I wanted to make an interactive terminal interface for something. Usually I just bang out some vt100 escapes to move the cursor around, color this, erase that. It’s crude but effective as long as the number of screen elements is kept to a minimum. This time, though, I decided on a slightly more disciplined approach, and so I was looking for a library that might assist in drawing views of various sizes, and input fields, and buttons. The works. In go.

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I’ve been paying a bit more attention than usual to web interfaces, and there’s a few examples which really get to me. GitHub is one that’s annoyed me for a while, but I didn’t quite know what was wrong until I looked at some screenshots to see what was frustrating me.

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I needed a (text) diff algorithm, and if you search for one you mostly come up with the Myers algorithm. But then I stumbled across something called patience diffing, and it turns out to be just what I wanted. It’s already described elsewhere, but it seems more people could stand to know about it, so here we are. It’s easy to understand, and more importantly, usually makes pretty diffs (often prettier than Myers).

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But what about screen readers, you ask. Somebody did a web thing you don’t like. Doesn’t this break screen readers?

It seems the easy way to find out would be to test. But that requires caring about screen reader usability enough to actually have one on hand to test. Much easier to wag fingers. Screen readers are the starving children of web accessibility arguments. Why don’t you care about the starving children?

It’s borrowing somebody else’s concerns to score internet points. Oh, hi, I just wanted to try this on and post a few comments, you can have it back now. Thanks. I wouldn’t want to have to think about this all the time.

I mostly like go, but after working with it a bit more I realize there are a few jibs of which the cut I do not like.

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I had some go code I wanted to quickly iterate on. Go compiles pretty quickly, but not instantly. Like 2 seconds. In some places, I can use gopher-lua, which gets me pretty close to 0 second iteration delay, but there’s a big up front development cost. It’s useful for scripting an existing program and adding custom behavior, but less useful for experimenting to see what happens when I do X. What I need is an actual interpreter for go, not an interpreter in go.

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My phone decided it didn’t like my face and wouldn’t let me log in. Unusually, instead of giving me some retries, it immediately locked me out, requiring a passcode. At first I thought this might be a security measure, but I’m pretty sure it was just a glitch. However, it’s an interesting possibility for an authorization system. Fast lockout after a near match.

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New year, new network. WireGuard promises to be a simpler more secure alternative to IPsec, and there’s a beta iOS client, so I thought I’d try my hand at setting up a server endpoint.

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I tried out a new laptop.

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Sometimes there’s just too many words and I want to look at visualizations and graphics. A collection of links.

The Information is Beautiful Awards are a good place to start. Entry Showcase. 2017 winners. 2018 winners.

Bloomberg Graphics is a nice collection. Or follow @BBGVisualData.

The Economist Graphic detail is a nice collection.

The Financial Times Graphics is a nice collection.

The Wall Street Journal Graphics is a nice collection . Or follow @wsjgraphics. 2017 Year in Graphics. 2018 Year in Graphics.

The Chicago Sun-Times Graphics collection doesn’t see many updates.

The Los Angeles Times Graphics collection doesn’t see many updates.

The Chicago Tribune doesn’t seem to have a dedicated page. Or follow @ChiTribGraphics.

The New York Times has a multimedia section, but it’s still photos. Or follow @nytgraphics. 2017 Year in Graphics. (2018?)

The Washington Post also seems to lack a dedicated page. Or follow @PostGraphics. 2017 Year in Graphics. 2018 Best Graphics.