w/e 2023-11-26

Still a bit overwhelmed, on this week at home alone, at all the things I should or could be doing on my various sites, but aren’t. There’s only so much time I want to spend on the computer and a lot (but not that a lot) this week has been doing client work. This feeling isn’t helped when things go wrong – this week the daily Pepys’ Diary emails stopped sending for a couple of days, thanks to Buttondown messing something up.

So, of course, when I did have a bit of leisure computing time this weekend I spent it on a completely non-essential whim: switching a project over from using black, flake8 and isort to using ruff instead. These are all tools to ensure your Python code is correctly formed and formatted, both to prevent mistakes, and to keep it consistently nicerer.

A recent client used ruff, the newest tool, that combines many previous tools into a single faster, tool. And it seemed good, and I like tinkering, so… Using this write-up as inspiration I changed over and, with all rules enabled, I discovered one project had several thousand problems. I fixed some then decided this was silly, so reverted all those changes, only enabled a couple of rules, fixed the few dozen resulting problems, then gradually added in the rules I liked the sound of, fixing as I went. It took a few hours but it was very satisfying, and a few potential errors were fixed. Ruff does seem super fast and it is nice to have everything in a single tool.

But, as I say, that was not at all essential and now, because I like to do things the same way everywhere, I now need to do at least some of that switchover for my other projects too.

§ Sorry, that’s the most exciting thing to happen this week. We can only apologise for the lack of engaging #content.

§ I forgot to mention last week that I’d watched the miniseries Zeit der Geheimnisse (Holiday Secrets) on Netflix. I’m not actually sure if it was any good. Whenever I thought it might be, its very sentimental acoustic guitar music emerged again and I had to change my opinion.

But, either way, it was good for the purposes of listening to German because everyone speaks pretty clearly and most of the conversations are about family life. As opposed to Dogs of Berlin where they’re muttering quickly about criminals, etc.

This week I watched two movies on telly:

Aloners (Hong Sung-eun, 2021) which I enjoyed. Lonely call centre worker is lonely. I already have no memory of what, if anything, happened in the end.
Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022) which I also enjoyed. It would have been excellent if it was a bit shorter, but my opinion dropped gradually during the final half-hour when I started getting a little bored. Some lovely shots and cuts etc. though.

I also started watching and swiftly gave up on:

Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy which I liked the sound of but the constant interruptions to read tweets, and the super-shaky hand-held camera made it unpleasant to watch.
Exhibition which, even as someone who likes some pretty boring films, soon pushed me past my limit.
The Cowboy and the Frenchman is only short but I couldn’t even last that long.

Otherwise I’ve been mostly watching car reviews on YouTube and continuing with The Thick of It.

§ Yes, that really is all.