Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Detoured to another small feature that I suspected I'd be able to slam out quickly while I wait on other stuff. It needs a little more work, but today's work solves what I consider the biggest blocking issue to getting the new version released and I know my staff will appreciate the change once I get that deployed for them and tell them about it.

Finished up enough of the code I've been writing lately to meaningfully test that. Needed to fix 1 assert failure (iterating over the wrong list) and missing breaks in a switch (really not sure how that happened) but otherwise that chunk of code worked fine and I can move on to the next thing.

The update does not include a new award that some listing site invented to try to trick people into thinking they're relevant.

First web site update of the year is done. It's just removing the notices that we're closed on Christmas and New Year's, removing the promotion for a charity fundraiser that ended yesterday, and changing the copyright year. I'll need a couple more soon to share the amount raised and lower at least one price.

Related, if the "Skip Verification" button is only going to show a "no, you can't skip verification" error, maybe don't present the option in the first place?

Can whoever keeps doing the email verification code thing test that against a greylisting mail server and not set things to time out before such a recipient receives your code? (Also maybe make sure that retries get sent from the same outgoing mail server so that people don't have to wait for the 4th code before getting one that can possibly work.)

Found the root of the issue. Still weird that it was only affecting one data series, but I'm pretty confident that this is fully fixed now.

Finally got a good read on the problematic state triggering the bug I was working on yesterday and it was not quite what I expected. It is still a complete mystery to me how the problem was only manifesting on a single channel so I may want to dig into that a little more, but there's a fast and easy check that prevents the issue from spreading into the rest of the program so I'll take that as a win for now and keep exercising the new code to make sure there's nothing else I'm missing.

I'm almost certain I know what the problem really is now, but I'd like to see the full details of the failure before working out what the fix needs to be.

Lately I've been trying to track down a calculation problem in one of my programs. It's the obnoxious sort that sometimes happens a lot and sometimes runs for hours without issue. I've at least gotten as far as identifying what I think is the first place in the code the issue can be detected, but after putting in more extensive debug output to capture erroneous state without interfering with live use, the problem stopped again. I'll keep checking back with it over the next couple days.

Removed the weird limited edition Sumatra from the web site. I still have some available to buy locally in person, but I don't have any more available to roast.

Just packed up the third batch of Holiday Blend produced today. This is a tricky one to plan for because people keep buying it all today, but they won't want it next week.

One of today's emails trying to sell me something I'm not buying included a product photo with a big finger in frame. I'm surprised they chose to use that one.

I'm going to try to replicate the first and last cups from the middle row. The lighter one is excellent on its own while the darker is potentially more versatile in blends.

Time for coffee.

My last coffee delivery for the year arrived while I was out running errands. I hadn't gotten the PRO# to track this and see that it was getting delivered today, otherwise I would have waited for it, but staff handled it perfectly without me so I'll be able to get on with product development right away.

Restocked my rice supply.

My mother wanted a microwave for Christmas this year so we got that sorted out today. My favorite feature of her new device is that if you don't set the clock (she already has 2 clocks in the room that she's not using) it doesn't show anything on the display. No flashing 12:00, no lights (and certainly no blinking lights).

Personally, I will always prefer a thoughtfully created purpose built interface for anything work related even if only for the massive feature discoverability benefits (rather than asking if the system can do something and then get a lie in reply).

Got an email advertising AI features and I'm looking at their examples and one can be done with a shell script. The next one is a trivial front end feature. The third one is a SQL query (or an automated report built around one). It would take me longer to think up the natural language prompts than to just click on the right thing in a well considered interface built around their pre-AI API. Not sure how their customers would be using them without already having a better integration than this.