New Year and I'm Still Lazy

January 24, 2016

Goodness, it has been a long time since I’ve posted. I almost posted something in September, but then I decided against it, because there really wasn’t anything interesting to be said in it. So what has been happening? Well, I got a job as a software developer, and that has been going quite well, but at the moment I’m very busy. I’m actually the only developer who’s actively working on customer deployments, and they are really beginning to pile up. I’ll be through them soon enough though (I hope so anyway).

As far as side projects go, I’ve been messing with some stuff, but haven’t been getting anywhere fast. I’m (very) slowly building a simple web site with the purpose of providing an easy way for amateur journalists to quickly generate a boilerplate disclosure for and conflicts of interest in their writing. The layout is almost done, but I haven’t even written any JavaScript for it yet. It has given me a good bit experience with Bootstrap 3, and it really is quite nice to work with, if not slightly over-engineered, but I digress. On a related note, perhaps I should write a post some time about the need for more custom controls in future HTML specs? We’ll see.

I also have a project that’s mostly just s silly experiment with HTML5 Canvas stuff. I was inspired after seeing a clever bit of manipulation to the color pallet of a GIF, giving the appearance of moving skies and running water without any actual movement. The idea is mostly just a color-picker that lets colors be substituted and replaced in live time. I don’t know whether or not I’ll actually do anything with it, but that’s mostly just because I’ve been too busy to care for the most part.

Finally, this post wouldn’t be complete without something regarding BPM. So a while back I posted about Apple’s increased cost of Safari Extension development, and because no clarification was ever posted, I assumed the worst. Then I got this email. Oh how I had hoped that this moment would come.

Now I technically haven’t tried it out yet (since I have only one developer machine, and it’s my personal machine at that), but this February, it’s going to be make or break for BPM on Safari. If this certificate does not work, then I’ll see about building in a manual update notifier. That is, if I can still build the updates after this. Still, this is way closer to success than where I was last year. Hopefully all works out well in the end.

Other than that, I’ve been working out more, trying to not grow out of my jeans. That’s about it for now though. I hope I’ll be more productive in the coming year, though a lot of that will be dependent on how tired I am after work.