I run my web site off a Debian server on GCE. I like tinkering with the configuration. I hear that HTTP 2 is the new hot thing, and that’s going to mean supporting ALPN which means upgrading to OpenSSL 1.0.2 and nginx 1.9.5 or newer. But they isn’t supported in Debian 8. I used apt pinning …
Author Archives: Ian McKellar
Writing ES6 without a transpiler
I like modern JS features. I’ve been using some like const and let for a long time in specific contexts like Gecko chrome (when I worked on Flock & Songbird). Recently I’ve been playing with the features that have been standardized as ES6. I tried a bunch of different build-system and transpiler approaches but I found …
Australia Days
Photo credit: Finn Pröpper I really like Australia. I was born there, I grew up there, my parents brothers and sisters all live there. I don’t have a single national identity, but ‘Australian’ is the one I put above the others. It’s a physically beautiful and inspiring country. At their best its people are generous, …
Brief first impressions of Rust
I had a little play with Rust this week. I’d been meaning to for a long time, but the arrival of 1.0 motivated me to spend a few hours playing around with the tools and the tutorial. I haven’t actually written anything myself yet – I’m sure I’ll have some different, perhaps more valid thoughts …
Boredom
Dan McKinley wrote a great blog post about choosing boring technology. It’s worth reading, but the tl;dr is that by adopting new and exciting technology you introduce additional risk and instability, which limits your ability to innovate on your product. I agree with pretty much everything he said. There’s another dimension to the boredom question …
The Problem With Democracy
The problem with democracy is that the people of a country lose the right to consider themselves independent of government policies. If a government does or says awful things then the people of the democracy have to bear responsibility. Citizens of totalitarian regimes can’t really be held responsible for what their governments do. I don’t …
The Kevin Bacon of Music
Who is the most connected musician? Mathematics had Paul Erd?s, film has Kevin Bacon, but who is the center of the musical world. At some point I flippantly suggested Brian Eno because of this long career as a producer. Rich Trott brought this up again recently when linking to his awesome Music Routes site. Rich has …
Streaming royalties: taking over, but what are the details
So TechCrunch posted that Kobalt, a company who collects digital music publishing revenue for artists has announced that Spotify revenue has overtaken iTunes revenue by 13% in Europe. That’s interesting, not surprising given the trends but is missing answers to a few key questions: What are the overall revenues – does this represent an overall …
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This is what an insurgent looks like
This is happening one state away from me: Pretty scary stuff. I guess at least Americans are bearing arms to overthrow (in their mind) tyrannical government not just shooting at each other out of fear, anger or greed. It shows some holes in many citizens’ view of the social contract though.
Malaysian Chicken Curry
I really miss Indonesian, Singaporean and Malaysian food. It basically doesn’t exist in the Bay Area. I started reading Bee’s Rasa Malaysia blog for recipes. I think I originally found it looking for a rendang recipe but subscribed. It’s actually a little disappointing because it’s largely Thai or Chinese recipes, and too many competitions and …