is Library” option) that lead to my resource file being generated differently. E.g

Before

[java] public final class R { public static final class id { public static final int button1=0x7f090001; public static final int button2=0x7f090002; public static final int button3=0x7f090003; } } [/java]

After

[java] public final class R { public static final class id { public static int button1=0x7f090001; public static int button2=0x7f090002; public static int button3=0x7f090003; } } [/java]

A subtle change indeed but one that caused the following compiler error for each line

case expressions must be constant expressions

C and C++ Preprocessor: warp, Clang and GCC

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I belatedly came across the news regarding warp, a C and C++ preprocessor written by Walter Bright in a joint project with Facebook. This has been released under the Boost license and is available at https://github.com/facebook/warp.

The Facebook blog makes the following statement with regards to improved efficiency over the GCC preprocessor

Replacing gcc’s preprocessor with warp has led to significant improvements of our end-to-end build times (including linking). Depending on a variety of circumstances, we measured debug build speed improvements ranging from 10% all the way to 40%, all in complex projects with massive codebases and many dependencies

UML: Modelling User Interfaces Part 1 - Hierarchy and Navigation

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post in a series that looks at the modelling of User Interface (UI) related software using UML.

The main purpose of the post is to explore how we effectively model the navigation of a tree-like hierarchy, especially when considering the premise “In a tree structure there is one and only one path from any point to any other point”.

The tl;dr is that UML does not necessarily have the ability to represent UI concepts of hierarchy and navigation effectively.

Antimatter Poster

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

During university I produced a poster on the topic of Antimatter as part of a Communicating Science module.

I put this up on the web in 2007 and years on, I am seeing traffic to the site driven by a link contained in a Rutgers assignment concerning Information Design. Unfortunately, across the years the poster image had become unavailable…. until now. While the poster was discoverable via a Google search (finding it hosted without permission on other sites, another story) in order to help out those eager students I will host it here permanently.