After quite a hiatus, again, I’ve produced a new mixtape: Beautiful Plumage. This one compiles new rock music from the past five years, in an attempt to disprove the eternal “rock is dead” meme.

I’m working on a somewhat intricate C++ project (a persistent storage manager) that internally uses a lot of different integral types: page numbers, page offsets, page-cache indexes, bucket indexes, hash codes, transaction sequence numbers… It’s very easy to get these mixed up, especially by passing parameters in the wrong order when a function takes more than one of these types; the results of that would be pretty bad. It would be great if I could declare each of these as a different type, and the compiler would stop me from assigning a value of one type to a different one. Read more…

I’ve completed the necessary surgery to attach the Netlify CMS to my blog, and I’m writing this post in the web-based admin UI. Exciting! Now maybe I’ll actually post here…

At dawn came the pig truck, driving itself in from over the hills. By the time it reached the jail, the prisoners were lined up, resigned, watched by the armed guards in their towers. Cleaned and shaved, naked and divested of names, they were human no longer. Dust rose and fell as the long blank truck pulled up, the back springing open by itself, the ramp dropping to the ground. Read more…

She was a worker, that’s all. A courier. Pick it up here, carry it a long way, drop it off there. It was a dull job, but it meant she didn’t have to think much, which suited her. And everyone she knew worked the same job, so it was easy to share in-jokes and gossip and complain about the conditions. Her people had no vehicles, no roads, no pack animals. But they knew all the trails throughout the valley and the forest, kept them clear and well-marked. Read more…