Blogs

This blog is now featuring has had RSS all along. Did you know this? I didn’t know this. But, I know now and now you know, too. If you’re so inclined, you may subscribe for intermittent updates: https://newschematic.org/blog/index.xml

As the next step in the exploration of the ideas behind the Dada Photo Booth, Adam and I reworked the project for showing at the Museum of Human Achievement during the 2018 East Austin Studio Tour. Responding to a call for artists working with the concepts around taking selfies, we intended to directly transplant our piece into one of about 30 stations in a selfie gauntlet. Personally, I was looking forward to the challenge of architecting and coding a stand-alone, self-service iteration of the Dada Photo Booth. However, once we received the requirements and context around the selfie gauntlet, it became clear that this would be an exercise in doing more with less coding. ...

tl;dr Download the Symbola font and install it; using, for instance, the included Font Book application on macOS. Trash Matplotlib’s font cache file (probably located at ~/.matplotlib/fontList.py3k.cache, again for macOS). Start your Jupyter Notebook. The font should be available and if it is, it’ll be used to render the final graph. If not, the default font will be used and all of those silly emoji will show up as empty rectangles of sadness. ...

We did what we always do when there’s a problem without a clear solution: we waited. from “Toward Go 2”

install istanbul & codeclimate-test-reporter in your dev dependencies: npm install --save-dev istanbul codeclimate-test-reporter add to circle.yml: general: artifacts: - "coverage" test: post: - CODECLIMATE_REPO_TOKEN=$CODECLIMATE_REPO_TOKEN ./node_modules/.bin/codeclimate-test-reporter < coverage/lcov.info In Code Climate, get the test reporter token from https://codeclimate.com/repos/YER_PROJECT_ID/coverage_setup and take it to the “Env Var” section of your Circle CI project settings page, like https://circleci.com/gh/USER_NAME/PROJECT_NAME/edit#env-vars – add a variable with a name of CODECLIMATE_REPO_TOKEN and value of the test reporter token from Code Climate. Update your test command in your package.json from ...

Background Here at OwnLocal, we’ve built lots of Rails apps and added lots of Ruby code to those apps. As our products and tools have grown organically over the years, our systems have become more opaque and, in some cases, more brittle. In the last quarter of 2016, my team was tasked with automating away a large portion of our bread and butter: writing parsers to extract, transform, and load data from text files sent to us by our partners on a daily basis. Studying the requirements, it seemed to me that the proposed data flow—passing in a text file along with a partner-specific configuration for how the system should translate that data—resembled a pure function: we’d always get the same output from the same input, no side-effects. When I pitched the idea that we build a greenfield project, rather than bolting more functionality onto a Rails app we plan to sunset next year, Drew told us to go for it. ...

When writing tests for a Rake task at work, I came across invoke and execute as two different ways for calling a specific task. Most of the content I found online about the difference was fairly superficial: invoke can only get called once, execute can be called as many times as one wants. There, are you happy? Move on. Never being generally happy, I did not move on. I wanted to know how these similar-looking methods were executed differently. So, I consulted The Truth. ...

Combined my blog with my portfolio, and got them all hosted on my own business. Drop on by! [goto](https://newschematic.org/)

With the recent announcement that Vine will be getting shuttered, I’m reminded of the uncertainty that all free web-based services face. As such, I’ve decided to move my blog off of Tumblr. While this decision is partly about wanting to get ahead of any potential disruptions in service, its roots are in mainitaining control and exercising autonomy. For this site, I decided to use Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. I could talk about how fast it is, how there’s no point in my reinventing this wheel, or how I get to write my posts in Github-flavored Markdown. But really, most of my decision was based on the fact that Julia Evans uses it for her very excellent blog. #socialproof ...

brew install go worked well, as expected. However, at the end of the installation, the notes suggest I add GOROOT to my path: You may wish to add the GOROOT-based install location to your PATH: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/opt/go/libexec/bin Buuuuut, it didn’t work. After trying out some different iterations, I was reminded when ls-ing through the surrounding directories that /usr/local/opt/go/... was aliased because Homebrew. This Stack Overflow answer reinforced my hunch. So, I updated my .zshrc: ...