Interesting Links for 16-05-2023

[andrewducker]

1. The racist history of the sex binary

(tags:racism gender history transgender viaSwampers science )

2. Lib-Lab "Coalition of Chaos" seen as more stable than a Conservative majority

(tags:politics UK libdem labour coalition )

3. I'm curious what makes Jeff Bezos' new yacht a yacht, rather than a schooner. Or a frigate.

(tags:boats money )

4. Games developers say mandatory return-to-office policy has 'cost us some amazing people'

(tags:office work games )

Comments

[simont]

That's confusing – #3 to #8 inclusive are all in yesterday's post as well!

Also, now I look more closely, yesterday's post doesn't number the links. Some kind of multifaceted confusion?

[andrewducker]

Aaand fixed. I think.

The issue is that the timezone of the feeds server is wrong. And, I think, varying. I *was* applying a 4 hour timezone difference, as it was claiming to be in GMT while actually being in New York. It's now actually in GMT. But, I think, switched back to New York time a few days ago, before returing to actual GMT.

And when it goes wrong, I then run the day's post manually. And when I did that yesterday I forgot to include the "NumberEntries" parameter.

(You can see the line that's doing that work here: https://github.com/andrewducker/AzurePowershellLinkPoster/blob/master/PostLinks/PostLinks.ps1#L29 )

[simont]

Ah, the style of Powershell that looks like an actual program! Don't see that every day.

I'm congenitally unable to read any text or code without also proofreading it, so have a bonus drive-by nitpick: "DeletetionTrigger" on line 72 looks like a typo.

[andrewducker]

No merge request? I am shocked!

But yes, it is a spelling mistake, but it's mostly there because the line of hyphens tells Dreamwidth that the email footer is about to begin and therefore to chop off anything after that point. Vital when I was running the code manually from a corporate location, otherwise the post had a thirty line disclaimer on the end.

[simont]

No merge request?

Sorry! I wasn't 100% sure whether there might be code elsewhere that recognised exactly that string and would need to be changed in sync, or some such.

[andrewducker]

Not serious! I don't think a typo actually needs a merge request.

And no other code depending on it - pretty much all of the code is in that one file. The rest is all the stuff that Azure requires in order to get a function running on a schedule.

[andrewducker]

Oh! I'm curious what kind of PowerShell you *do* see every day!

[simont]

Well, all right, on a typical day I don't see any PS at all. But when I do, it's normally in the "glue code" style: the reason someone was using PS at all was because it has convenient APIs to talk to lots of different classes of thing, and they needed to make those worlds connect together. So it doesn't normally have anything as organised as loops or sensibly named variables; it's just a handful of commands that get stuff from here and send it out to there, the source and destination being things that would otherwise have a hard time talking to each other. If you're really lucky there might be an error handler to abort on failure half way through.

Most of the things I actually know about Powershell came from a book called "Learn Windows PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches" (Jeffrey Hicks). That's approaching PS almost exclusively from the angle of "look at all the things Powershell can talk directly to": it's not until chapter 21 (out of 28) that the author even starts talking about saving PS commands in a script file instead of just entering them at the interactive prompt, and even then, the first subheading stresses "Not programming, more like batch files". I think there's one full-length script in the whole book that shows an example of an actual program, with function definitions, try-catch blocks and a while loop. And that's in chapter 26 "Using someone else's script", and none of that stuff is even explained – that was the first hint in the whole book that exceptions are even a thing in Powershell. "Loop" and "exception" don't even appear in its index!

[andrewducker]

Ah, gotcha. I had that book too, and very useful it was. But definitely didn't cover huge amounts of what we did with it. Last job ended up with dozens of modules and scripts to make up our build system. It was very useful.

[simont]

That book definitely struck me as being aimed at the kind of sysadmin-only person who thinks Proper Programming is scary, and trying to sell PS on the basis of all the useful things it can do which aren't programming.

I presume there's some entirely different book out there which teaches the other half of the language!

[andrewducker]

Bound to be. I think I got it mostly from online references though. That was pretty much the last tech book I bought!

[jducoeur]

Yeah -- when I first learned Powershell, I was completely blown away by the idea of being able to actually program the shell, in a respectably real language.

Been many years since I've touched it (I generally use Ammonite these days, to do the same sorts of things in Scala), but at the time it was pretty amazing, and it really surprises me that so few people take real advantage of it.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, lots of Unix people are unhappy it's not Bash, lots of Windows people are unhappy it's not a GUI. Not enough people who look at it for its own thing.